Rapid scientific progress has provided modern society with tools to stop time more convincingly than ever, yet lurking behind these claims is a persistent fear of ageing. Andrea, a nonprofit worker in Dallas with a PhD in literature, describes the pressure to remain youthful in her city as palpable and almost irresistible. “You don’t know what it’s like here,” she said. “Everyone has a facelift if they can afford one and everyone has had some work done. I’m a feminist to the core, but if I had the money, I would get a deep-plane facelift in a heartbeat. I’m saving up to get my neck done.” Despite appearing healthy and vibrant, Andrea feels powerless to withstand the urge to slow down the ageing process. She withheld her last name because she felt embarrassed by these feelings, even though they are commonplace among boomer, gen X, and elder millennial generations who grew up under the pressure to remain as young and perfect as possible.
Dr. Sarah Lamb, an anthropologist at Brandeis University, has researched this pressure for over a decade. Her study participants in Boston exemplify “permanent personhood,” an anthropological term for the tendency to freeze one’s self-concept at age 35-40. While these individuals strive to stay young, they are increasingly frustrated by the paradigm of “successful ageing,” which creates a strict binary between a “good” and “bad” old age, implying that one can fail at ageing. This hypermodern anti-ageing rhetoric is essentially ageism wearing a lab coat.
Historically, the perception of ageing has shifted significantly. As detailed in sociologist Dr. Deborah Carr’s 2023 book, Aging in America, people aged 65-plus made up only 2% of the population in the 1600s and 1700s and were often revered, with fashionable people even lying about being older for social prestige. After the American Revolution, industrialization increased the need for efficiency and the number of elderly grew, causing the social standing of older Americans to decline as a new “youth culture” emerged. By the mid-1800s, derogatory terms like “old coot” became common. A linguistic study found that age stereotypes shifted from positive to negative around 1880, a trend that correlates with the rise of microbiology and modern research on biological ageing.
The field of gerontology gained its first major boost in the early 1900s from Russian scientist Elie Metchnikoff, the “father” of immunology. In a 1904 interview, Metchnikoff expressed his belief that science could prolong life beyond current limits, similar to biblical times. However, anti-ageing culture truly began in the mid-20th century. In the 1961 inaugural issue of the Gerontologist, chemist Dr. Robert Havighurst coined “successful ageing,” a concept that framed ageing as a personal choice rather than a natural outcome. This led to a culture where it became “bad” to get old, with people being told they had “let themselves go” and buying books like 1986’s How to Live Longer and Feel Better or 2010’s Stay Young, Stay Fit.
Today, the longevity industry is valued at $78bn. Geneticist Dr. David Sinclair’s lab at Harvard focuses on reprogramming cells to “reverse” ageing, while the USC-Buck Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Biology of Aging aims to extend the human healthspan. While the desire to live disease-free is reasonable, some advocates act as if death is optional. Figures like Ray Kurtzweil, Google’s chief futurist, have spoken about the certainty of overcoming ageing, and even world leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have discussed immortality. In 2017, Allure magazine announced it would stop using the term “anti-ageing,” but the industry simply pivoted to terms like “pro-ageing” or “preventative ageing,” which DeFino notes are still anti-ageing at the formulation level.
Anthropologist Dr. Abou Farman notes that while researchers were once ridiculed for studying immortality, the influx of Silicon Valley money has changed the landscape. He suggests that the rise of longevity rhetoric is tied to a widespread fear of the end of the world, where anxiety and desire are coiled together. Research psychologist Dr. Ashley Lytle agrees, noting that people double down on anti-ageing when the world feels overwhelming. Lytle and her students have observed internalized ageism appearing in younger cohorts, with pre-teens buying anti-wrinkle products and twenty-somethings joking about “dementia.” Dr. Patricia Kahlbaugh’s research on 400 people aged 19-77 found that those with higher ageing anxiety were more likely to view their “best self” as further in the past after seeing ageist memes. Boomers and Gen X, in particular, are entering their later years focused on “healthspan” and longevity, often in a state of collective denial about the natural process of ageing. Ultimately, as Lytle states, “Anti-ageing is anti-life.” Lamb suggests that instead of fighting to stay young, society should embrace the natural losses of ageing as meaningful parts of the human experience.
