I watched “My Dinner with Andre” this morning and there’s a line where Wallace Shawn says “… when I was ten years old, […] Now, I'm 36, …“ This guy, 36?
I rewound the scene so my wife could watch it when she flitted through the room because I thought the line was so funny.
But then I looked it up. Wallace Shawn was born in 1943, and the movie was released in 1981. Probably filmed the year before release.
I feel mildly bad for thinking it was a humorous line.
I don’t know if he smoked, but I’ve heard high testosterone can cause male pattern balding. That aside, the changes to humanity in just a few decades, for whatever reason, are pretty shocking. It’s likely that we have less pollution (that impacts humans, anyway), better understanding of things that harm us, and better access to preventative healthcare, that helps to ‘slow down’ aging.
That sort of makes me feel a little less cynical about folks who keep adjusting life milestones upwards. 30 is the new 20!, 40 isn’t middle aged, etc. I had just figured those folks were vain and delusional. But I do look way better than my dad did at this age, so maybe there’s something to it.