Newsletter Subject

Gen Z feels old. Feel old yet?

From

vox.com

Email Address

newsletter@vox.com

Sent On

Wed, Mar 6, 2024 01:00 PM

Email Preheader Text

TikTok’s “how old do I look?” trend is exacerbating fears that people have had for ge

TikTok’s “how old do I look?” 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. 👵🏼 Never ask the internet how old you look 👴🏿 I keep seeing people asking the internet, “How old do I look?” Each time, I want to tell them, “No, don’t do that, you’re going to get your feelings hurt,” not because people in the comments will be truthful but because they will be mean, on purpose, for sport. The trend isn’t really about the individual person; it’s a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young people’s 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 “aging like milk” (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](, there’s a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age. But it’s 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 — even if the idea that culturally defined generations are made up of distinct cohorts rather than a perpetually rising escalator [is a false one](. “If Gen Z feels ancient, then what are we?” the thinking goes, as if we forgot that a central experience of being in one’s 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 it’s 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. I’d 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 “how old do I look” [meme]( is taking place on [TikTok](, and it’s much more difficult to determine someone’s 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 someone’s 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 “plain-looking” to some simply because, unlike Gen Z stars Dove Cameron or Madison Beer, she “doesn’t have the extremes of [Instagram face](: extreme absence of buccal fat, extreme button nose, extreme angular jawline.” It shows up in discourse around beautiful actresses like Margot Robbie being “[mid](” or Aubrey Plaza “[hitting the wall](” (manosphere speak for “aging out of the tiny window of female attractiveness [designated by incels](”), or in the comment section of a [viral TikTok]( showing a 28-year-old’s “raw” face (sample comment: “stay out of the sun jeez woman”). We’re 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. “It’s a stigma we grew up with where it’s like, ‘You look like you’re aging. You’re old news,’” 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. “We always want to see the newer, younger, fresher thing. We correlate anything that’s older with [something] that’s already been seen before.” In a follow-up to her viral post, Donoghue also suggested that the ability to endlessly examine oneself online is exacerbating young people’s anxieties. “We almost have too much access to comparison of our old selves and other people,” [she said](. “I 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 you’re not careful and cautious with it, you can go down a bad rabbit hole.” 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 media’s encouragement of appearance and “self-focused attention,” as well as American culture’s dismissal of older people, particularly women, as possible causes for Gen Z’s aging panic. There’s also the fact that young people today are [delaying adult tasks](, such as getting their driver’s license or going on dates, and “there 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,” she explains. Doomerism may also play a part: Consuming depressing news content on social media can engender a sense of helplessness, and “many youth today may have internalized a bleak or fearful outlook about the future, perhaps including their own developmental aging process,” 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 ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. “Millennials weren’t taught to fear aging; we were taught to fear fat,” wrote Alexandra D’Amour [in the Times](. Kids who watched their mothers obsess over wrinkles might believe they need to “[slow down the aging process](” from the time they understand what skincare is; writer Jessica DeFino [coined the term]( “serum mom” — a play on the diet-obsessed “almond mom” — 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](. “The fear of growing old is so great that every aged person is an insult and a threat to the society,” wrote [Sharon Curtin in the Atlantic in 1972](. “They remind us of our own death, that our body won’t 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.” 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. “The beauty standard is to stay young, and I do try to fit the beauty standard,” one 15-year-old [told the Cut](. Or perhaps there’s something even more cynical happening here. I’ve 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 doesn’t matter if you’re 17 and have the poreless skin of a newborn baby, there will be middle-aged men in the comment section saying you look “mid-30s at best.” What they are really saying is that you have lost value, that you’ve expired like last month’s yogurt. That you are no longer worth looking at on a platform where “being looked at” is the only thing that matters. Unless, that is, you know exactly what you’re doing. In an interview, one 30-year-old told [the Times]( that she posted her “how old do I look” video for the simple fact that it would get attention. “I knew it would get engagement,” she said. “A comment is a comment. I don’t care if they are trolls. I don’t care if they tell me I look like a toad. I just want the comments.” 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 [“satisfying” TikTok spam videos](. - The text file that runs the internet may be at risk — [from AI, obviously](. - Christian influencers who previously touted purity culture [are pivoting to sex](. - The [positive male role models]( trying to detoxify the manosphere. - What happens when body positive influencers [start using Ozempic](? - The internet’s family unit is [daddy, mother, babygirl, and the 30-year-old teenager](. - Music is TikTok’s past, [sounds are its future](. - The backlash to Tarte Cosmetics’ bougie Bora Bora influencer trip, [explained](. - What is [TikTok doing to sandwiches](? One Last Thing I neeeeed to hang out with the [Mardi Gras sorority girls dancing]( in a gas station parking lot so bad.  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...](   [Facebook]( [Twitter]( [YouTube]( Manage your [email preferences]( or [unsubscribe](param=culture). If you value Vox’s unique explanatory journalism, support our work with a one-time or recurring [contribution](. View our [Privacy Policy]( and our [Terms of Service](. Vox Media, 1201 Connecticut Ave. NW, Floor 12, Washington, DC 20036. Copyright © 2024. All rights reserved.

Marketing emails from vox.com

View More
Sent On

06/12/2024

Sent On

05/12/2024

Sent On

03/12/2024

Sent On

29/11/2024

Sent On

27/11/2024

Sent On

27/11/2024

Email Content Statistics

Subscribe Now

Subject Line Length

Data shows that subject lines with 6 to 10 words generated 21 percent higher open rate.

Subscribe Now

Average in this category

Subscribe Now

Number of Words

The more words in the content, the more time the user will need to spend reading. Get straight to the point with catchy short phrases and interesting photos and graphics.

Subscribe Now

Average in this category

Subscribe Now

Number of Images

More images or large images might cause the email to load slower. Aim for a balance of words and images.

Subscribe Now

Average in this category

Subscribe Now

Time to Read

Longer reading time requires more attention and patience from users. Aim for short phrases and catchy keywords.

Subscribe Now

Average in this category

Subscribe Now

Predicted open rate

Subscribe Now

Spam Score

Spam score is determined by a large number of checks performed on the content of the email. For the best delivery results, it is advised to lower your spam score as much as possible.

Subscribe Now

Flesch reading score

Flesch reading score measures how complex a text is. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is to read. The Flesch readability score uses the average length of your sentences (measured by the number of words) and the average number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Text with a very high Flesch reading ease score (about 100) is straightforward and easy to read, with short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease score of 60-70 is considered acceptable/normal for web copy.

Subscribe Now

Technologies

What powers this email? Every email we receive is parsed to determine the sending ESP and any additional email technologies used.

Subscribe Now

Email Size (not include images)

Font Used

No. Font Name
Subscribe Now

Copyright © 2019–2025 SimilarMail.