aging,
organism’s changes over lifetime-comparable spans; in changed humans, it is mostly the conscious evolution of appearance, esp. facial features. Human aging as a steerable, short-memory, superficial bloom is thus contrasted to growth which builds on the entirety of already-there, is much harder to sway; you can’t stop or redirect your growth (deep sleep only partially backtraces it) but aging is a choice: on top of routine shallow-gene inves, some aging control is achievable simply by body consciousness and exercise. Human face — life’s focal point, consilience of chance and design — is a stream of natural growth shaped by creative aging pulses, fads and antifads of varying scopes and speeds; a sudden urge, conscious or not, to self-morph may reflect solitary developments of the mind (“the new me”) but usually it’s part of a dialog — a thread in the collaborative changestream of a family (by far the most influential), community, culture. For all the inconstancy, humans are somewhat recognizable throughout a life, often there’s some periodicity — returning to “the old me” after years or decades; with age, more and more inves are corrective to roll back an earlier change or freeze an undesired body drift. ■ It used to mean senescence: the irreversible, after some point universally degrading, changes in a multicellular organism — with age as the best predictor. The arrow of time has proven more resilient in human minds than in the bodies, however: it is still common to look gradually older with time even if the oldness is intentional (and the inanimate objects that we care about are never shiny new: livedness, dissolving as art); contrastingly, juvenation — deep sleep or not — tends to be drastic and precipitous.