Why
is it important, or worthy of the time and investment, to look younger than you
are? You aren’t actually younger than you are no matter the cosmetic sleight of
hand. And what is driving the desire to look, say 10 years younger; like the
women in the creepy Stepford wives commercial? Is it to be younger now? Or is
it trying to keep the world in homeostasis at the time when you were 10 years younger? Saying, as it
were, that I want to be forever in 1998, as an example, because it was a good
year, and, as I’ve lived through it once; I can make it even better and more to
my liking or benefit. Some of it is vanity; one would think, particularly if
you were once young and beautiful. No
one dreams of being old and ugly. We can, without much fuss, blame it on our
youth obsessed culture. Youth being our golden idol. We can also invoke the
grim spectre of death icily rubbing our shoulders, whispering sweet nothings
into our baleful ears. Our time will come. Unless we can somehow keep it at
arm’s length.
The
notion or desire to be, or look, younger, paradoxically, runs right into the
invariability of change. With the passage of time all things, particularly
ourselves, change. Even our memories change as we age. The longer we live, the
more we experience change, the further removed we become to those times in the
past infused with memories good and bad. Yet they continue to influence us. This
as we continue to question the veracity of those memories. When asked about our
favorite movies, music, or TV shows, we almost always refer to those of our
youth; when we’re the most impressionable. I’ve been listening to music all my
life, and have been exposed to nearly all members of the rock n’roll family
tree. Consequently, all of the new music I hear in some way reminds me of what
I heard in the past. That doesn’t mean it’s not good or enjoyable, but it
inevitably must go against all that’s gone before it. It must stand against the
memories that the old songs evoke; something the new ones can’t do.
If
you could defy biology and time in order to be 10 years younger, does that mean
that every 10 years you once again revert back; perpetually reliving the same
10 years, or just those 10 years? You can only lord over those you seek to
impress for so long; at some point they would age out. Then what? Would it be
as important to impress those with whom you have no connection? Why would they
care? Naturally, this is all just talk. No matter how well you paper over an
aging body or face, it continues to age, and at some point begins to fail.
Therein lies the problem. Aging means getting old, which means infirmity, loss
of mental acuity, sexual function or desire, age spots, big ears, and wispy
white hair. We no longer venerate the old, rarely seek their wisdom, assuming
they have any, and have no day to day relationship to death; something our
forebears deal with as a normal course of affairs. We don’t lay out the dearly
departed in the parlor; we don’t bury them.
A
lot has been written about our allotted time on this Earth. It’s brevity; it’s
supposed purpose; it’s inevitable end. However you describe it, however you
choose to live it, including how you choose to appear, it is finite. It then
strikes me as odd to try to circumvent that arc of existence with the notion of
being younger when no matter the effect; it cannot be.
