Ageism

Those constant Zoom calls and Google Meets are fundamentally altering how individuals perceive their facial appearance. A study shows that people spending more time staring at their digital reflections than the actual speaker. In addition, thanks to appearance-enhancing filters, they’re finding themselves more likely to consider cosmetic procedures as a result.

Much like staring into a mirror for extended periods, spending hours on video calls has created a new form of self-scrutiny. Platform features like “touch-up my appearance” filters, which provide an airbrushed effect, might amplify this effect by presenting users with an idealized version of themselves. This phenomenon shares similarities with ‘Snapchat dysmorphia,’ where people seek surgical changes to replicate their filtered images.

Survey results show that nearly 89% used videoconferencing platforms more than three days per week. Perhaps more tellingly, 68% reported using appearance-enhancing filters more than half the time during their calls. 66% of participants admitted to focusing more on their own image than on the speaker or presented material during video meetings.

Most striking was the connection between self-viewing behavior and cosmetic procedure interest. Among those who frequently watched themselves during video calls, over 80% expressed interest in cosmetic treatments. Popular procedures under consideration included chemical peels, fat reduction, laser treatments, surgical reconstruction, dermal fillers, and neuromodulators like Botox.

The first thing to know about people who shun retirement to work past age 80 is that they are probably busier, and possibly cooler, than you.

One said an interview would have to wait because he was traveling to France for the 24 Hours of Le Mans. Another said he would be free after hitting a research deadline and organizing his Harvard Business School class’s 65th reunion. A third, available on shorter notice, emailed a physical description before meeting: “In the spirit of YOLO, I have blue hair and tattoos.”

Growing numbers of 80-somethings are deciding that if days are finite, they are better spent on the job than in retirement. Harrison Ford, 80, released his latest Indiana Jones movie, Jane Goodall, 89, is still protecting chimps, Smokey Robinson, 83, is still touring.

Roughly 650,000 Americans over 80 were working last year, that’s about 18% more than a decade earlier. Some people have been pressed back into duty by inflation and stock-market volatility. Many cite a simpler reason to keep working—they just want to. These workers joke about getting bored on the golf course or being pushed out of the house by a spouse who won’t tolerate idleness. Beneath the wisecracks is a sense of purpose that refuses to fade. They just can’t quit their careers.

Possible Preaching Angles:

As a positive illustration this shows that retirement can still be a fruitful time of life. As a negative illustration this could show how people’s identities and worth are still wrapped up in work.

We may not want to admit it but author Arthur Brooks is convincing when he writes to the effect that age-related decline will come much sooner than we think. We might make excuses for ourselves but our recall of names and places is not what it used to be. He writes:

By the time you are fifty your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library. Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted. When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone’s name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place. Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years. When the librarian finally shows back up and says, “That guy’s name is Mike,” Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.

Medical clinics are popping up across the country promising to help clients live longer and better—so long as they can pay. Longevity clinics aim to do everything from preventing chronic disease to healing tennis elbow, all with the goal of optimizing patients’ health for more years. Clients pay as much as $100,000 a year for sometimes-unproven treatments, including biological-age testing, early cancer screenings, stem-cell therapies, and hair rejuvenation.

The centers capitalize on Americans’ obsession with living longer. Many doctors caution that some clinics’ treatments lack robust scientific evidence or introduce health risks. One researcher said, “Anybody who is treating your toenails can say they’re contributing to longevity.”

People who visit these clinics are often wealthy people in their 40s to 60s who are seeing signs of aging. Several providers say they have noticed clientele trending as young as 20-somethings in recent years.

The dramatic increase in life expectancy confuses people. In the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, the average life span was about 45 years. Now people are expected to live up to 78.5 years. That has spurred an unwarranted optimism, when in truth, the overwhelming majority of the increase is the result of a decrease in infant mortality.

At the turn of the twentieth century, about 10 to 15 percent of all children died before their first birthdays, mostly from infectious diseases. But because of medical advances, today less than one percent of children die before their first birthdays. Thus, Olshansky and Carnes point out in their book The Quest for Immortality, “The rise in the life expectancy has slowed to a crawl.”

Another thing that confuses people is thinking that if we could cure cancer, most of us would live many more years. Not true. In fact, Harvard demographer Nathan Keyfitz calculated that if researchers cured all forms of cancer, people would live only a measly 2.2 years longer before they died of something else! Unless science cures the majority of all diseases, as author Stephen Cave writes, “Then the result is not a utopia of strong-bodied demigods but a plethora of care homes and hospitals filled with the depressed, the diseased and the incontinent old.” In that case “it is not about living longer but dying slower.”

A study explaining why mouse hairs turn gray made global headlines. Not because the little critters are in desperate need of a makeover; but knowing the “why” in mice could lead to a cure for graying locks in humans. Nowadays, everyone seems to be chasing after youth, either to keep it, find it, or just remember it.

People in the ancient world often turned to lotions and potions that promised to give at least the appearance of eternal youth. Roman recipes for banishing wrinkles included ingredients from donkey’s milk, swan’s fat, and bean paste to frankincense and myrrh.

Some ancient elixirs were highly toxic. China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang, who lived in the Third Century B.C., is believed to have died from mercury poisoning after drinking elixirs meant to make him immortal. In 16th-century France, Diane de Poitiers, the mistress of King Henry II, was famous for looking the same age as her lover despite being 20 years older. A study of Diane’s remains found that her hair contained extremely high levels of gold, likely due to daily sips of a youth-potion containing gold chloride, diethyl ether, and mercury. The toxic combination would have destroyed her internal organs.

Many people in our world today are still trying to find ways to look younger forever.

In an issue of Christianity Today, Jen Wilkin writes of an unexpected lesson from Facebook:

Facebook decided to kick off (the new year) with a challenge: Compare your first profile picture to your most recent one to see how hard aging hit you over the past ten years.

I pulled up my first profile picture and stared at it, the air exiting my lungs and an odd numbness seeping up from my toes. Hello, fresh-faced person. I remember you. I remember that shirt, the wallpaper in that kitchen, that haircut. I also remember the night I uploaded you, lightheartedly filling in my Facebook profile with enough information for my identity to be stolen and my house to be robbed.

Imagine if it had been possible to post a picture of your heart (10 years ago), laid next to another (now). A spiritual angiogram, before and after, a trajectory of the growth or decline of wisdom itself. What would it show? Would you want to post it?

This is what I thought as I sat at my computer, contemplating the face of a younger self. I have not stopped thinking about it since. Who says social media can’t make you wise? Facebook invites us to count the lines on our faces, but wisdom reads between those lines.

A psychologist at New York University wondered if young adults were not saving money for the future because they felt like they were putting it away for a stranger. So, Hal Ersner-Hershfield conducted an experiment, giving some college students a real mirror and others virtual reality goggles where, with the help of special effects like those used in movies, they could see a future version of themselves at age 68 or 70.

Those who saw the older version of themselves in the virtual “mirror” were willing to put more than twice as much money into their retirement accounts as the students who spent time looking at their younger selves in a real mirror. What’s more, those who glimpsed their future selves were more likely to complete their studies on time, whereas those who didn’t were more likely to blow off their studies. Those who saw their future selves were also more likely to act ethically in business scenarios.

Possible Preaching Angle:

As followers of Jesus, when we catch a vision for who we might become in the future, we can begin to live as that person now. When we can imagine ourselves in both our temporal future and our eternal future, we can be inspired toward holiness in our day-to-day lives.

Actor and director Justine Bateman has never gone under the knife and never will. The 55-year-old Family Ties actress is so perplexed by society’s acceptance of plastic surgery that she has penned a new book, Face: One Square Foot of Skin, in which she explores the idea of getting some work done. She says,

Why is the idea that women’s older faces are undesirable, what is the root of all that? How did we get to this point in our current society where cutting your face up, or injecting it, or inserting plastic or whatever, is spoken about so matter-of-factly?

We went from, “Wow someone getting a face lift is quite unusual!” to, “It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.” To me it’s really, it’s like, psychopathic. It’s lunacy, and I don’t like that we’re going along with it without pausing to think about it.

The reporter said, “What struck me in reading Bateman’s book was how much time we spend fretting about whether we should do something about our faces or hold out. And I don’t just mean older women. I have friends in their 20s who also fall into a vortex of products that promise to reverse aging that isn’t even visible yet. The Instagram generation hasn’t been spared, in fact, they may have accumulated more time examining their faces than any before them.”

Applicant Emile Ratelband petitioned a Dutch court to change his official date of birth. Ratelband, a motivational speaker and hedonist, wanted his official documentation to match his state of mental and physical fitness, in which he claims to feel 20 years younger than he is.

Initially, he was motivated by online dating apps. “I feel much younger than my age, I am a young god, I can have all the girls I want but not after I tell them that I am 69,” Ratelband told French press agency AFP. “I feel young, I am in great shape and I want this to be legally recognized because I feel abused, aggrieved and discriminated against because of my age.” He added, “I am my identity.”

Alas, the court did not see it his way. Its published ruling read in part:

Amending his date of birth would cause 20 years of records to vanish from the register of births, deaths, marriages and registered partnerships. This would have a variety of undesirable legal and societal implications … there are other alternatives available for challenging age discrimination, rather than amending a person’s date of birth.

Potential Preaching Angles:

We cannot change objective reality just by declaring it so. And we don't need to be afraid of aging, for as we walk with God we gain wisdom and maturity.

Trying to look younger and prevent aging has become an $511 billion a year business [as of 2022]. According to a book by Arlene Weintraub titled Selling the Fountain of Youth: How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old—And Made Millions.According to an article based on this book, "The anti-aging phenomenon started off with good intentions. Baby boomers were getting older and didn't like what they saw or how they felt." In 1990 the New England Journal of Medicine claimed that human growth hormone (HGH), which was previously used to treat growth disorders in children, could be used to reverse aging. Adults latched on to this news like "junkies." Then, in 1993 a number of doctors started injecting themselves with HGH. A little later these doctors started opening clinics where patients could learn to inject themselves with HGH (for thousands of dollars of course).

Today supermarkets and drugstore aisles teem with bottles adorned with the words "anti-aging." In 2023 Botox sales topped $18 billion. Anti-aging "institutes" have also continued to expand their client base. According to one anti-aging company president, these products comprise "the perfect example of a service you're not going to give up in a bad economy."

What's driving this quest to find, bottle, sell, and ingest a modern-day fountain of youth? The answer might be found in this book's subtitle—How the Anti-Aging Industry Made a Disease Out of Getting Old. Sadly, for many people in our culture, getting old isn't an opportunity to grow in wisdom and grace; it's a "disease."

Editor’s note: Statistics were updated as of March 2024

As a 15-year-old girl in 1927, Lois Secrist promised God she'd go overseas as a missionary, perhaps to Africa or India, helping the needy. But Lois never made that trip of mercy.

At 23 she married Galon Prater, a handsome farmhand who became a heavy drinker.

Many years later, Galon did become a Christian and testify about the peace of Jesus to his drinking buddies. But by then he was almost 80 and nearing death. When he died January 9, 1988, Lois's childhood desire of becoming a missionary returned.

At first she resisted. At age 76, she felt her opportunity to serve overseas as a missionary had slipped away.

"I said, 'Lord, I'm too old to go now. I can't do this,'" Lois admits.

But this great grandmother was determined to fulfill her unforgotten promise. Lois, pricked by the memory of ignoring God's calling as a teenager, would not refuse a second chance at becoming a missionary.

So at 87, Lois Prater has become the unlikely builder of an orphanage in the Philippines, a lifeline to 35 children whose lives have been rescued from neglect, begging in the streets, and parental abuse.

Today the 35 orphans living in the two-story, 2,000 square foot white stucco home call Lois "Lola," which means "grandmother" in their native Tagalog language.

Lois's "children," as she calls them, range in age from eight months to 10 years. Each of their stories is heartbreaking.

Lois has built the orphanage without taking out a loan, relying instead on individual financial support from across the United States. Because of her age, she is not supported by any church denomination and depends solely on private donations.

When asked if that makes her nervous, she says confidently, "I serve a mighty God. He's in control. I feel I'm not talented enough to do any of this. But God enables me. My responsibility is to do what I can."

It is the meaning that men attribute to their life, it is their entire system of values that define the meaning and the value of old age. The reverse applies: by the way in which a society behaves toward its old people it uncovers the naked, and often carefully hidden, truth about its real principles and aims.