The face that didn't change, and the one that did

The experiment runs itself; all you have to do is wait. Take two people of the same age, in the same city, with comparable lives. See them again twenty years later.

The gap is almost always considerable, and it is almost always poorly explained.

What doesn’t explain much

Products. It’s the first explanation people reach for, and the weakest. Over twenty years, the difference between two decent routines is marginal compared to everything else.

The sun. It matters, undeniably, and it doesn’t explain the cases where both people had the same exposure.

Genetics. It matters too, and it mostly serves to close the conversation. We invoke it when we no longer want to look, and it has the flaw of making the subject pointless — if there’s nothing to be done, we might as well do nothing.

Money. It allows you to buy a great many things, including a great many bad ones. We regularly observe the opposite of what the budget would suggest.

What explains the most

The rhythm you keep, first of all. Over twenty years, the regularity of sleep and workload produces more difference than everything else combined. It’s tedious to hear and perfectly verifiable.

And then, a variable no one talks about: direction. Not the quantity of effort, but its orientation.

Direction, explained simply

Two people can, over twenty years, make exactly the same quantitative effort and obtain opposite results because one was moving with the grain of her own logic and the other against it.

A nature that needs movement and spent twenty years calming itself down, because that was the general advice, has accumulated twenty years of tension. She was disciplined. She was disciplined in the wrong direction.

A thrifty nature that followed twenty years of stripping protocols, because that was what was being recommended, methodically spent a reserve she didn’t have.

In both cases, the person did what she was supposed to do according to what she was told. And twenty years later, the gap between her and the one who, by chance or otherwise, was moving in her own direction, is the largest gap observable in this whole affair.

Why you don’t see it beforehand

Because a face compensates, and it compensates well.

As long as it compensates, the two trajectories look alike. They diverge on the day the compensation runs out, and on that day we attribute to the day itself — to an age, to an event, to a difficult year — what belongs to the twenty years that came before.

That is why it is so difficult to correct in time: the signal arrives after.

The only variable you can act on

Rhythm, we know it. The sun, we know it. Genetics, we don’t change it.

That leaves direction, and it’s the only one that depends on information rather than virtue. Knowing which way your own nature runs turns the same quantity of effort into an opposite result — without extra discipline, without extra expense.

This information is obtained neither by observation nor by experience, since the experience took place in the fog. It can be read from the very beginning, and it is available at any point along the trajectory, including late.