TikTokâs âhow old do I look?â trend is exacerbating fears that people have had for generations.
vox.com/culture CULTURE The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. The Wednesday edition of the Vox Culture newsletter is all about internet culture, brought to you by senior reporter Rebecca Jennings. ðµð¼ Never ask the internet how old you look ð´ð¿ I keep seeing people asking the internet, âHow old do I look?â Each time, I want to tell them, âNo, donât do that, youâre going to get your feelings hurt,â not because people in the comments will be truthful but because they will be mean, on purpose, for sport. The trend isnât really about the individual person; itâs a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young peopleâs fear of aging. Thanks to essentially three viral posts, there now seems to be a culture-wide acceptance of the idea that Gen Z is âaging like milkâ (i.e., poorly), beginning with a [video last fall]( by 23-year-old content creator Taylor Donoghue sharing that someone mistook her age for early thirties. A podcast called Staying Up included a [small segment about it]( in January, which went viral, and then significantly more viral when the popular TikToker Jordan Howlett [made a response video]( about his own experience being mistaken for someone significantly older than his 26 years. Combined with the concurrent furor over tween girls [asking their parents for anti-aging products]( and [10-year-olds taking over Sephora](, thereâs a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age. But itâs millennials, Gen X-ers, and boomers who are [doing]( [most]( of the [freaking out]( in [response](. This is understandable: Every time a new cohort of young people realizes they are getting older, the main effect seems to be making everyone older than them feel even more out of touch by comparison â even if the idea that culturally defined generations are made up of distinct cohorts rather than a perpetually rising escalator [is a false one](. âIf Gen Z feels ancient, then what are we?â the thinking goes, as if we forgot that a central experience of being in oneâs 20s is the naive assumption that life ends at 30. [A young woman stands in front of a bathroom cabinet mirror and applies a face mask.] Getty Images Many of the theories online veer into the conspiratorial: One woman suggested that Gen Z looks older because the quality of [food is getting worse](, which results in faster wrinkles; another claimed that itâs because [food is getting better](, and because millennials ate food with more preservatives in it than Gen Z, somehow those preservatives also preserved (?) their skin. Iâd argue, though, that the theory that Gen Z is somehow aging more rapidly than people a few years older than them boils down to three main components. One is that the âhow old do I lookâ [meme]( is taking place on [TikTok](, and itâs much more difficult to determine someoneâs age through a screen. The second is that as the practice of injecting your face with fillers or [sucking out certain pockets of fat]( becomes [more normalized for young people](, it further obfuscates someoneâs age (if a 22-year-old brings their dermatologist a photo of, say, Kim Kardashian, they could understandably end up looking closer to Kim's age than their own). The third and most relevant component is the way in which social media has warped beauty standards that were already pretty warped to begin with. This crops up in insidious ways. As the writer Mikala Jamison [points out](, the pop star Tate McRae is considered âplain-lookingâ to some simply because, unlike Gen Z stars Dove Cameron or Madison Beer, she âdoesnât have the extremes of [Instagram face](: extreme absence of buccal fat, extreme button nose, extreme angular jawline.â It shows up in discourse around beautiful actresses like Margot Robbie being â[mid](â or Aubrey Plaza â[hitting the wall](â (manosphere speak for âaging out of the tiny window of female attractiveness [designated by incels](â), or in the comment section of a [viral TikTok]( showing a 28-year-oldâs ârawâ face (sample comment: âstay out of the sun jeez womanâ). Weâre so used to seeing even regular people online wearing digital filters that give them the sort of creepily snatched, almost otherworldly beauty rewarded by algorithms that, by comparison, an untouched face appears bloated, saggy, and old. On social media, where extremes get the most attention, people have lost the ability to recognize what normal is. âItâs a stigma we grew up with where itâs like, âYou look like youâre aging. Youâre old news,ââ says [Jordan Howlett](, the 26-year-old who made the video about having spent his entire life being mistaken for someone significantly older. As a full-time [influencer](, he understands his generation's aging anxiety because it mirrors the way the internet constantly demands the newest thing. âWe always want to see the newer, younger, fresher thing. We correlate anything thatâs older with [something] thatâs already been seen before.â In a follow-up to her viral post, Donoghue also suggested that the ability to endlessly examine oneself online is exacerbating young peopleâs anxieties. âWe almost have too much access to comparison of our old selves and other people,â [she said](. âI can look back at Snapchats of me from when I was 12 years old so you can physically kind of really see your face change. If youâre not careful and cautious with it, you can go down a bad rabbit hole.â Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies adolescent development and tech, points to social mediaâs encouragement of appearance and âself-focused attention,â as well as American cultureâs dismissal of older people, particularly women, as possible causes for Gen Zâs aging panic. Thereâs also the fact that young people today are [delaying adult tasks](, such as getting their driverâs license or going on dates, and âthere may be a natural tension or confusion when social or cultural markers of adulthood are delayed, but the body keeps aging on a relatively consistent timescale,â she explains. Doomerism may also play a part: Consuming depressing news content on social media can engender a sense of helplessness, and âmany youth today may have internalized a bleak or fearful outlook about the future, perhaps including their own developmental aging process,â says Maheux. This thinking could also be passed down by parents of Gen Z-ers, who were perhaps more careful about not reproducing the anti-fat messaging that was particularly present in the â80s, â90s, and 2000s. âMillennials werenât taught to fear aging; we were taught to fear fat,â wrote Alexandra DâAmour [in the Times](. Kids who watched their mothers obsess over wrinkles might believe they need to â[slow down the aging process](â from the time they understand what skincare is; writer Jessica DeFino [coined the term]( âserum momâ â a play on the diet-obsessed âalmond momâ â to describe such [parenting](. The fear of aging is, obviously, not unique to Gen Z. M. Night Shyamalan was 51 when he released [Old, a horror film about a beach that makes you old](. âThe fear of growing old is so great that every aged person is an insult and a threat to the society,â wrote [Sharon Curtin in the Atlantic in 1972](. âThey remind us of our own death, that our body wonât always remain smooth and responsive, but will someday betray us by aging, wrinkling, faltering, failing. The ideal way to age would be to grow slowly invisible, gradually disappearing, without causing worry or discomfort to the young.â Essentially all art is about confronting the eventuality of death and the knowledge that life does not last forever, but right now, amid fears that not even our planet will last another few generations, these anxieties are extremely marketable to an audience hungry for anything that might delay the inevitable. âThe beauty standard is to stay young, and I do try to fit the beauty standard,â one 15-year-old [told the Cut](. Or perhaps thereâs something even more cynical happening here. Iâve been around long enough to know that asking the internet how old you look or [how hot you are]( is almost always a losing game: It doesnât matter if youâre 17 and have the poreless skin of a newborn baby, there will be middle-aged men in the comment section saying you look âmid-30s at best.â What they are really saying is that you have lost value, that youâve expired like last monthâs yogurt. That you are no longer worth looking at on a platform where âbeing looked atâ is the only thing that matters. Unless, that is, you know exactly what youâre doing. In an interview, one 30-year-old told [the Times]( that she posted her âhow old do I lookâ video for the simple fact that it would get attention. âI knew it would get engagement,â she said. âA comment is a comment. I donât care if they are trolls. I donât care if they tell me I look like a toad. I just want the comments.â You may not be able to look young forever, but you can always submit yourself to mass humiliation as part of the hottest new TikTok trend. And, in one small way, remain relevant forever. Clickbait - Three great stories from the worker-owned 404 Media, which is publishing some of the most interesting tech coverage right now: Tumblr is [selling user data to train AI](, Etsy sellers are stealing fanfiction and [turning them into bound books](, and finally, a deep dive into those [âsatisfyingâ TikTok spam videos](.
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