I am consigned to my fate. A few years, hopefully a few decades, down the line, I will be bald.

I do what most people do when they're inside an elevator with mirrors on the walls, and check themselves out. My hair's still a bit messy, so I try fixing it as much as I could without using a comb. (I was never really a comb person, but that's not really related to this thought now, is it?) I see my hairline. I see my hairline retreat. It's happening, or at the very least, it's going to happen soon.

Is it supposed to be happening now? I mean, I'm only turning 34 today. Am I supposed to be balding now?

Prince Harry is in the news, doing a string of interviews for his memoirs. I suppose the answer is, yes, it's possible that I am supposed to be balding now. I mean, we're only six years apart, and he's been bald for the most part of the last decade.

Not that I come from a family where the men get bald early. My father still has a lot of hair, and my grandfather passed away without being bald. Sure, he lost some hair - he was 91 - but he wasn't completely bald. I suppose that's my saving grace if I'm that conscious about my looks.

I remember a conversation I had with some colleagues in Hong Kong. Well, technically, I was not in that conversation. I just happened to be there, then a twentysomething surrounded by folks in their 40s and 50s, talking about how they're pushing back against inevitable hair loss. One of them turns to me, as if to partake a lesson. "Twice a week ka lang dapat mag-shampoo," he said, "para hindi ka agad makalbo."

I actually took his advice until the lockdowns, by which time my hair grew so long and the weather got so hot it was impossible not to shampoo with more regularity. My current barber also reinforced that new-ish thinking. Shampoo everyday, he said, for our hair gets greasier than we give it credit for, or something.

I suppose if being at least partially bald is part of my future, there's no point in trying to resist it. Shampoo daily. Call it self-care. That's also one less thing to worry about. Claud and I talked about the signs of aging we spot when we hit our 30s, for some reason, and those signs, we can't really do much about, unless we have a lot of cash at our disposal or something. Fine lines, maybe stretch marks... signs that we've been here on this planet for so long and our bodies are showing signs of natural wear and tear? Just a few hundred years ago, humanity's average life expectancy was somewhere in the 30s. In any other century I would be dying by now. We would be dying by now.

That's perhaps why we panic when we see those signs. My initial realization to Claud was that our reference points to the changes in our bodies when we're adults are the changes in our bodies when we're in the midst of puberty. Whether we admit it or not, we freaked out at those. The quiet trauma remains with us when faced with something we can definitely face now, something we're now better equipped to cope with.

But then, the other explanation - the whole thing about how we as a species weren't going past our 30s until recently - kind of makes sense, too. Our collective unexplained memory is of all of our ancestors dying at this point. By now, we should have at least contributed to the continuation of our species. Have children, preferably ten. Displacement rate and all that. Instead we're having extended childhoods. Not that I'm against it. Our generation is the victim of what previous generations did. Our world is collapsing, and opportunities are fucking hard to come by, unless you're unknowingly ultra-privileged or something.

So, go, be a child. At least until your body stops you. And even then, you can arrest that decline further. Go to the gym. Go to the gym. Go to the fucking gym and express your grief through dead weights. Sorry. Anyway. I am almost two years into taking maintenance medication for high blood pressure. It's shocking to know that I am already under such a regime in my early 30s, but my cardiologist tells me that teenagers are also having their heart rates and blood pressure monitored these days. I supposed we will all die early again, just as the universe intended.