Aging Well
I’ve always thought that an anti-wrinkle cream is silly. It’s not that I have no vanity — I’m not looking forward to wrinkles, and I expect someday I’ll want to look younger than my age — but even if you had the best imaginable cream and you got to be a nursing home resident with the skin of a teenager, you’d still be a nursing home resident.
Same with hair dye. I can understand wanting to put off the grey a bit, but you’re still going to get older. You can figure out how to look young for decades, but you won’t actually be young forever.
Nor should you be. Probably anyone much over 25 has at least some regrets for mistakes made while young and stupid. Not aging would mean being stupid forever. It means not growing as a person. Being old is different from being young, or even middle-aged, and we fear that which is different, but being adult is different from being a child, and we got through that transition, didn’t we?
The real problem with aging is not trying to look younger, but failing health and also social vulnerability. Your body doesn’t work at well, you could be in pain, your medical bills will go up, and eventually you won’t be able to hold a job even if you want to. Younger people might not take you seriously anymore. Knowing how to look young won’t help.
If you can age well, though, and avoid or minimize chronic health problems, you could even enjoy being old. Some people do. To some extent these things are the luck of the draw, but you do have some influence. Eat well, stay physically and mentally active, take care of any medical problem you have so they don’t fester, you’re probably familiar with this sort of advice already. What you may not have heard of is the importance of being happy. Seriously! Optimists live longer than pessimists and develop fewer chronic health problems. While a tendency toward optimism or pessimism may be in-born, you can nudge your attitude over using simple cognitive therapy techniques.
Similarly, some people have very bad things happen to them that can make it difficult to be anything but depressed, and some people are born with a tendency to just feel awful, but at the same time it is possible to at least influence your own mood. And if you are depressed, you can get treatment for that.
And the funny thing is, if you manage to stay happy and healthy and engaged with life, you won’t necessarily look younger — you’ll be wrinkly and gray and so forth—but you’ll look great.
