Getting Older and the Vagaries of Perception

I have come to a conclusion. I'm not getting older. Biologically perhaps. Chronologically most certainly. But psychologically I'm as young as I ever was. My dad tells me of a time when someone in his mid twenties would be pretty much a carbon copy of his father. He'd dress the same, speak the same and act very much like a classically middle aged person. But these days that doesn't seem to be the case. I have the same dreams, pretty much, as I did when I was sixteen. I have the same drive, the same ideals (mostly) as I did then. I am, for all intents and purposes, in a state of perpetual youth.

But there's a twist. While I am no older than I ever was, other people are getting younger. The average undergraduate is quite clearly no more than twelve years old. Look at them! They're a bunch of pre-pubescent chimps! They may have all the bits in the right places and their reproductive parts might well have dropped already but that doesn't change the fact that, while I have remained unchanged by the constant drumming of experience in to my eyes and ears and whichever other convenient openings to which this experience has been able to gain access, those who have come after me have actually been able to avoid becoming older entirely and have in fact begun to regress.

Something terrible has clearly occurred. Or is it so terrible? Perhaps this is just evolution's way of preparing the human race for immortality. It's bound to happen eventually isn't it? After all, we're supposedly pretty close to finding and disabling the genes for all sorts of terrible deadly ailments. We will soon live in a world free of cancer, devoid of degenerative brain diseases and, with any luck, where the gene that encourages people to listen to music through tinny speakers on their mobile phones while on packed buses has been found, given a bloody good hiding and obliterated once and for all. So when we do find the gene for death and flick the switch to standby we'll already been in a state where, mentally at least, we've become perpetual young adults! No need to worry; Jonathan Swift was wrong. We'll not all spend eternity as haggard old cretins but rather as horny twenty-one year olds with great skin, abundant hair and a never ending drive to dance on tables.