“Over the past few years, I’d felt like an old young person,” writes Emily Gould, who turned 44 in October. “The feeling seems pretty common in my generation. It’s been much more difficult for older millennials and cusp X-ers to attain the career status our parents had at our ages. Many live without a financial safety net, keeping us young in the ‘furniture from the street’ way. It’s also possible, though expensive, for us to appear far younger than our parents did at our ages via Botox, fillers, and those red-light LED masks that make you look like a scary robot.” And, she says, “The world doesn’t really treat us like old people anymore.” But Gould knew she was still heading for an aging milestone: the cliff. Last August, Stanford University published a widely-discussed “nonlinear aging” study, seeming to confirm something that, as Gould writes, “we already sort of knew.” “There are certain years in life when aging hits us hard and moves us forward at hyperspeed.” Forty-four was the first of those years. Sixty was the next. Dr. Michael Snyder, the study’s senior author, told Gould that he believes these aging cliffs might be mutable—that people might be able to delay them or improve their outcomes, though the data does not yet support this. His take fits comfortably with the orthodoxy of our time: that our health is adaptable, that everything is possible if we look, if we research, if we try. Aging is widely understood in our culture as a problem to be solved, not a natural and inescapable bodily process. But can we truly outrun what’s coming? Gould reports on the new aging cliffs — and whether or not we can, or should, fight to delay them: