There are many obsessive urges and fixations in our lives but the dominant lust is the drive to perpetuate youth. Like losing an arm or a leg in middle age we remember back to the time when were fully functional and groaning with potential. We resent the dawn of decrepitude and the beginning of that long day of infirmity. Like an old wooden door or floorboard our creaking bodies remind us of what we have lost. But of course we don’t actually want to regain just our youth and repeat our youthful follies, no, we are far more greedy than that. What we want is to return to our prime along with our hard won experience that has been painfully accumulated over many decades. We want an old head on a young body to gain an unfair advantage over our teenage peers and to change our trajectory as we flow from youth to old age. In other words to repeat not the mistakes that gave us that hard won experience we now want to weaponise.

Ah, the bathroom mirror. Like the slave that whispered Memento mori (Remember you are mortal) in the victorious general’s ear in ancient Rome, it reminds us every day of our uncomfortable relationship with reality. It is also a spur to deceive ourselves and hopefully others that by a slick renovation we can stem the relentless encroachment of old age. A large part of our motivation is that somehow we have been cheated. Time it seems operates only on external features like canyons, boulders, bodies and our faces, but not on interiors such as our mind. I remember when I asked my dad Jim on his 90th birthday if he felt old, ‘no’ he said ’I still feel like I’m 19’. In the poem Of a Nostalgic Mind, I use the metaphor of a doll to describe the efforts a woman goes to, to preserve the shreds of its youth. And how she:

laughs a how much money
she has given to doll makers
To keep it pristine

But of course it is not just about lotions and potions even though the cosmetic industry generated $430 billion in revenue in 2023. Even the ancient Romans were aware of the efficacy of cosmetics. Sex workers, for example applied red colouring to their lips to advertise their willingness to perform oral sex. But as I said it’s not just about lotions and potions, not everyone for example goes to gymnasiums for health reasons but rather to regain a semblance of lean, supple and muscular youth. I saw an article this year just before summer that exhorted men to get to the gym as soon as possible, because now was the time ‘to get that summer rig’ for the beach. Oh? Is it possible that beaches are not the ultimate destination for placid leisure but rather a sandy catwalk of lust and desire where men and women strut and engage, like birds of paradise, in a garish displays designed to attract mates? Interestingly, Charles Darwin, who had a few insights into the long term trends of how we acquired partners proposed that the different colours and shapes of humans are not because of the environment i.e. hot climates equate to darker skin, but because of sexual selection. Ok, that’s interesting, but It is also interesting to ask why, despite all the cosmetics and the scramble for a youthful body, are birthrates falling to record lows? The big decline in birth rates is in the group of women under 24 yrs. The age group most of us get nostalgic about. Surprisingly the birthrate in the group of women between 40-44 yrs. has almost doubled over the past 30 yrs.  Perhaps this is one for the Ethologists.

I have always assumed, from an evolutionary perspective, that acquiring a mate is to ensure the reproduction and survival of human beings, and other types of animals of course. But are we focussing too much on ourselves and Mrs. McGregor next door? Is it about human beings at all? Well it seems it is and it isn’t. Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene romantically suggested that human and animal bodies are just survival machines for their genes. If this is the case then it asks the question whether free will, love, sex, ethics, culture, time, language and beauty are just random attributes that have been acquired to promote the relentless drive of evolution that has successfully ensured the survival of a particular set of genes, which have been endlessly shaping themselves over billions of years.

So perhaps my dad Jim’s feeling that he was still 19 yrs. at 90, and the urge to remain young at any cost, is just a hard wired evolutionary expression or function to keep genes immortal. But the illusion of our life, also a useful genetic expression, is always shattered momentarily when we experience death. The of death others, either family, friends or celebrities etc. But this reminder of our mortality only shakes us for a moment before we return to the master code of living our illusions as written by our invisible genes. But nevertheless death shakes us all. As the poet C P Cavafy wrote about the horses of the hero Achilles who were given immortality by Zeus:

When they saw Patroklos dead

-so brave and strong,

so young –

The horses of Achilles began to weep;

Their immortal nature was upset deeply

by this work of death they had to look at.

They reared their heads, tossed their long manes,

beat the ground with their hooves, and mourned

Patroklos