I’m twisting the intended narrative here, but the illustration to the left represents how most successful men visualize their roles in the context of the human food chain.

It’s called EGO because it supersedes logic in human populations.

Of course, if you’re rich, it can be argued that ego denotes empirical proof that delusion is everything but.

The illustration to the right is what reality looks and feels like after enough therapy and modest financial success.

Fortunately for men, financial success provides a way out of this existential nightmare, which is not to suggest that once handsome men don’t mourn the erosion of physical beauty, but money can often slow the process to a crawl.

Not so for women whose appearance is considered tantamount to good mental health, therapy notwithstanding.

With this as a backdrop, here is how the evolutionary process has played out for me, a successful Baby Boomer.

Without coming across as a conceited jerk, I was a very handsome young man. I dated pretty much anyone I wanted to date and became accustomed to attracting admirers every time I entered a room. Over time I learned to feed from the positive reflection, the energy that followed me around like a force field. Then as I got older, things changed, and I learned the hard way that while youth and money are the consummate fate, they rarely occur simultaneously. So I had figure out how to balance my assets.

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THE BALANCING OF HUMAN ASSETS IS A UNIQUELY MALE PHENOMENON

Unlike women, men are able to age gracefully as long as the money holds up.

Put another way, money carries with it a certain preternatural quality that enables men to sidestep the aging process well into the final chapters.

In my experience, the reasoning goes something like this:

1] Women tend to be more inspired by what they feel ratter than what they see with their eyes.

[Note: This change takes place as women approach their late 20’s and are still unmarried and not in possession of a 7-figure investment portfolio.]

2] Security is like a opiate for women. Flashbacks occur over every stage of life reminding them that without it they are lost.

3] Wealthy older men can pretty much date anyone they want utilizing success and hubris as leverage.

On a very fundamental level, women see this and begin to feel that their greatest assets are, in fact, youth and beauty and that women in possession of such qualities tend to land in the better neighborhoods.

See, it isn’t that aging women fear death. It’s the fear that aging and losing the power of beauty eclipses all of their other accomplishments, mostly because it does.

For men, their accomplishments play an almost seamless stand-in for whatever time took.

Of course, all of us get screwed after enough water’s passed under the bridge.

But we’re far from maligned over a few wrinkles and gray hair.

In the end, it’s what we’ve accomplished that stands the test of time.

So while older women report feelings of irrelevance, invisibility and fear as they age, older men tend to report similar things when they’re financially challenged.