Let’s grow old together: No more anti-ageing bullshit

Lately, I’ve been getting really obnoxious about coffee. I’ve been watching YouTube videos and learning about ratios and I even bought an embarrassingly expressive tamper because apparently the one that came with my espresso machine is shit (and, listen, having used said expensive tamper for the first time just this morning—I get it). I know it’s pretentious and insufferable to weigh out my espresso beans before grinding them, but I don’t care. It’s fun.

Just this morning as I was in the midst of the ritual of making a latte, a thought came to me: I love getting older. I really love having all these weird interests develop, and being comfortable enough in myself to fully embrace them. Every year older that I get, the happier and more secure I am in myself. It rocks. I love ageing.

But goddamn, is that ever not the norm.

I’m a person who has been on the internet for a long, long time. I’ve been active online since my midteens, which means I have seen innumerable eras of culture come and go. And never, in all those years, have I seen a time as desperately terrified of getting old as now. People freaking out over TikTok filters that virtually age you. The unbelievably widespread practice of cosmetic procedures. The seething vitriol towards any signs of ageing. The comments on a woman’s TikTok pointing out her (frankly charming) crow’s feet. The myth of celebrities “ageing unproblematically.” The women in my work’s #skincare Slack channel debating if twenty-three is too young for botox. The Sephora tweens. The targeted ads I, as a thirty three-year-old woman, receive regularly. All of them screaming the same message, over and over again: don’t you dare get old.

Guys, this is not normal. We are not okay.

Now, I know that my life experiences have given me maybe a different perspective on ageing than others in my peer group, because when I was thirty I thought for a little while that I might die. Cancer didn’t end up killing me then (take that, cancer 🖕), but the chemo and radiation that it took to curbstomp my tumour fundamentally altered my relationship with my body. When you think you’re going to die at thirty, every day after thirty feels like the greatest gift ever bestowed.

What it means is that when I see an anti-ageing ad, my first visceral reaction is fuck you, I get to get older.

But here’s the thing—it shouldn’t take having cancer at thirty for us to recognise that our collective phobia about ageing is deeply fucked up. We’ve villainized ageing in a way that totally disconnects us from the actual reality of being alive, and that villainization was created by shredding the self-confidence and sense of belonging of women and girls.* And honestly, it scares me how cool we all seem to be about it.

In today’s world, the unspoken “girl code” is to support, unquestioningly, any woman embarking on any degree of cosmetic/physical alteration. You go girl, you gotta do what makes you happy. Culturally, we are supposed to believe that it’s about self-confidence, about feeling good in your skin. Yes, girl boss, drop another grand on preventative botox! You do you! 

But the total, all-consuming obsession with our appearance has absolutely nothing to do with our inherent self-confidence. It is not about happiness. I want to ask all the women I know to dig deep and be gut-wrenchingly honest about where these impulses and desires come from. Where this terror of getting older comes from. 

Because I’m willing to wager that it’s not coming from you, not really—it’s coming from multiple global industries that have a vested interest in making you hate yourself. Industries that profit by making you feel like your body is wrong for daring to do the natural thing and age. Industries that have done such an incredibly good job at training us to believe that ageing is gross that we now think getting laser resurfacing is self-care.

Of course, this is socioeconomic too. Those industries exist and flourish because of capitalism, and it is a certain economic class of woman who can afford the procedures and products that keep wrinkles and—horror of horrors—nasolabial folds at bay. If you do age without the proper prevention in place, it says a lot about your station in life. And don’t worry, your morality will be judged based on your appearance: oh, she obviously smoked all her life. She didn’t wear sunscreen. She drank too much. She didn’t take of herself. That’s why her skin looks like that.

I am not, by any means, saying that we shouldn’t look after ourselves and our skin. This body is our body for life and it deserves our care. We should wear sunscreen (because cancer sucks). We should moisturise. We should drink enough water. And skincare is fun, too—please don’t ask me how much I spent at Sephora last year. 

But we also need to start being more critical. We need to recognise when our emotions—when our goddamn inherent self-worth—are being manipulated by multinational corporations so a couple billionaires can get richer. We need to get angry. I’m angry! Isn’t anyone else? Aren’t you pissed that some company has told you that the natural processes of your body are abhorrent? That some corporation sat around a boardroom table and decided how best to make you feel like shit about yourself? That they’ve so fully convinced you of your own fallibility that you’ll give them thousands and thousands of dollars to try and stop time from affecting your body?

Look, I genuinely don’t care what other people do with their bodies. But we’re setting a standard as a society right now that successful women don’t age—or at the very least, that a woman ‘looking after herself’ means she’s doing everything possible (including spending tens of thousands of dollars) to not get a wrinkle. And I really think that’s bad, because we’re setting ourselves up for failure. 

Because maybe the most terrifying truth of all is that you will never win this fight. It does not matter what products you use or procedures you undertake, if you use your red light mask every night, if you swear by your NuFACE. You are going to age. It is going to be visible on your skin. When we’re eighty, we’re going to look eighty. Yes, it will vary. We will wear different patterns of wrinkles, tell different stories. But should we be so lucky—so incredibly, viciously lucky—to get old, we will show it on our faces. 

And we should wear that age like a badge of honour. 

Enough with the anti-ageing bullshit, please, I beg. Let’s dare to grow old together.

*I recognize that other genders beyond women are affected by this too, and it’s just as dangerous for them. But I focused on women in this because 1.) I’m a woman, so it’s what I can speak to, and 2.) because I think we can agree that the bulk of anti-ageing messaging is targeted at women.