Coming of Age - Harper's BAZAAR

Julia Fox called it: ageing is, like, fully in. While Silicon Valley’s tech bros try to biohack youth, the women of Hollywood are taking a different path

Ageing is a biological inevitability, a great privilege and, considering the alternative, something most of us probably want to do. And yet ageing is met with resistance — hell, it’s met with kicks and screams and serums and injections and science experiments involving mice and naked mole rats and transfusions of teenage blood. Birthdays are no longer a cause to celebrate that you’ve kept yourself alive for another year but a chance to lament the loss of youth and spend some time in front of the mirror looking for new lines and wrinkles.

For women in particular, ageing is a paradox. We are simultaneously reassured (“40 is the new 30!”), cautioned (“10 Anti-Aging Secrets for Women in their 40s”) and insulted (“Hilary Duff Still Looking Great at Age 35!”). We are led to believe that as we become more self-assured, more witty and more successful, we do so in a trade-off with our physical traits, making us less valuable to society. All because we’ve simply stayed alive. And so we devote massive amounts of time and energy to trying to defeat the inevitable: we fill our creases and erase our lines — but no aesthetic treatment can stop what’s coming for us.

We pretend we don’t care. “We nod and agree that we should embrace our wrinkles while quietly understanding that none of us, individually, want to be the one who actually looks old,” Amanda Hess wrote in The New York Times. And yet, a 2022 study of 600 women in the United States and France found 90 per cent were anxious about ageing. Shockingly but not surprisingly, more women were worried about their ageing appearance (60 per cent) than whether they’d have enough money to retire (43 per cent).

But lately, there’s something in the air: an energetic shift vibrating through the atmosphere and our social media feeds. While the Silicon Valley bros try to outrun their biological eventualities by pouring millions into Big Tech anti-ageing, treating it like a code to be hacked, the women of Hollywood, who have undoubtedly faced more age discrimination than said bros — Paulina Porizkova, Naomi Watts, Sarah Jessica Parker and Courteney Cox, to name a few — are rallying behind a more empowering and holistic solution to ageing: making it cool. “Ageing is fully in — like, fully,” declared Julia Fox (who, admittedly, at 32 could only be considered old by someone under 25). “Getting older is hot.”

These women are onto something. By no longer having a negative outlook on it, they are actually less likely to experience exactly what the tech bros are scared of: physical and cognitive decline, Alzheimer’s and an untimely death. Studies have shown that people who have a positive outlook on ageing live, on average, 7.5 years longer than those who hold negative attitudes or are fearful of ageing. The ultimate ageing hack is to simply embrace it. The science writer David Robson calls this the Expectation Effect: when our “beliefs create self-fulfilling prophecies through changes to our perception, behaviour and physiology”, he explains. Think of how trying to force yourself to fall asleep often means you’ll be awake for longer, or the placebo effect: if you take what you believe is a painkiller, you will likely experience some pain relief. If you have a preconceived notion that a quick and dramatic decline is inevitable, and can only imagine feeling pain, depression and helplessness in your old age, you’re more likely to experience those things and are also more likely to die younger.

This isn’t the stuff of woo-woo, positive-vibes-only self-help, he says. Time and again, multiple studies based on robust scientific research have verified the Expectation Effect. The landmark finding, he explains, came from Dr Becca Levy, the director of social and behavioural studies at the Yale School of Public Health, whose 2022 book (see, something in the air), Breaking the Age Code, details her three decades of research into how ageist beliefs can reduce a person’s lifespan.

In 2002, she and her team analysed data collected in a longitudinal study that began in 1975 and tracked thousands of people’s health as they aged. She analysed the data from 660 people older than 50 who had been asked to predict how their life might change as they got older. When Levy and her team checked to see who was still alive in 1998, they found that — even accounting for their health status and other risk factors such as socioeconomic status and feelings of loneliness — people who’d had a more positive attitude were more likely to still be alive nearly 23 years after the study ended. Those with negative views on ageing were more likely to have died after 15 years.

How can thinking a certain way about something change how our body responds to that thing? “Put simply, if you are always focused on the potential for disease, disability, dementia and dependence on others, you begin to feel much more vulnerable,” Robson says. “Then, all kinds of everyday challenges begin to feel much more threatening. That not only discourages you from doing the kinds of activities that are good for your health, but it also increases levels of the stress hormone cortisol and contributes to chronic inflammation. Over months and years, these changes can bring about bodily wear and tear that will put you at greater risk of illness.”

One of the biggest obstacles to rebranding ageing as a positive experience is how early negative stereotypes are ingrained in women — and it’s affecting more than our self-esteem. In a 2009 study, Levy looked into how negative age stereotypes held at a young age could influence a person’s cardiovascular health. Using health records from almost 400 people aged 18-49 that had been collected four decades earlier for a 1968 study on ageing, they found that “they had twice as high a risk [of a cardiovascular event in the next 38 years] if, at young ages, they’d taken in negative stereotypes about ageing”, Levy said at the time.

Fox captured exactly this in a follow-up video to her PSA that ageing is “fully in”. She shared that she spent her 27th birthday crying to a friend because she could no longer say she was in her mid-twenties. “This is how deep this shit is for women.” Need more proof? Anti-ageing skincare is taking over TikTok — you know, the app for gen Z, the youngest of whom was born in 2013. The 18-year-old influencer Douxfairy uses a retinol-based moisturiser twice a day. She has seen a “reduction” in her “fine lines”.

In her book, Levy goes so far as to say that ageism — the cause for the perpetuation of negative ageing stereotypes, which then feed the fear of ageing — is akin to a virus. “If an unidentified virus was found to diminish life expectancy by over seven years, considerable effort would probably be devoted to identifying the cause and implementing a remedy,” she wrote. Robson agrees. “Ageism is contributing to an increased risk of illness and death,” he says. “We should fight as individuals and as a society against these thoughtless prejudices.”

Australian television presenter and journalist Melissa Doyle and the producer and filmmaker Naima Brown have been working to do just that with their podcast, How to Age Against the Machine. In it, they speak to women across the world to understand how ageing is perceived in other cultures. Their new book of the same name acts as a “nuts and bolts” guide to ageing well, a large portion of which is about accepting that, while some parts of ageing are unpleasant, there are a lot of benefits. It covers everything from social issues and health to relationships, appearance and sex. The idea is to celebrate the empowerment that comes with age while also being realistic about the parts that aren’t so pleasant. “It feels like [positive ageing] is a conversation we’re having in the wider community,” Doyle says. “We’re starting to see Hollywood women — like Andie MacDowell on the red carpet with grey hair, owning it; Jane Fonda on magazine covers, owning it — a lot of people who I grew up loving and are in a similar age bracket are so proud to be over 50.” Brown nods enthusiastically while Doyle speaks, adding: “We are living in the age of ageing. Everyone’s just gone: Why have we not been talking about this? I’m tired of pretending it’s not happening. Let’s have this conversation.”

Having a positive attitude towards ageing is not about forcing yourself to be sunny and optimistic all the time. If you have a human body, you’re always going to feel some way about it, and moments of negativity aren’t suggestive of failure. It’s about acceptance. “When you can say, ‘I wouldn’t trade being 54 for being 24 for all the tea in China, and here’s why,’ when you really have clarity around the gifts that come with ageing — and there are plenty — that’s really what puts you on a good mental health track,” Brown says. “As you get older, life is different, things change, but you have to find what keeps driving you,” Doyle adds. “There are bits about ageing that suck, but like anything, there are good bits and bad bits. What’s the alternative to getting old? No-one wants that, so let’s find a way to make sure we can embrace it and feel positive.”

“You don’t need to force yourself to have a purely rosy view of ageing,” Robson explains. “It’s more about recognising the advantages alongside the disadvantages. Things like decisionmaking skills, general knowledge and vocabulary all peak later in life. Physically, our speed may drop, but we can still have huge amounts of stamina.”

Dr Paula Robinson, the founder and CEO of Sydney’s Applied Positive Psychology Learning Institute (APPLI), also has some advice for cultivating a positive outlook about later life. “Mental fitness and psychological wellbeing are built from two changeable sources: what you think and what you do. So, What do I think about my ageing process? and What am I doing about it?” she says. “It’s very helpful to look at your thoughts. Regret is really dangerous, and so are shame and guilt, because they’re about living in the past. Let them go. Fear and anxiety are about the future, so let them go too and try to live in the present. Be grateful for the privilege of getting older, the opportunity to have more time, and use that time wisely. Forgive yourself for past mistakes, keep a sense of humour, and surround yourself with things and people that lean more towards your genuine interests and positivity. All these bits and pieces added up are very, very powerful.”

If all else fails, Robson recommends faking it until you make it. “You can take advantage of a well-studied phenomenon in psychology known as the Saying as Believing Effect, which shows that when we describe ideas to others, it increases our own commitment. So try to start positive conversations about ageing: you’ll be challenging others’ assumptions while also reinforcing the positive attitudes yourself.”

This article originally appeared in the May 2023 issue of Harper’s BAZAAR.