What if you aged backwards?
You’re born old and die as a baby. School comes at the end of your life, and so does your first word.
A new arrival with white hair, too young to speak.
Day 1
Maternity wards fill with tiny newborns who have white hair, wrinkled skin and no words yet. Nurses have to learn how to hold a baby with the joints of a grandparent.
TV presenters can’t decide whether to say a child was born or arrived.
Year 1
People spend their first decades frail and slowly get stronger. Work happens in the middle of life, when the body can cope with it. Retirement, in a sense, came first.
Secondary schools are full of teenagers who have already had a career. Some lessons feel very late, and some of them are.
Year 10
Funerals become rare. What families dread instead is the last childhood: a parent getting smaller every year, becoming a toddler, and finally a baby.
People write their wills in their strongest years, because by the end they won’t be able to read them.
Who wins
- The strongest yearsThey come when people already know what they’re doing.
- Anyone who hated being a helpless babyHelplessness waits until the end, when someone who loves you is there.
Who loses
- New parentsTheir newborn has arthritis and can’t say where it hurts.
- Pension fundsThe expensive years now come first, before anyone has paid in.
- Old age as a time of restThe end of life is now nappies and a cot.
- Teenage freedomYou get it in the middle of life, and then childhood takes it back.
Growing old is wear and tear adding up. Reversing it would need a body that repairs itself all the way back to infancy and then stops. Ours just keeps wearing out.
Would you want to age backwards?
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