Tales of Future Past v2

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Eternal Youth

Future Living

Sort of. Think of it more as stretching out the appearance of youth for as long as possible. That was one of the more assured promises about the year 2000 as seen from the 1950s. Advances in plastic surgery owing to the needs of the Second World War and other new medical discoveries made it seem as if old age would go the way of typhoid and the Black Death and when Popular Mechanics published their famous list of predictions in 1950 they were perfectly confident that careful use diet and hormones would mean your average septuagenarian of 2000 A.D. would look like and be as vigorous as a person of forty.

Robert Heinlein went one better with his predictions of about the same time by declaring that not only would plastic surgery remove all blemishes from human beauty, but that the family psychiatrist would iron out all neuroses so that the last hurdles to nudism, at least among everyone more intimate than the pizza deliveryman, would finally be cleared.

What no one foresaw was that Father Time isn't so easily mocked and that while all sorts of diets, treatments,  and cosmetic surgeries exist today, they cannot bring back youth. At best, they can dam up the worst ravages, but not completely or forever, so now we have that strange new variety of human life -- the vain and wealthy who diet, botox, face lift, liposuction, personally train and Heaven knows what else until you have aging, Viagra-popping  actors who shave behind their ears and spend entire afternoons in the gym to combat the encroachment of a spreading gut; and middle aged to elderly women who starve themselves until they look like skeletons who've been upholstered in saddle leather and kitted out with what are less breasts than miniature airbags awaiting deployment.

And nude beaches are still the best argument against naturism around.

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