Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

 From the Elderescence Podcast Beauty After Perfection: Decay, Dignity, and the Digital Gaze Digital culture has trained us to worship the unmarked surface. Smooth skin. Even light. Correct proportions. Endless optimisation. For years, technology promised refinement — better resolution, sharper focus, cleaner edits. The logic was simple: beauty was something to be perfected, preserved, and defended against time. And yet, something curious is happening. As artificial intelligence becomes more capable of rendering faces, bodies, and futures, it has also begun to reveal something we were never meant to see so clearly: what happens after perfection fails . Ageing is no longer hidden behind soft focus. Decay is no longer off-screen. Digital tools now generate wrinkles, sag, opacity, greying — not as metaphor, but as data. And instead of feeling grotesque, it often feels… honest. There is dignity in this honesty. For a long time, decay was treated as an error. A flaw in the sy...

 From the Elderescence Podcast AI, Time Compression, and the Return of Death to Consciousness I didn’t expect artificial intelligence to make me think about death. At least, not like this. I expected spectacle — novelty, cleverness, perhaps even menace. What I didn’t expect was the way AI would make time itself visible , and in doing so, quietly remove one of modern life’s most effective illusions: that death is distant, abstract, and safely postponed. AI has a peculiar ability to compress time. To accelerate it. To render decades as seconds. Faces age. Bodies change. Futures appear without narrative, without explanation, without sentiment. There is no story arc. No tragedy. No triumph. Just time, applied. And that is what makes it so confronting. We have lived for a long time inside a culture that disguises ageing. Youth is endlessly extended, death politely hidden, decline edited out of the frame. Even old photographs allow us a degree of emotional distance — they are ot...

 In this chapter of Elderescence , Sarnia de la Maré explores how sensation changes after midlife — including increased sensitivity to texture, sound, temperature, and pace. The essay reframes ageing not as sensory decline, but as refinement, arguing that subtle pleasures become more meaningful as the body becomes a finer, more attentive instrument. Topics include ageing and the nervous system, sensory sensitivity, pleasure after midlife, embodied intelligence, and rethinking the ageing body in contemporary health culture. A full transcript of the essay is available for listeners who prefer to read alongside the audio. Chapter 2 The Sensory Body After Midlife There is a persistent myth about ageing that insists the senses dull with time. That touch becomes blunted, sound fades, pleasure weakens, and the body gradually withdraws from the world of sensation. Yet for many people, the opposite is true. What changes after midlife is not the ability to feel, but the nature of feel...

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 https://amzn.eu/d/dXgbQjP Handmade by Sarnia, Eco Winter Warmers: Elderescence Academy: Recycled FashionHandmade by Sarnia, Eco Winter Warmers: Elderes… Tea Cup Shorts: V1Tea Cup Shorts: V1 Strata 13: The Fight (Hormones)Strata 13: The Fight (Hormones) Strata 1 : The Beginning (Purpose) (The Book of Immersion)Strata 1 : The Beginning (Purpose) (The B… Immersion Graphix: Strata 1-4Immersion Graphix: Strata 1-4 Strata 10: Dinfant Trouble (Synthetic Love) (The Book of Immersion)Strata 10: Dinfant Trouble (Synthetic Love) (The Book… Empathy in Algorithms: AI's Role in Inclusive Feminist Activism (The Humanitarian AI)Empathy in Algorithms: AI's Role in Inclusive… Strata 1 : The Beginning (Purpose) (The Book of Immersion) Sarnia de la Mare Kindle Edition £0.99 Strata 2: The Maybe Line (Friendship) (The Book of Immersion) Sarnia de la Mare Kindle Edition £0.77 Strata 3: Flex and the Robo-Dog (Making Decisions) (The Book of Immersion) Sarnia de la Mare Kindle Edition £0.77 Strata 4: T...