How do you perceive aging?

I’m halfway through 27 now and will be 28 in the fall. It feels like yesterday I was 17 but another life all the same. I find a lot of my peers super freaked out about aging and getting older, but I feel very much at peace with it.

I’ve noticed these same peers tend to be stagnant in certain areas of life. Whether they gave up the career they always wanted, or stay at the same job, or fear marriage and commitment with their partners. Some of them even stuck in self-destructive patterns.

I don’t blatantly share but I do feel very content and almost excited for where I’m at and what’s coming. I’m fortunate in that I have a job that I find very purposeful and that I enjoy for the most part, I have a fantastic partner who I’m marrying this summer and am beyond excited to start a family in the next few years, and I am very happy with my hobbies, mental growth, social growth, and development of healthier habits to correct my former destructive ones.

I think this overall satisfaction with my life and it shaping to be everything I’ve wanted leads to my acceptance of aging. I feel exactly where I always wanted to be by this point in my life. I am so into the whole having a prefrontal cortex and caring less about what others think too that naturally come with aging, and I’d take it over being a teen or young adult any day. My life may seem “boring” from the outside, but I am so at peace and grateful for my day to day life.

Circling back to my question and summarizing, I’m wondering if fear of age is related to life satisfaction and perceived self expectations, or if it’s related to certain personality traits, maybe a little of both? What do you think? How do you perceive aging - positive, negative, neutral?