Find Out How Many People Are Older Than You

Ever look around the office and feel like the world is filled with 22-year-olds? Now you can know for sure — by checking out an interactive graph that will show you who is older and younger than you are in the U.S. And I promise, when you turn 28, nobody is going to send you off on an ice flow.

The graph titled "Who Is Older And Younger Given Your Age" was created by statistician Nathan Yau for Flowing Data. Yau utilized data from the five-year 2014 American Community Survey to estimate where each age would stand in comparison to the rest of the US population. The graph gives you the option to divide it by gender, and compare your age to only the male or the female population as well. For the most part, when isolating the ages of women and men, the older female population is three percent greater than the male (probably due to life expectancy data). For example, at the age of 60, 20 percent of the female population is older than you, while only 17 percent of the male population is older.

The inspiration to explore and visualize this data came to Yau when he was thinking about the feelings of age-perception. As a little kid everyone seems older than you, he points out. According to the graph that feeling is spot on — at ten years of age, 86 percent of the US population is older and only 13 percent is younger.

However, as you age the feeling of being "too young" transforms, and somewhere in your mid-to-late-20s you begin to feel like you are getting "too old" (no lie, you're downright ancient). Turning 30 may seem like a big birthday, but when you blow out the candles, you are not really as old as you may think (comparatively). At 30 years old, you are still younger than 58 percent of the population! Though, I know, you may not be able to drink quite as much tequila as you used to.

It's not till your 38th birthday the numbers flip. At age 37 you split the difference — with 49 percent of the total population older than you and 49 percent younger than you. At 38, you are older than 51 percent of the population.

This still doesn't classify you as "old" though — so need for a mid-life crisis just yet. According to the Pew Research Center, people actually start to feel younger than their age as they grow older. In a 2009 survey, they found that 60 percent of those aged 65 and older felt younger than their chronological age, where a quarter of 18 though 29 year olds felt younger than their age (a quarter felt older too). But Millennials rejoice, because by 2060 there will be more than twice as many older persons (as compared to 2013), according to US census data, so this graph is in for some drastically change!

So just how old are you comparatively? Check out flowing data and find out!

Images: Joey_Thompson/Unsplash, Nathan Yau/FlowingData