The Fear of the Future Self

Bags under your eyes? Skin looking wrinkled? Seeing a few gray hairs? Struggling to do a 360 windmill dunk on a 10-foot basketball rim?

You may be suffering from living a normal human life.

In this western society of ours, we fear aging. It’s no secret. In fact, it’s so un-secret that the global anti-aging industry is expected to be worth $60 billion by 2030, with $24 billion of that being anti-wrinkle products alone.

All of these attempts to hide the inevitable seem a band-aid to the true issue: we’re simply uncomfortable with the idea of death. I don’t mean that death should be easy to face, that it isn’t painful.

I mean we’re insulated from it.

We don’t see it anymore. A loved one dies in a hospital, and is whisked away by staff to be further handled at the funeral home. And leading up to their death, we didn’t even see the aging process. We’ve traded 3-generation households for nursing homes, eroding family bonds and exacerbating the loneliness of old age (which seems to be an issue unique to North America). We even have a subset of people who are actually disgusted by the aged human body.

This is where I take an odd turn. Just bear with me.

I had a friend once mention “nude-neutral” households to me, wherein families don’t demonize nudity. No, I don’t mean full nudists. Just people who don’t prescribe a certain taboo around the human body. It applies to all people in the household, old and young, and for this, the children develop a far healthier understanding of aging, because they’re familiar with what it looks like to be a human at different stages, including the later stages.

This calls to mind the Japanese concept of wabi sabi, which values the beauty in the fleeting, transient, imperfect nature of all things.

There’s no shame in wanting to look a little more youthful. And, as a 28-year-old, I suppose it’s easy to criticize a response to aging, when I haven’t yet experienced it. I simply think we’ve swung a bit too far out of comfort with the basic truth that our bodies evolve as we go along this strange trip of life.

Embrace the beauty of change, whether it’s a job promotion, a passing breeze, or a new wrinkle from decades of smiling.