Our species, like all the others, have evolved. We seem to have a basic drive to survive, both personally and as members of the human family. The biologists say that we and all life suffer changes and modifications over time and that some of those changes make our survival and reproduction more likely, giving us a little advantage. However, human civilization is also changing all the time and often more quickly than natural, biological change occurs.
One of the changes that is clear is that humans in general are living longer and having better health during those extended lives. So, we spend more of our lives in our post-50 decades. After living for 50 and more years, we have different skin, hair, faces and waistlines than we did at 20 years of age. Because mating driven by biology and very basic drives involves attraction between potential mates, we humans have done our usual thing and enhanced and overlaid basic mating tools such as flirtation, cosmetics, dress and costume in dozens of ways.
These enhancements and complicated add-ons can be a fascination, even a professional preoccupation in themselves. We can have surgery to add soft curves here and remove sags from there, collagen injected into our lips to improve the visual invitation to kiss, hair implants to make our heads look more youthful. Many of the complications show their results for only a limited time. While we can continue to take advantage of the anti-aging and faux anti-aging tools and activities, we can also work on various fronts to improve our acceptance of and happiness with what age brings us.
As a post-70 man, I can assure anyone interested that such men in some cases find those who are only 50 a bit green and unseasoned. We sometimes find the face, neck and arms of 20 year olds amazing but closer to infant skin that to what we want to touch. Some of the restaurant hostesses, while meeting the visual standards they were hired for, seem much closer to being newborns than women, as indeed chronologically, they are.
I might draw up legal papers to start the American Association of Revamped Older Minds (AAROM) to help all those interested in unlearning and modifying some of our basic biological directors. We are already close to really seeing, hearing and sensing our actual beauty and flexibility in our age mates. We are finding greens more attractive than beef, wit more uplifting than sneers, water more satisfying than sugar. We are homing in on better appreciation and admiration tools.
