A colleague of mine told me that "Right now you are the oldest you have ever been and the youngest you will ever be." I don't believe this is the case.
In my mind, the idea that he is trying to articulate is "will ever be, henceforth." When I hear "will ever be" I think that it includes the past, but I don't know which tense "will ever be" is in, technically.
His use of the word 'will' makes it seem like he's talking about the future, but he also uses the word 'ever' which means 'at any time'. There must be some sort of complex interaction between these two words, I just can't figure it out.
My best guess is that while he definitely states that the evaluation should include future dates, he doesn't carefully exclude the past, leaving this open to whether you think that 'will' or 'ever' is the more important word.
Best Answer
No, the phrase will ever be does not include the past, but the statement your friend has made is perfectly correct and grammatical.
To explain:
This is true, unless you are a time-traveller, or your aging process goes backwards. I believe neither of that is true, therefore the statement is true.
This is also true, because you will never be any younger anytime in the future than you are right now at this very moment.
Imagine a timeline starting at right now, ending in the infinite future. There is no past on this imaginary timeline. At which point, on this timeline, are you the youngest (you will ever be)? At its beginning = right now!
EDIT: Seeing from the comments below your confusion, I'll try to explain this problem a little bit further.
Imagine the following sentence:
This sentence may be expanded to:
Since will is a future tense and the future is already implied in it, there's no need for the expanded sentence.
As you mentioned, ever means "at any point in time," which is correct, but let's add it to our sentence:
And let's expand our sentence again:
So, as you can see, ever still means at any point in time, but time is limited by the tense used in the sentence. Therefore, contrary to what you may or may not believe, will ever be does not include the past.