If You Could Freeze Your Age, Which Age Would You Choose?

By Drew Magary
I recently wrote a novel called "The Postmortal" in which a scientist discovers a way to stop the human body from aging. You can still die after taking this cure. You can get shot or get AIDS or whatever. But your age stays the same. In the book, people freeze their age at various points. Old people still around when the cure is invented freeze their age and become the perma-elderly. Sex workers take it or are forced to take it at a relatively young age to appeal to clientele. But many people are allowed to freeze their age at any point they see fit (the main character does so at 29). Which got me wondering: What would be the BEST age for you to freeze yourself?

Keep in mind that maturity doesn't play a factor. If you freeze your age at 19, you don't stay as naive and stupid as a 19-year-old, you just look like one. I asked my parents this question and they didn't come to a mutual consensus. My dad said early thirties. My mom said forty, which I thought was crazy. Then again, I've never been forty, so I don't know how good it feels to be that age. I assumed turning forty felt like the Grim Reaper smacking you on the ass. But no! Apparently, some people are okay with it! Astounding.

Choosing an age to freeze yourself is shockingly difficult. You might choose age twenty, when you're young and fresh and wrinkle-free, and your ass hasn't started to sag and your tits still hold up. The problem is that, if you're frozen at twenty, you may mature but it doesn't APPEAR that you have. People may eternally think of you as an innocent waif who doesn't know anything, and that wouldn't be much fun. I'm 34 years old, and there's no way I'd ever choose to remain the 20-year-old me. I look like someone dropped me off in the city from a fucking cornfield. I don't want to look like that forever. And any younger would be out of the question as well. I was a fat child.

This question also cuts along gender lines as well. It's an old cliche that men age better than women, but I bet men would end up choosing to freeze themselves at an average older age than women if a cure for aging were ever found. George Clooney is fifty years old and I bet he considers himself in the prime of his life right now, this instant. He wouldn't go back very far to freeze his age. But society puts far more pressure on women to remain youthful-looking, and so you'd have a majority of ladies probably getting cured somewhere in their twenties. Of course, this is what I assume because I'm a horrible sexist pig.

It's also a difficult question to ponder if you've never experienced being every age. If you're 21 years old and someone offers to freeze your age, you might be stupid enough to be like, "HELL YES!" and do it without considering how you'll look and feel ten years hence. It's one of the things I realized when I was dicking around and writing this book. Each age is a step. Each age has its own unique value. And people have wildly different ideas of when they consider themselves to be in the prime of their existence. I think I'm in mine now. I think 34 sounds just about right. But maybe that's because I haven't been 44 yet. Or even 54. Maybe the best age to be is the one you are, to constantly be aging and changing and experiencing life as the person you've slowly become. I don't know. All I know is that freezing it at 65 would SUCK.