Ever since I hit the big two-oh, I’ve been feeling… old. I’ve lost that spring in my step, that conquer-the-world attitude I had in my teens. When I look in the mirror now, I see a strange face staring back at me: the face of a twenty-year-old. The sagging skin, the glassy eyes. And I don’t like it.

So I’m doing something about it. With the help of a facelift, rhinoplasty, liposuction and a generous breast reduction, I can regain that fresh-faced teenager look I once had, oh so long ago. The only thing standing between my youth and me is several hundred thousand dollars of extensive cosmetic surgery. At that price, I can’t afford not to do it!

Okay, I’m not actually going under the knife to recapture the face I had when I was 15 — especially since all I’d really have to do is paint on a few zits and glue some metal to my teeth. But if contemporary advertisements are any indication, I’d better start worrying about aging now, before it’s too late.

As middle age stretches out later and later, people — especially women — are attempting to combat aging earlier and earlier. Commercials for anti-wrinkle creams feature young models with skin so taut you could bounce a quarter off it. Women in their thirties are now having their eyelids yanked up towards their eyebrows before they can even start to droop. People in their forties are having their faces paralyzed with injections of Botulinum Toxin Type A, a drug that comes with a warning of side effects that include “rare spontaneous reports of death.” On the bright side, if it doesn’t kill you, it keeps those pesky lines from forming on your forehead when you frown. You say wrinkle, I say vital facial expression. Shall we call the whole thing off?

Not so quickly. People are hasty to condemn cosmetic surgery, calling it unnatural, disgusting, and responsible for perpetuating an arbitrary standard of beauty.

Natural? Is anything that humans do “natural”? If we followed the dictum that deviating from our “natural” state (i.e., the body that we were born with) is wrong, medical technology would have never advanced past the state of “Leeches! He needs more leeches!” Hemophiliacs would be screwed; so would diabetics and premature infants. You probably wouldn’t be alive.

The same goes for the disgustingness argument. Sure, a big bag of blobby cellulite that’s been sucked through a tube out of some woman’s thighs isn’t the most appetizing thing in the world, but neither is open-heart surgery. I certainly wouldn’t want to go out for burgers after watching a tumor excision. And you know what’s really disgusting? Childbirth.

Of course, all of the procedures that I mention for comparison are used to help people, to make them healthier and to save their lives. But who’s to say that the benefits of cosmetic surgery aren’t an equally valid justification? Few would disagree that fixing a cleft palate or a disfiguring facial scar is a bad idea, but many of these same people frown upon one who shrinks a large nose or plumps up thin lips. This is where the arbitrariness argument comes in: Deformities such as scars are abnormal and universally unattractive, whereas the preference for a smaller nose or bee-stung lips is cultural. Surgically altering your face to follow the whimsies of society merely perpetuates a random preference, or so say the critics.

But it doesn’t. A big nose is unattractive for the same reason that a cleft palate is: it isn’t normal. Across cultures, the faces that are considered most attractive are those that are average in terms of dimensions and shapes. There is a universal standard of beauty, and it consists of signs of youth and fertility — a plump lower lip in women, for example, or a prominent chin in men. Your kindergarten teacher was wrong when she told you “everyone is beautiful in their own way” — some people are just empirically ugly. That’s what personalities (and liquor) are for.

Though natural selection may have ceased for humans, we continue to evolve through technology, using science to make us healthier, smarter, and happier. It only makes sense that technology should also make us more attractive, especially in a society where physical appearance plays such an enormous role. It’s interesting that people have no qualms about improving their lives with surgery that makes them healthier and drugs that make them happier, but uneasiness sets in the moment physical appearance comes into play. To condone plastic surgery is to admit to being shallow. I say drop the pretense, because claiming that we don’t judge people by the way they look is more harmful than embracing the truth.

We like looking at pretty people; we also like talking to friendly people, and hiring competent people. If an unfriendly person can increase his market value by undergoing anger management training or an incompetent oaf can be schooled in job skills, where does that leave the generically homely rest of us? It’s a cruel world out there, and you can either stick to your principles or have your face molded to look like every other face that ever graced the cover of People Magazine. Make your choice soon, and the incisions will have plenty of time to heal over the summer.