‘Anti-ageing is anti-life’: why longevity culture is just ageism in a lab coat

“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.”

I can see no visible reason for Andrea to be worried about her neck; she looks happy, healthy and vibrant. But like Nora Ephron before her, and millions of other middle-aged women, she still is. Despite being all too aware how anti-ageing culture is driving these feelings about her physical appearance, Andrea feels almost powerless to withstand the urge to “slow down” the ageing process.

In fact, she withheld her last name here because she is a bit embarrassed that she feels this way, despite the fact that how she thinks about her ageing body is commonplace. Those of us in the boomer, gen X and elder millennial generations grew up – and are now growing old – with a pervasive cultural pressure to be as young and “perfect” as possible, for as long as possible.

An anthropologist at Brandeis University has made this pressure one of the central tenets of her ethnographic research for well over a decade. Dr Sarah Lamb’s research focuses on how people think about and navigate ageing today. Her study participants in Boston are devoted adherents of this new regime of quasi-scientific anti-ageing. They exemplify the idea of “permanent personhood” – an anthropological term used to describe how we freeze our self-concept in time, typically at around age 35-40, and expect never to deviate from it as we age.

They do everything in their power to “stay young”. And yet, Lamb has also found that they are increasingly frustrated with the idea of “successful ageing” - a framing that has set up a strict binary between “good” and “bad” old age. This paradigm implies that it’s now possible to fail at ageing well.

As a fiftysomething woman, and a medical anthropologist researching the history and culture of anti-ageing, I sympathize with Andrea’s dilemma and Lamb’s ageing research subjects. One of the main differences between us and people who encountered ageism a century ago is that rapid scientific progress has given us more tools to stop time more convincingly than ever. When I see cosmetic products touting the “latest science” behind their formulations - AHA/BHA acids to exfoliate or ceramides to reinforce the skin barrier - I want to believe in these ingredients’ almost magical-sounding ability to “rejuvenate” my ageing skin, to transform it back into my age twentysomething skin.

And that’s exactly the problem: lurking behind all these hypermodern anti-ageing claims is the same old ageism.

It wasn’t always like this. In the 1600s and 1700s, when people aged 65-plus made up just 2% of the total population, older people were revered, as detailed in sociologist and ageing expert Dr Deborah Carr’s 2023 book Aging in America. Fashionable people often aged themselves and lied about being older for social prestige.

After the American revolution, as industrialization made the need for “efficiency” greater and the number of elderly increased, things shifted. The social standing of older Americans took a big hit as a new “youth culture” emerged.

By the mid-1800s, derogatory terms like “old coot” had become common. A recent linguistic study found that “age stereotypes have become more negative in a linear way over 200 years. Around 1880, age stereotypes switched from being positive to being negative.” This gradual shift correlates to changes like the rise of microbiology and the more recent boom in scientific research on biological ageing.

Russian scientist Elie Metchnikoff, widely regarded as the “father” of immunology, coined the term gerontology and gave the science of anti-ageing its first boost in the early 1900s. “I believe that it will be possible in the future to prolong life beyond the limits which it reaches in the present day,” Metchnikoff said in a 1904 interview. “Man attained a much greater age in biblical times than he does now, and the efforts of science should be directed to bringing about a similar state of things nowadays.”

But anti-ageing culture as we know it didn’t begin in earnest until the middle of the last century, after advances in modern medicine made it possible for a record number of people to reach advanced ages. In the 1961 inaugural issue of the Gerontologist, chemist Dr Robert Havighurst coined the term “successful ageing” – the concept that would end up driving the new ageing-focused field of gerontology.

Ageing well or poorly now seemed like a personal choice, rather than a natural outcome. Although ageing had never been fully welcome, it was now officially “bad” to get old. We started saying that visibly ageing people had “let themselves go” and buying books with titles like 1986’s How to Live Longer and Feel Better or 2010’s Stay Young, Stay Fit.

Longevity culture is the most recent iteration. Harvard’s Sinclair Lab – run by one of the most visible longevity advocates, geneticist Dr. David Sinclair – is dedicated to the idea of reprogramming cells to be “young” again in order to “reverse” ageing. One research hub, the USC-Buck Nathan Shock Center of Excellence in the Biology of Aging, has the goal of extending the human healthspan (the amount of years we can live disease-free) by digging into the biological processes of ageing.

On its surface, there is nothing wrong with the concept of longevity. It’s perfectly reasonable to want to live as well as possible, for as long as possible. Occasionally, however, modern advocates often make it seem as though death is now optional. Anti-ageing gurus have turned themselves into modern alchemists, questing for the scientific elixir of eternal youth. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic last year talking about immortality as though it were inevitable. Google’s chief futurist, Ray Kurtzweil, has talked about the certainty that we will be able to “overcome disease and ageing”.

But this hope that modern science can halt ageing is simply ageism wearing a lab coat.

Cultural critic and Guardian columnist Jessica DeFino is suspicious of this framing too. “Longevity is just the latest word that we’re applying to regular old anti-ageing ideology,” she explained.

DeFino links the terminology shift back to the fashion magazine Allure’s 2017 announcement that it would no longer use the term “anti-ageing”. Editor Michelle Lee argued that by using it, “we’re subtly reinforcing the message that ageing is a condition we need to battle.”

Allure’s decision quickly sent ripples throughout the multi-billion-dollar anti-ageing industry. But the industry did not crash; it simply pivoted. DeFino recalls that brands scrambled to change their labeling to avoid being seen as ageist. Instead, companies started underlining the scientific basis behind their products. The market for anti-ageing products is currently valued at $78bn and growing.

Now, brands use terms like pro-ageing, non-ageing and preventative ageing, DeFino said: “Even the idea of ageing gracefully became a marketing tool.”

“These terms all sound more positive, more scientific,” DeFino said, “but when you get down to the formulation level and the purpose level, it’s all anti-ageing.”

The ultimate goal of anti-ageing and longevity is to stop normal biological processes, so any signs of ageing – grey hair, wrinkles, saggy skin – mean that you’re failing. But DeFino argues that failure is the ultimate success of the anti-ageing industry. There is no end to ageing, apart from death. There’s always another product to buy, another procedure to undergo, another supplement to take.

Before Metchnikoff and the development of cell biology, research into anti-ageing and immortality was largely considered “crank” or fringe science. Now it is wholly mainstream. Hundreds of biotech companies are focused on longevity and anti-ageing, and many popular social media influencers are cashing in on the nascent science.

The sheer number of quasi-scientific products being sold as “anti-ageing” now – many of them piggybacking on geroscience findings - makes longevity seem more accessible than ever.

The diabetes drug Metformin, which was initially found to extend the healthspan and lifespan of male laboratory mice, is now often used off-label to promote increased cellular repair functions and inhibit a key pathway involved in cell senescence, even though there is still no convincing clinical evidence that it has the same effect in humans. Popular anti-ageing experts and entrepreneurs like Dr. Peter Attia and Bryan Johnson (whose X bio reads “Conquering death will be humanity’s greatest achievement”) admit to having used the immunosuppressant drug rapamycin off-label in an effort to slow ageing, despite little longitudinal scientific evidence that it works.

When Dr Abou Farman, an anthropologist and professor at The New School, began his ethnographic research on the science of immortality, scientific researchers were regularly ridiculed for even being associated with it, and reported hiding their involvement. Now, with growing interest and an influx of money from Silicon Valley, that’s no longer the case.

“The researchers started telling each other to focus on the small bits of the science,” Farman said. “Don’t go out and talk about living forever; talk about how our knees are going to live forever. It’s part of the anti-ageing utopia.”

As a social scientist, Farman sees something deeper behind this powerful wave of anti-ageing rhetoric. “We can’t ignore the rise of all this – longevity, immortality – at a time when there is also a widespread fear about the end of the world,” he explained. “The desire and the anxiety are coiled together.”

Like Farman, research psychologist Dr Ashley Lytle connects our current obsession with anti-ageing back to how we’re coping – or failing to cope – with the chaos of our time. We may not be able to halt greenhouse gas emissions or do anything about international conflicts, but maybe we can do something about ageing. “When the world feels overwhelming and like we don’t have much agency,” Lytle said, “people really double down on all this.”

Lytle studies ageism and is my colleague at Stevens Institute of Technology. Over the past decade of teaching college students, we have both noticed internalized ageism surfacing at much younger ages than in past generations. Young women and pre-teens are buying anti-wrinkle products. Early twenty-somethings are blaming sore backs or knees on their “old age” and joking about having “dementia” if they forget something.

“We have this rampant idea now that to show any signs of ageing is something that we want to stave off or avoid for as long as we can,” Lytle said, “potentially forever.” After all, who wants to die?

This logic is increasingly being packaged for younger and younger cohorts. “The people in the ads are usually younger,” Lytle said. “They use pretty inflammatory language sometimes, like ‘Join me in the battle against ageing.’ Like it’s a war instead of a natural part of the human experience or existence.”

Gen Z and gen Alpha have a unique cultural milieu; much of their daily digital lives exist on Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat. The internet ideal, DeFino argues, is permanent youthfulness. Now, ageist beauty standards are being dressed up in new, positive-sounding scientific terminology and packaged as “self-care.”

“We were able to launder these anti-ageing ideals through the language of empowerment,” DeFino said. “It’s reached such a peak that those two things are now synonymous in the cultural imagination, even though they couldn’t be farther from each other in practice.”

It’s not just younger generations. Negative ageing stereotypes on social media may have increased every generation’s desire to disassociate ourselves from our own chronological ages, according to research conducted by Dr Patricia Kahlbaugh, a developmental psychologist and professor of psychology at Southern Connecticut State University who researches how internalized ageism affects different age groups.

In a small study of nearly 400 people aged 19-77, subjects who had higher levels of ageing anxiety, especially fears about the decline of their physical appearance and a loss of social status, were more likely to say that their “best self” was further in the past after viewing ageist memes. The “best self” reflects a specific time – past, present or future – when we felt, feel or think we will feel the most valued and at our peak.

Baby boomers and gen X are entering their latter decades much more focused on ideas like their “healthspan” and longevity, said Kahlbaugh.

Unlike prior older generations, who viewed retirement, leisure and relaxation as a reward for a lifetime of hard work, they don’t see old age as a time of inactivity. Instead, they want to remain active and able to work and play hard well into their 80s and 90s. Kahlbaugh thinks that Boomers’ cultural approach to ageing might result in denial about ageing, and a desire to look and feel younger.

Everything else has bent to the might of their collective will – so why not ageing, too? I’m Gen X, and from what I’ve encountered personally, as well as in my nascent research project on cultural attitudes on ageing, most of us are adamant that we are far “younger” than any other middle-aged cohort that has ever existed. If there is such a thing as “collective denial,” we are in the midst of it.

“We have to fight ageism,” DeFino said. “We have to address why looking younger boosts your status in society and opens up opportunities on the political, social, economic level.”

Lamb agrees and argues that our biggest mistake is to pretend that we can stop the process of getting old. When we do age, despite adhering to “scientific” advice, we may experience disappointment, shock or embarrassment.

It can be hard to reject anti-ageing rhetoric. If visibly ageing is tied to job discrimination, less cultural clout and social standing, it makes sense to try to stave it off – to get the neck lift rather than suffer the social consequences. When you add in other common fears about ageing - loss of independence, mobility or memories - it’s a perfect storm of anxiety.

“What we’re trying to protect through all this anti-ageing or healthy ageing is a sense of our core,” Lamb explained. Over the last decade, she’s noticed that more older people are keeping up with the science of ageing to help them preserve the health and function of their middle-aged years. They want diet and exercise advice, but they don’t necessarily want to “live forever”.

“They would rather be dead than old,” Lamb said. “They don’t want too much medical intervention or to be hooked up to machines. They don’t want to be a burden. They don’t want to be in pain.”

Lamb would like to see a culture that embraces some of the normal losses of ageing as meaningful. We could view wrinkles and grey hair as signs of our lived experience, or slowing down as a chance to finally relax and be with loved ones.

Lytle, my research psychologist colleague, is more pointed when I ask her about alternatives to anti-ageing.

“Researchers in this space have a phrase we like to use a lot,” Lytle said. “Anti-ageing is anti-life. Ageing happens from the second we’re born; we just call it ‘development.’ Ageing is part of life itself. You can’t get rid of it, and I don’t think we should try to.”