EB 282 – Comic Relief. Get Young FAST – the Dutch Way
Just when you thought you’ve heard it all, along comes a new way to reverse the aging process that you may want to think about.
It seems that there is this guy in the Netherlands who wants people to be able to legally change their age if they FEEL younger than their chronological age. There is this 69 year old Motivational Speaker who says he feels like he is in his 40s and wants to legally change his LEGAL age to 20 years younger. That would include change on all his legal documents.
He says that he experiences “agism” when he signs up on Dutch dating sites; girls won’t go out with him because of his age. The dating site apparently told him to lie, but he says he has too much integrity for that. He also says he can’t get a mortgage or anything else that younger people can do, because of his age. He is self-employed.
I should point out that he isn’t confused by his age. He acknowledges his chronological age. But he says his biological age and his emotional age are much younger. His biological age reflects the condition of his body. His emotional age is how he FEELS and chooses to identify. He says his doctor has told him he has the body of a 45 year old. According to local newspaper articles, he describes himself as a “young god”.
He says that if he can change his chronological age on his legal documents, he will be able to get dates and a mortgage and other things.
He feels so strongly about this that this past November, he filed a lawsuit in a Dutch court to have this age legally changed.
The lawsuit got a lot of European TV time, and even prompted an academic paper by a Finnish scholar from the University of Oslo in Norway who has justified the reasoning as a social change that needs to be looked at as reasonable. His paper was published in the Journal of Medical Ethics.The scholar says that “people whose biological and emotional age do not match their chronological age should be allowed to change their legal age in order to secure relief from discrimination.”
The scholar stipulates that there should be an limit put on the range of age that you can change to, so that you can still vote and drive a car.
According to the Associated Press in the Hague, the 69 year old man claimed that his request was“consistent with other forms of personal transformation gaining acceptance around the world, such as the right to change name or gender.”
So the takeaway is that exercise and nutrition are out the window, and all you have to to do to slow down or reverse aging is to go to court. I might as well shut down this blog now.
But not so fast, the Dutch court rejected the request. It said, in a press statement that“Mr. ‘X’ is at liberty to feel 20 years younger than his real age and to act accordingly. But amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register for births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This would have a variety of undesirable legal and societal implications.”
According to the Associated Press article, the man vowed to appeal saying that “he was the first of ‘thousands of people who want to change their age.’ “
Don’t believe it? Here are a couple of links to some videos. The last on is a Fox News video which is a bit tongue in cheek and irreverent — but funny:
In his own words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=rAEmMWZkR0E
Fox News Report (funny): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AflIJwq9GOA
So, no more exercise. No more dieting. Just get a lawyer.
Thank you for reading.
NOTE: I credit a good friend and reader for sending me an article from a publication called The College Fix. I said “no way can this be real”, but I did some research and came up with the above. Thank you.