The Age of Anti-Aging

In the summer months, mayflies drop by the billions within twenty-four hours of birth. Drone ants perish in two weeks. Daylilies bloom and then wilt, leaving dead, papery stalks. Forests burn down, replenish themselves, then disappear again. Ancient stone temples and spires flake in the salty air, fracture and fragment, dwindle to spindly nubs, and eventually dissolve into nothing. Coastlines erode and crumble. Glaciers slowly but surely grind down the land. Once, the continents were joined. Once the air was ammonia and methane. Now it is oxygen and nitrogen. In the future, it will be something else. The sun is depleting its nuclear fuel. And just look at our own bodies. In the middle years and beyond, skin sags and cracks. Eyesight fades. Hearing diminishes. Bones shrink and turn brittle. … Muscle to flab. Vigour to decrepitude. Dust to dust.— Alan Lightman, The Accidental Universe

There seems to be, according to the aggregated confessions we whisper to our search bars at 1:17 a.m., a roaring and nearly ecclesiastical faith in creams. Millions of queries for “anti-aging.” Triple-digit growth for moisturizers that promise to do what glaciers, empires and beloved dieffenbachia have all failed to do: resist decline. “Wrinkles.” “Eye bags.” “Retinol.” Typed with the same quiet urgency as “symptoms of chest pain” or “how to apologize without admitting fault.” The data suggest we are less interested in living forever than in appearing as though we might.

It is tempting to frame this as vanity, but vanity is too small and tidy a word for what feels more like metaphysical panic in a jar. A jar that costs $89.99 and comes with a dropper. Time in a bottle. Bonfire of the inanities.

Every visible system available to us testifies against permanence. The banana browns. The dog slows. The paint peels. Civilizations collapse with the same predictability as soufflés. Even the mountains — those smug, stone-browed symbols of endurance — are being sanded down by weather with a patience that makes any skincare routine look frantic. And yet we persist in believing that there must be something in us that can be sealed, preserved, stabilized. Something that at least does not sag.

This belief may be less about epidermis and more about narrative. We want the story of ourselves to have a stable protagonist. We want to be the same “I” across decades, the same consciousness peering out from behind increasingly unreliable hardware. If the body insists on moulting, then perhaps the self can remain lacquered and intact, like a museum specimen under glass.

The trouble is that even our personalities moult. The person who once believed that midnight was an early hour becomes someone who Googles “best orthopaedic pillow.” The idealist becomes pragmatic; the cynic becomes sentimental; the sentimentalist develops a cholesterol problem. We are not statues weathering the passage of time. We are weather.

Consider even the phrase “anti-aging.” Anti. Aging. As if aging were a hostile foreign power and not the basic operating system of carbon-based life. We don’t say “anti-gravity moisturizer.” We don’t say “anti-oxygen serum.” And yet aging — literally the price of admission for having been alive yesterday — has been rebranded as an aggressive invader that must be neutralized with anti-oxidants and peptides. Not sure what those are but they sound scientific. (Probably should have paid more attention instead of fidgeting with the pithed frog when Mr. Acker was covering amino acids back in Grade 11 biology. It was a gas, though, to jolt the poor thing’s legs while singing: “Hello my baby, hello my honey, hello my Ragtime gal … .)” But I digress. Ribbit.

“Think with Google” data tell us that at this very moment, hundreds of people are typing “wrinkles” into a search bar as though they might be recalled. The wrinkles, I mean. Not the people, though that will happen, too.

“Eye bags,” as if the eyes packed them for a trip without consulting us. “Retinol,” which sounds less like a skincare ingredient and more like a mid-level Tolkien villain.

And what’s especially poignant is that we know better. We have seen fruit rot. We have seen the skin of our hands turn thin and papery, like those of our grandparents. We have left bread out. Ugh. We understand the arc. Time was never on our side. Rust never sleeps.

But here’s the funnier and more uncomfortable truth: humans are the only species that experiences time as a personal insult.

A tree adds a ring and calls it growth. We add a line and call it decline. Somewhere between our frontal lobes and our bathroom mirrors, we decided that evidence of survival should be interpreted as failure.

Part of this is obviously about attractiveness and mating and all the ancient crocodile-brain Leonardo DiCaprio-ish urges and incentives. But that explanation feels incomplete, like saying people climb mountains strictly for cardiovascular benefits. There’s something grander and stranger going on.

We are narrative-addicted creatures. We do not simply exist; we storyline ourselves. And youth, inconveniently, occupies the “beginning” section of the arc. It’s the pilot episode. The montage of potential. When we long for youth, we are not just longing for smoother skin; we are longing to re-open the plot.

Only we’d be smarter this time.

Because aging does something narratively rude: it turns potential into history.

When you are 20, you could still become a marine biologist, a novelist, a backup dancer for a touring pop star. When you are 47, you are someone who did not become those things. Your face begins to look less like a résumé of possibilities and more like a quarterly report. At 71, that face has filed for bankruptcy and resembles the old baseball glove from your childhood at the bottom of a dusty toy box, fallen into desuetude.

So yes, we buy creams. Not necessarily because we believe collagen will reverse entropy, but because we resent being moved so briskly through the third act.

And this is where the sneakers come in.

The worn-out Converse All Stars are not shoes. They are a legal affidavit that says: “Exhibit A: I was once the kind of person who jogged around cities at midnight with no orthotic support and infinite optimism.” Throwing them away feels like shredding evidence.

Same with the thinning Nordiques jersey. Same with that mouldy baseball glove that still carries a faint scent of leather, ambition and the faded signature of Frank Robinson. These objects are continuity devices. They reassure us that the child, the adolescent, the reckless optimist — all those earlier avatars of ourselves — are not entirely deleted.

We are, in a sense, hoarders of former selves.

Here comes the Judge.

If this is so, anti-aging products are just wearable nostalgia. We smooth them onto our faces the way we scroll through old photos: carefully, reverently, slightly delusionally. We are not trying to defeat time so much as negotiate with it. Perhaps just a stay of execution. A light rescheduling.

What makes this tragicomic is that impermanence is not hiding. It is not subtle. Everything in nature is practically screaming “limited edition.” The mayfly does not unionize against its lifespan. The autumn leaf does not cling to the branch filing formal complaints.

But humans? We invented embalming. We invented cryonics. We invented serums that promise to “reverse visible signs of aging,” which is a wonderfully lawyered phrase that means “light bounces differently now.”

Why this insistence that something must be unchanging?

Because if nothing is stable, then what exactly is the “me” we are defending?

We want there to be a core self that persists — an inner marble statue untouched by time’s weather. We suspect that beneath the sagging and greying and increasingly loud joint noises, there exists an essential, continuous identity. The same consciousness that once believed summer would last forever. When we were 10, it really seemed to.

The problem is that neuroscience, memory and basic observation suggest that we are less marble statue and more lava lamp. Always moving. Always reforming. The self is not a monument. It’s a process. See you in September.

You might find this liberating, because it means we are not trapped by who we were.

You might find this horrifying, because it means there is no permanent edition to preserve. Either way, it makes no difference to the second law of thermodynamics in its relentless, insatiable drive toward maximum disorder. Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, no matter how much WD-40 we spray and Gorilla Glue we squeeze out of the tube.

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea.

So we compromise. We stash away the glove. We hide the dilapidated runners from the wife. We buy the cream. We participate in small rituals of resistance — not because we think we will win, but because surrender feels too abrupt.

Aging is the most universal experience available to us, and yet each of us greets it like a shocking administrative error. “This can’t be right,” we think, examining a new crease. “I was under the impression I was the exception.”

There’s something almost sweet about that level of denial. It suggests that somewhere deep down, we still believe we are special enough to slip past the rules.

Bring on the tummy tucks and toupees. The Botox treatments and varicose vein injections. The facelifts, breast-lifts, hair dyes, penile implants, vitamins and anti-aging potions descended from the “elixir of life” legends common to every human culture. That whopper about Ponce de Léon discovering Florida while searching for the Fountain of Youth is the just the tip of the congealed snake oil.

In China alone, prolific physicist/writer/social entrepreneur Alan Lightman tells us in his wise little 2014 book of essays that I quoted off the top, the mythical nostrum supposed to confer youth and immortality goes by a thousand names.

It is known in Persia, in Tibet, in Iraq, in the aging nations of Europe. Some call it Amrita. Or Aab-i-Hayat. Or Maha Ras. Mansarover. Chasma-i-Kausar. Soma Ras. Dancing Water. Pool of Nectar. In the ancient Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, one of the earliest known works of literature, the warrior king Gilgamesh goes on a difficult and dangerous journey in search of the secret of eternal life. At the end of Gilgamesh’s journey, the flood god, Utnapishtim, suggests that the warrior king try out a taste of immortality by staying awake for six days and seven nights. Before Utnapishtim can finish the sentence, Gilgamesh has fallen asleep.

How can we overcome death if we can’t even conquer sleep?

Lightman doesn’t discuss what happens next, but I think it’s even more germane to any discussion of mortality or impermanence. Urged by his wife to offer Gilgamesh (parts of whose story closely parallel those of Noah’s in Genesis 6-9, which it predates) a parting gift, Utnapishtim vouchsafes to him that at the bottom of the sea, there lives a boxthorn-like plant that will make him young again.

I’ll let Wikipedia pick it up from there:

Gilgamesh, by binding stones to his feet so he can walk on the bottom, manages to obtain the plant. Gilgamesh proposes to investigate if the plant has the hypothesized rejuvenation ability by testing it on an old man once he returns to (his home city state of) Uruk. When Gilgamesh stops to bathe, however, it is stolen by a serpent, who sheds its skin as it departs. Gilgamesh weeps at the futility of his efforts, because he has now lost all chance of immortality.

On the plus side, I suppose, Gilgamesh didn’t waste a year’s barley crop or hundreds of shekels on a bogus detox remedy or a useless collagen supplement.

But as his heroic legend suggests, written in Akkadian in the late 2nd millennium BCE, maybe humanity’s ironically eternal longing for youth and immortality isn’t about vanity at all. Maybe it’s about our refusal to accept that the story is finite. We love the world enough to want more of it. We love being a self enough to want to remain one.

Which makes the nightly application of moisturizer less pathetic and more poetic. A small, fragrant declaration. Almost a Kilgore-like graffito:

I am here. I would like to continue.

And if that declaration comes in a frosted glass bottle with a dropper and a name that sounds like a wizard’s apprentice, well — history suggests we’ve always preferred our existential courage with a bit of froufrou packaging.

Perhaps the most human thing is not our denial of change, but our insistence that something in the midst of it must count. Even if it is only the memory of a summer, preserved in cracked leather, or the small, stubborn hope contained in a bottle that promises — against all geological evidence — that we might hold the line for just a little while longer.