Will You Still Click Me, When I'm 64

I keep seeing clickbait ads that say something like, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of Major Dad Looks Like Now!" Sure, I will admit a little curiosity (probably not for Major Dad, but say, for a show or movie I actually watched.) But generally, it's easy to resist the urge to click, since I can guess the answer: they look twenty years older. In addition, since they're in the entertainment business, they started off better looking than most, and they probably have better than average knowledge of make-up and clothing, so they'll look significantly better than others the same age. But still, they'll just look good, but older.

I know this, because I have particular insight into how people's appearances change as they age. That is to say, I'm on Facebook. So I constantly have the experience of seeing what people look like after a couple of decades. It's a little intriguing, but in the end it's a pretty mundane part of life.

I suppose my generation is the first to see this as commonplace. It used to be that you either lost contact with people, or you stayed close enough to them that you weren't conscious of their aging, since you saw it one day at a time. Your only opportunity to get a real perspective on aging was at a reunion. But now I get a reminder of the aging process quite often. I have to say, I think my generation has actually aged fairly well. You'd think Generation-X would have developed more Worry Lines.

So I really don't want to see what such-and-such celebrity looks like now. I'm sure that years ago, this sort of clickbait would have made sense, If clickbait had existed back then. You're looking at the cover of the Entertainment section of the paper, and you see the page-turn-bait headline, "You Won't Believe What The Cast of My Mother The Car Looks Like Now!" You'd probably turn right to page C6.