We are projected to spend more than $100 billion on anti-aging products by 2030. Is there a better way?
I love visiting old people. They make me feel young. But all of us are aging. In the grocery store one day a guy asked my wife if it’s her dad who writes those books. I threw my dentures at him.
If there was a quick, inexpensive fix for wrinkles, baldness, aches, pains, and the heckling I receive from my younger friends, I’d be tempted to get on my scooter and go stand in line. Ah, to be 23 again. At 23, I was a well conditioned figure of vitality and machismo. Stuff worked. I jogged past elderly people knowing I had centuries before I reached their age. Then oldness happened. And there is no reversing it. Ten pounds of broccoli a day will not send you back in time. I don’t care how expensive the juicer, it is not a time machine. Time marches on.
Our culture is increasingly obsessed with stopping time, with finding the fountain of youth. According to Mordor Intelligence, the anti-aging industry is now an $80 billion empire expected to surpass $100 billion by 2030. It encompasses skincare, supplements, cosmetic procedures, and emerging “longevity science”. To stave off aging, advertisers convince us to try drugs, surgery, serums, creams, injections, lifts, nips, and tucks.
We love our Oil of Delay.
The dream of living forever is an old one, of course, popularized in the themes of myth, literature and movies. Remember Arwen the half-elven maiden in Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” who renounces eternal life to marry her mortal sweetheart, Aragorn? Arwen dies shortly after Aragorn, at the ripe old age of 2,901.
If we’d like to live this long perhaps we should look to the lowly jellyfish. Researchers have named one species the “immortal Jellyfish.” According to National Geographic, the adult jellyfish will revert back into a youthful “blob-like cyst” which then grows into a polyp colony—the first stage in a Jellyfish life cycle. From there, this colony develops into a normal Jellyfish adult. Instead of dying, however, the immortal jelly reverts, time and again, back into the polyp colony, “allowing the jellyfish to bypass death, rendering [it] biologically immortal.” The anti-aging secret is out. Become a jellyfish.
One researcher commented: “The immortal medusa [jellyfish] is the most miraculous species in the entire animal kingdom. I believe it will be easy to solve the mystery of immortality and apply ultimate life to human beings.”
Most other researchers aren’t so optimistic, but what if it were true? What if you had the option of ultimate life here on earth? You’d never grow old. And every single day you would roll out of bed whistlin’ “What a Wonderful World” and feeling like a 23-year-old.
But living long is no substitute for living well. People who live well have purpose in their lives, their eyes aren’t fixed on the stuff of earth, but on a world that’s to come.
We will live forever. Not because we eat spinach or ride stair machines—though I applaud these activities and have attempted them myself—but because Philippians 3 (NLT) tells us: “We are citizens of heaven, where the Lord Jesus Christ lives… He will take our weak mortal bodies and change them into glorious bodies like his own.”
So, instead of obsessing about the way we feel today, let’s live well today. Let’s think less about the years in our life, and more about the life in our years. And the next time you see a cocky 23-year-old jogging past, smile and thank God for the purpose he gives. Then determine to die young, as old as you can.
