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Comment by eganist | Hacker News Reader

At risk of sounding absolutely insane:

There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of:

1. being burned at the stake

2. being trialed in repeated experiments

3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake.

---

I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives?

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Someone I work with looks very youthful for their actual age, and that isn't always a good thing.

When the team went on an offsite morale event jet skiing, he was told by the proprietor that he couldn't participate because their policy requires you to be at least 16 years old. He was 27 at the time. He never lived that down with his peers. When he tries to go to a bar with friends, he's sometimes accused of trying to pass off a fake ID. These experiences are deeply embarrassing for him.

Imagine trying to get promoted to a senior director position at a company while looking like you are fresh out of college. In that case ageism takes a different meaning.

I'm only 23, so I understand that I am young, but looking young is, without a doubt, a serious disadvantage when it comes to people trusting in your ability.

I recently worked on overhauling the reporting system for one of the largest police departments in the US, and every step along the way I was asked who was in charge, how did I enter the workforce so young, how I got an internship while attending high school (I had already graduated college), etc. I even got those types of comments from other employees at companies where I worked full-time. Of course, I don't really have the luxury of getting too offended by it all the time, otherwise I'd be really bitter, but the classic "Oh well you'll be glad you look young when you're older" gets tiring.

I always looked about 5 years younger than my age. It sucked when I was young. At 40 it’s not the worst quality, but it also doesn’t help much. So I look 35, big whoop. I did discover wearing my hair long in my 20s made me look a bit older (eh, more like my age). Might try modifying your look.

Absolutely, just dressing differently and changing a few things has helped. Facial hair is a big one. I'd rather look young than be balding at 23 like some of my peers.

Right!? I found dressing “older” actually made me look younger. It looked like I was pretending to be grown up. I kind of embraced a rock/slacker look in my 20s and that worked best. These days I just do the dad look. That works fine. Best of luck out there!

Wear a suit? That thing buys a lot of deference.

You have to be careful not to come across like "a suit" in the engineering circles, it's a tricky balance, but it's worth it.

Yeah, I have experienced this as well before hair loss started up in earnest. Not really fun walking around with your partner of the same age and someone thinking she's your mom (she started graying early).

I think people age at different rates.

My Dad is in his mid 80's and plays four hours of sports a day, or at least he was before the pandemic hit.

When I was in my mid-20's I had to impress the hell out of potential clients to get work, as I looked like I was 15, and girls my own age wouldn't look at me as I was too young. I never drank, so bars weren't an issue. When I was in my early forties, 15-20 year old girls were still coming on to me. I will be 50 next year, and I finally look like I'm in my 20s or 30s, and still get those looks from University-aged girls whenever I venture where they hang out.

A couple of years ago, my now 43 year old partner was mistaken for her teenage doppelganger and asked to the high school prom by three different boys while walking home from work.

It was annoying earlier, but now I look forward to turning out to be one of the immortals.

> A couple of years ago, my now 43 year old partner was mistaken for her teenage doppelganger and asked to the high school prom by three different boys while walking home from work.

Pretty sure I saw this movie in the 80s.

One thing to remember is that people don’t have perfect vision either. As long as you are not out of shape or have sagging skin or gray hairs, people will not be able to clearly see any wrinkles or other textures in skin that would give away age.

In general I’ve seen a lot of people that look young for their age but when looking at their skin up close on their face, neck or hands it gives it away. Women are also at an obvious advantage through their use of makeup.

>When I was in my early forties, 15-20 year old girls were still coming on to me. I will be 50 next year

I've read that when Scott McNealy met his future wife (they married when he was 40) she thought that he was a Stanford undergraduate.

Here's a response that he can use when people comment on his youthful appearance.

"You look so young."

"I have this portrait in my attic."

I appreciate the dorian gray reference :)

A friend of mine also has this issue. She just turned 30 but looks like she could be a teenager, or perhaps a uni student.

We did a Dexa scan a few months back and it put her age based on body composition at 14.

She gets annoyed about it sometimes as she feels people don't treat her seriously. Because of this she's quite conscious of what she wears, and how she presents herself.

For anyone curious you can find her on youtube - search "Good Paleo Life"

I am 34, and people always say I look 23. In my last job, upon meeting me, people asked if I was a student (intern) or just graduated.

It was nice. I can't grow facial hair though so I have no choice. What worries me is when I'm 45, I'll look like the world's oldest 30 year old or something.

I'm 26 and but I look much younger (as long as I shave my beard). I regularly have to show my ID when buying alcohol for instance (which you can do with 16-18 in my country).

It's rather fun for me and I enjoy these kinds of interactions. Can't say it really ever hindered or embarrassed me in any way.

I suspect that if those people who feel embarrassed because they look young were looking older, they'd find something else to be embarrassed about. It's easy to find any number of shortcomings with yourself.

He should grow a beard then. It probably helps.

One of my most favorite sci-fi movies explores this idea [0]. It's very intriguing and quite entertaining.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth

Was going to also post the same thing. It too is one of my favorite sci-fi movies.

I just commented before seeing your mention of it.

Although I didn't realize until I commented that Jerome Bixby the author of The Man From Earth was also a Star Trek writer.

Oh yes. I met them in person a while back [0]. Super nice people.

[0] https://twitter.com/synopsi/status/1188295183130955778?s=21

He wrote the episode Requiem for Methuselah, which has an almost identical premise.

> If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives?

I was routinely told I looked 25 at the age of 45, and can assure you I felt no need to start accumulating secret identities.

A surprising number of people have taken my comment rather personally.

Well, you know, the way you wrote the comment, it kind of invited us to take it as personal - as applying to ourselves.

My personal experience led to that assumption; I've never guessed anyone's age wrong by 15 years, hence the example. Sorry it hit you the way it did; wasn't my intent.

I don't think we took it "personally" in a way that calls for an apology. I don't think anybody felt accused or anything - just that we are responding literally, noting that some of us are in those circumstances, and aren't reacting the way you said. That's all I meant when I said you invited us to take it personally. I did not at all mean that you gave us grounds for feeling accused or defensive. (But thanks for the non-defensiveness of your reply - this conversation could easily have blown up with you feeling accused by my post, and I would not have known why, because I didn't mean it that way at all - which may mean that I wrote it badly.)

Internet is full of these stories, I believe none. For one, even if there are people who look younger (say, Selena Gomez, or Lucy Liu) even them cannot pass to be 10+ years younger than they are, after looking at them in person. Have you actually met a 30+ year old person who could pass consistently as a teenager? I have never met one. The second thing is that if you are "routinely" told that you look XX or YY years old , either you are going around people telling your actual age, or they are being gracious in their compliment. You dont approach a teenager to tell them that they look young.

These responses happen after people encounter me first, then see my kids come up to join the conversation (in their 20's) getting introduced as my kids, at which point the person I'm talking with realizes I am way older than they thought and they freak out. "Routinely" doesn't mean daily, but it does mean it happens often enough to be a thing.

I've gotten that from time to time. My oldest is turning 22 this year. When people hear that, they do a double take and say, "wow, you're not old enough to have a kid that old," to which I agree. I had her at 15 - a bit young to have a kid that age indeed.

I did meet a Taiwanese woman who I thought was a teenager but was actually in her 30s. It could be because I am not asian myself and have difficulty recognising distinctive features of asians, but she said that her friends in Taiwan told her the same all the time.

I’m almost 30 and I know I look like a teen because salespeople who knock on my door ask if my mom is home and flight attendants don’t want to let me sit next to the emergency door (you have to be FIFTEEN for that!). I can buy child tickets to things without a question asked. Of course celebrities don’t really look like teenagers, because they’re meant to look attractive. Real people who look young look like gangly awkward teens :)

It's also entirely possible that they just look younger, but aren't given much more of a lifespan because there's other issues with such a treatment. So someone that just ages well but ends up dying of otherwise natural looking causes and a typical age.

Sounds more like vampire-fiction like historical realities. People were "burned at the stake" for heretical ideas and challenging church dogma, not for looking suspiciously young. And the examples we have of living persons being deified was generally because they acquired enormous power (roman emperors, pharaohs and so on) not because of looking particularly young for their age.

> Sounds more like vampire-fiction like historical realities. People were "burned at the stake" for heretical ideas and challenging church dogma, not for looking suspiciously young. And the examples we have of living persons being defied was generally because they acquired enormous power (roman emperors, pharaohs and so on) not because of looking particularly young for their age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_executed_for_wi...

Quite a number were burned for (obviously alleged) witchcraft. (grep page for 'burn')

That's where I derived that first bullet.

The actual charge was "maleficium", using magic to harm people. Things like poisoning also counted, although we wouldn't consider that magic today. The important point was the intention to cause harm.

Of course that was hard to prove or disprove, but we have examples of alleged witches accepting payment for harming/killing other people using whichcraft - like a contract killer. So at least the intention to cause harm was there in some cases.

There are numerous accounts of people having (alleged) supernatural abilities who was not persecuted, e.g ascetics surviving without eating for years and such. These were generally held in high regard, and could end up as saints.

Of course people could be accused for maleficium on really flimsy evidence so it could also hypothetically happen to the hypothetical slow-aging person just like it could happen to anybody else.

> There are numerous accounts of people having (alleged) supernatural abilities who was not persecuted, e.g ascetics surviving without eating for years and such. These were generally held in high regard, and could end up as saints.

> Of course people could be accused for maleficium on really flimsy evidence so it could also hypothetically happen to the hypothetical slow-aging person just like it could happen to anybody else.

Yep, hence points 1 and 3.

Thanks!

Well you only become a saint after you are dead and if miracles at your grave. So the risk of being saintified and then burned at the stake is not high.

My point was just that unusual aging patterns would not put you at any particular risk of being burned at the stake.

Based on your comment, you will likely enjoy "The Boat of a Million Years", by Poul Anderson [0]. Needless to say, it's science fiction.

It's about a very small number of people who are immortal, in the sense they stop ageing at 25 (iirc). They can be killed like anyone else, but smaller damages do heal faster. Also, they never get sick. Some are thousands of years old, some less. Some smart, some not so much. How they handle their immortality is very interesting though. I won't spoil it for you though.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boat_of_a_Million_Years

The Lords of Farmer's World of Tiers also stop ageing at 25 and are immortal unless killed, usually by other Lords. I loved that series when I was young.

Like in the Highlander.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man_from_Earth

One of the only movies that remains intriguing throughout despite being basically a single conversation.

Just don't look up the sequel.

What about "My Dinner with Andre?" That's exactly a single conversation.

And so is, mostly, "Rope."

I happen to love certain niche movie genres, which happens to include "dinner party movies". Feel free to list some recommendations, if you like "people talk in a room" movies.

Some of my favories:

    Coherence (scifi)
    Garden Party (sleazy young adult Los Angeles drama)
    Murder Party (low budget horror comedy)
    How English sounds to non-English speakers (youtube)
    Circle 2015 (scifi)

The Invitation (2015 film)

12 Angry Men. My Dinner with Andre. Steve Jobs (a stretch, but much more a play than a movie).

There's some play adaptations which have few characters and mostly dialogue: Carnage, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Glengarry Glen Ross

Linklater's "Before" trilogy is also heavily dialogue-based, but the there are multiple locations.

El método (2005) is a really good take on corporate/personal dynamics.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427582/

"How About Adolf?" (2018) [0].

"Perfect Strangers" (2017) [1].

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7477310/

[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6101820/

Not exactly a dinner party movie, but Sleuth (1972 and also the 2007 remake) is a good one.

The Big Kahuna (1999) ("the majority of the film takes place in a single hotel room, and nearly every single line of dialogue is spoken by one of the three actors.")

Exam (2009) is another good single-room film.

I love those kinds of movies. It's a Disaster (2012) is a good watch.

It doesn't need to be the malicious.

Let's assume the mutation happens when the person is in their 20s, which would be ideal. If this occurred any time in history up to the 1800s, would you not still be likely to die of disease, cancer, or other injury? Life expectancy hasn't increased because we are better at slowing aging, it has increased because we are better at not dying of the things that kill us.

If the mutation happened invitro, did the child survive birth? If it did survive but never grew, it wouldn't reproduce, and may have been abandoned if it were too much of a burden.

There are many scenarios where this mutation could have occurred but was never passed on.

I've met people who look 25 but are actually 45. A few of them, actually. It's on the extreme end of the bell curve but it happens.

As for more extreme cases, I could believe that a few people discovered that they weren't aging and hid it, but not more than a few people, especially in modern times. Switching identities isn't exactly easy and the probability of every one of them successfully carrying it out gets exponentially suppressed as the number of people increases.

I guess one would when they start approaching 80 and looking as 35.

To take that further, most ancient myths from most cultures, have some kind of immortals in them.

And the same argument applies to true magicians btw.

When you could summon real magic, why should you reveal that to others?

(or care to claim a million dollar

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Million_Dollar_Paranorma...

)

But I doubt it.

From a perspective of evolution, aging and dying and new borns, make sense, because the environment changes. And youth is able to adopt better to new changes.

Given how much people focus on looking youthful, it's probably reasonable to assume that appearing youthful has historically been advantageous, from a reproductive point of view. Which would lead such a mutation to spread pretty rapidly throughout the population.

Probably confounded by the social dynamics of human groups. There also isn't any evidence that it would extend reproductive lifespan either.

> There also isn't any evidence that it would extend reproductive lifespan either.

FWIW, it doesn't need to do this. It just need to result in more surviving children and grandchildren. Looking 5-10 years younger when you're a female between the ages of 25 and 40 could A) get you access to a higher status mate who can better provide for your children, and/or B) keep your mate more interested in you, reducing the likelihood that they will continue to provide for the children you have with them.

Might I recommend the "The Man from Earth" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0756683/). Definitely worth checking out.

It's a low budget film, but I agree that it's worth watching.. especially for the socio/psychology elements.

This implies a sort of binary between "normal" aging and vampire-like eternal youth, but if these mutations do exist within the population, their practical effects are likely far more nuanced due to confounding factors.

There would almost certainly be a continuum, perhaps following a power law. The top quartile might be the "40 not looking a day over 25," while the top 0.1% might be true Dorian Greys.

regarding mutations, perhaps they are just confined to certain physical systems. The reason I bring this up is my mother-in-law has brownish hair with not a single grey hair, she does not dye her hair and is about to turn 70. Her mother also has barely any grey hair and is in her 90's, this to me is extremely strange as people in my family get alot of grey in their 40's and most get grey at least by 50ish.

Assuming such a de-aging mutation had occurred, the countless other ways to die would eventually kill all such people. Setting aside the fact that - in a long enough time line - an illness, accident, combat, or some external factor independent of one's baseline physical condition would be guaranteed to get you, other natural effects of longevity like e.g. cancer incidence may not be reduced by <insert whatever this hypothetical mutation does> either.

Aside from that, it's only in the last millennium or so that we have record keeping that we could plausibly consider credible enough to prove the existence of such a person - in ages before that we have countless myths of immortality or unnatural longevity that we immediately disregard as fictional. So if Methuselah really had lived 969 years due to this mutation, we'd all be none the wiser!

Probably, yes. I turn 40 this month, and was recently told by someone who just met me that I look 25. What exactly am I supposed to do differently now?

Ignore benign random behaviors and continue to apply your agency as you see fit?

I'm sorry, my programming is limited. I'm unable to answer your question.

This is kind of obvious, but since you are asking: you have to quit your job, quit your hobbies, delete your social media accounts, go out into the desert and spend 15 years seeking the true meaning of life.

I recently returned to a workplace I left 15 years ago. There are a substantial number of staff still there who are around my age - early middle aged. Many look very similar, but what took me by surprise - as I've never studied a large group of aging people over a decade plus - is their skin. Superficially features, hair, body weight, etc., hadn't changed but to a man (ie across everyone) they all have "aged" skin.

So, if you want to tell if someone is 25 or 40, maybe their skin will give it away?

That's pretty much the plot of the story The Man From Earth written by Jerome Bixby. He also wrote a similar story for the original Star Trek series.

The Man From Earth and its sequel are on Amazon Prime Video.

edit: I should have did a ctrl+f man from earth

It's a great show everyone seems to have seen it. I never knew about it until I saw it in my Amazon Prime Video suggestions.

I think the variation in “visual age” is too large for “look like 25 by the time we reach 40” to be an outlier.

Excessive smoking and UV light exposure can easily make a 25-year old look older than a healthy 50-year old who exercises regularly, uses sunscreen when they go out in the sun, and didn’t get scars from accidents.

Or maybe they just died of other things. Pretty sure most people didn't die of old age historically.

>At risk of sounding absolutely insane:

>There's probably no way to prove that this hasn't happened. Anyone who realizes they're not aging normally would likely have taken on a new identity elsewhere for fear of:

>1. being burned at the stake

>2. being trialed in repeated experiments

>3. being deified, and then subsequently being burned at the stake.

---

>I realize my comment sounds like a joke, but I'm entirely serious. If you or I found out we're not aging normally and look e.g. 25 by the time we reach 40, or 30 by the time we reach 45, would either of us remain in our current lives?

1, 2 and 3 are very astute observations about human nature. ALL people who disagree on 1,2 and 3 are just naive in what they think human nature is. History repeats.

I think you should consider the boiling frog syndrome.

Not aging is as slow as aging, and by the time you realise and accept there is something special with you, everyone else around has already figured it out. Disappearing at that point might be a pretty conspicuous move "that guy [or woman, I wonder why all immortals must always be men... :)] who is 70 but actually looked thirty went missing".

There are other things that can cause similar effects. Many people look “younger” than their age.

I’d guess that one out of fifty times the person would not die prematurely, have the means and foresight, and then go on to do this; and that one out of two times their community, which they don’t part ways with, catches on and names them a god for a while.

Robert Heinlein had a whole universe where this was the case. A group of people had been bred to live as long as possible and hid it from the wider world for fear of being hunted down and used as lab rats. They end up fleeing to space when discovered.

Probably also worth noting that there are [stories of it happening before](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah).

If you read Genesis most people mentioned there lived 100s of years. This most likely is an artifact of years corresponding to moon cycles (aka months) in the earlier parts of the Old Testament.

The novel "How to Stop Time" by Matt Haig is a recent addition to this genre, and is built on this very premise. It is a fun read. (And, unlike most "eternal life!" type books, has no vampires)

That artist that survived both the Spanish Flu and COVID is 107.

Go take a look at her photo.

This one? To be fair, this photo is back from when she was a youthful 102.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/at-107-this-artist-just...

But yeah, wow.

I once met a 102 year old man who lived alone in a big patch of private forest in BC that he bought in the '20s. He was still driving a car and doing jumping jacks.

Amazing. She looks like she's in her 70's, or early 80's at the worst.

I looked, and she's wearing an Ouroboros necklace.

"The Ouroboros, an ancient symbol depicting a serpent or dragon eating its own tail, has been said to have a meaning of infinity by depicting the cycle of birth and death. The Ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal."

I think this is unlikely because at some point there would be an large cohort of such persons; discipline among 25 year olds (your figure) regarding reproduction cannot be relied upon. :)

I'm 31 and can probably pass for a college senior if I dress the part. I still can't get my facial hair to connect and form a full beard.

Waiting for my deification now...

>25 by the time we reach 40

The socially desirable scenarios like this aren't really the interesting ones. How about looking 5 when you reach 25?

At the risk of the suggestion being a spoiler in and of itself, the movie The Man From Earth is basically about this topic.

In the end, there can be only one!

If you have not seen the movie The Man From Earth, I highly recommend it.

Have you seen "The Man From Earth"?

this person exists--- his name is Jared Leto.

I was thinking Jon Bon Jovi.

Interestingly he is vegan. Many people I know that follow a plant based diet look suspiciously younger than the norm (I get the same comments often too). Causation or correlation - who knows.

Probably can't chalk it to that - I mean, Keanu Reeves is ageless as well and he's not.

haha yup!, I feel like all the people I know who look relatively young for their age don't eat a ton of meat or processed foods, also are extremely active both physically and mentally with work or other endeavors. Sitting around watching TV doing nothing in retirement is a sure way to early death.

Andy Milonakis?

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