How about this for a scary thought? If you cling to trying to look too young, you'll die young. Don't believe me?

Not long ago I found myself reading Betty Friedan's comprehensive and compelling book, "The Fountain of Age" (1994), and I was stopped dead in my tracks by her following statement: "Mindless conformity to the standards of youth can prohibit further development... it takes a conscious breaking out of youthful definitions, for a man or woman - to free oneself for continued development in age." Say what?

Friedan, who died last year at the age of 85, was commenting on the observation that people who participated for years in long-term studies about aging actually survived significantly longer than they were expected to.

After discounting every possible error that might have skewed the results of those studies, researchers concluded that it was actually the participation in the studies that increased their longevity. And what they think, according to Friedan, is that "those who consciously affirmed and studied their own aging in an open-ended way, as a new period of development, simply continued to find ways to keep on developing."

Here's the awful irony that I took away from Friedan's insight, that the very things we're doing to look youthful...Botox, plastic surgery, hair dye... may, in fact, be preventing us from reveling in the here and now of whatever our biological age may be. And that fact alone could actually make us die younger.