You look in the mirror and the calendar and realize that you’re aging. At some point, you realize that aging entails loss: loss of youthful vitality and beauty. But if you’ve bought into Hollywood hype, you may deny this. You may believe that it is possible to attain some semblance of eternal youth and beauty. You starve yourself so you don’t develop middle-aged spread or at least some visible loss of tone, you get cosmetic surgery and Botox, you dye your hair, all to hide what is really happening with your body. And you behave in ways that go along with this denial of aging. You get a young lover, you dress the way teenagers dress. Maybe because your vision deteriorates as you age, that plus the tremendous capacity of the human brain for self-deception enables you to really believe that what you see in the mirror isn’t aging as much as it is.