Anti-ageing From The Inside Out
A scientific breakthrough has been announced that will finally end the tyranny of ageing by stopping our DNA from falling apart like the overstressed zip in our favourite jeans. Given that the scientist who announced it confessed he’s been self-medicating and looks like he should be building Lego instead of chemical compounds, I’m convinced.
Eventually, we will no longer have to confront once-taut abs that now look like an explosion in a lard factory, and a face like a bloodhound who copped an overdose of gravity in a wind tunnel. Order will be restored to body parts that went rogue, formed a majority government and made us unable to move without impersonating a Cyberman or hard-pressed to find anything on which a hairbrush might be useful.
But while a future of octogenarians with ripped abs and perfect health is to be applauded, it’s still a few years off. What’s more, it needs a companion drug that will fix the attitudes that develop alongside ear hair and an appreciation for the work of Mariah Carey.
Middle age starts in the brain and works outwards, with grumpiness and bitterness the advance army for the sort of physical decline that suggests decomposition is making a pre-mortem start. If you don’t believe me, try to think of a youthful and devastatingly attractive shock-jock. There’s not one that would get as far as the bathing suit round of a blobfish beauty contest.
So, here are a few lessons on how you can develop an outlook on life now that won’t make it blindingly obvious you’re just an old person who’s been warmed over. With a change of mindset, you might even be able to hold back some of the external manifestations of middle age that make it look as though life has slapped you upside the head vigorously and repeatedly with a pile driver. Feel free to send me the money that these tips save you on drugs down the track.
1. When two or more people in the age group that’s pulling 40 rather than pushing it gather together, the talking stick goes to the person who can trump the group with the most severe medical problems. Somewhere there is a league table stating that a dodgy prostate outranks osteoarthritis, and a malfunctioning major organ gets bonus points. If everyone brings an elephant into the room and insists on discussing it’s every wrinkle, eventually it’s hard to move for elephant shit. Just agree to call an ambulance if anyone collapses into their glass of shiraz and let the conversation move on to more enriching topics.
2. Don’t diss what you don’t understand. Just because you don’t know what a quark does, you don’t say “life was better when it was all about neutrinos”. Similarly, just because you don’t understand your mobile phone/car dashboard / teenage children, don’t dismiss their place in this wonderful new world. Take time to learn and understand, or embrace your ignorance and accept it’s you, not them. The world will move on regardless, so digging your heels in will only make your ankles hurt even more.
3. Explore new music. If you think that the Sex Pistols were skilled musicians and Status Quo were innovative, it’s possible you caught something nasty off one of Ozzy Osborne’s expired bats. This can be the only justification for contending that no decent music has been made since Alice Cooper lost his favourite mascara. Here’s an idea – try listening for a while to something other than Boringoldfart FM.
4. If your job is so tedious you have rigor mortis by morning tea, try the wild roller-coaster ride of self-employment. Pull on your big girl pants, take a deep breath, and take responsibility for earning your own money. You’ve had plenty of time to become good at something by middle age, and if you haven’t, the prospect of homelessness will seriously fire up your enthusiasm to learn. And if you wouldn’t employ yourself, why should anyone else?
5. Live like a celebrity. No rock star in history has ever deferred the prospect of going out and getting wasted because they have to do the laundry/ mow the lawn / de-flea the cat unless it’s a condition of their bail order. Don’t put dull chores above the prospect of pursuing the spiritually enriching or liver-destroying activity of your choice, unless it’s the sort of fun likely to result in a messy divorce or nuclear Armageddon. If you martyr yourself to chores, you’re only going to bang on endlessly about it, and no one’s got enough spare life to want to listen to that.
6. Don’t give yourself limitations. If you’d like to go dancing, don’t let the fact that you move like a pantomime horse enjoying a severe electric shock stop you. No one is looking at you, so do all those things you’ve been wanting to try but thought the opportunity had passed. Pole dancing past 60 or skateboarding at 70 are all great alternatives to lawn bowls and will help your orthopaedic surgeon put his kids through school.
7. Celebrate the fact that by middle age, you’re free of so many of the things that beset the young and the beautiful, like the all-consuming worry that you might be wearing something unfashionable, fear that your parents may make you leave home when you hit 30, or a waistline.
But most of all, as a dweller in the dungeon of mid-life, you can hitch your underpants up to your armpits with pride if you’re now free of a mortgage, because that makes you better off than today’s youth are likely to ever be. Thwart their hopes of an inheritance by living forever. That’s gotta make you happy.
