That Escalated Quickly

Gradually and then suddenly. That’s how the character Mike Campbell in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises answers the question: “How did you go bankrupt?” It turns out that the same answer applies to the question, “How did you get so old?” We know that time keeps on slippin’ slippin’ slippin’ into the future. What researchers are now learning is that, as it relates to human aging, time also occasionally leaps, surges, and accelerates. Actually, time isn’t going faster. It’s just that we’re slowing down. Ironically, the only thing we can do more quickly as we age is age. In short, midlife is a crisis. “In a new study, scientists at Stanford University tracked age-related changes in over 135,000 types of molecules and microbes, sampled from over 100 adults. They discovered that shifts in their abundance — either increasing or decreasing in number — did not occur gradually over time, but clustered around two ages.” WaPo (Gift Article): Feeling old? Your molecules change rapidly around ages 44 and 60. (I have a feeling my molecules are more precocious than most.)