Why prior generations looked older while young
This is a quite well researched / known topic. It’s been a part of the social conversation here and there, it’s not of utmost importance but I thought it would be interesting to discuss. There is a fantastic V-Sauce video on the topic and plenty of articles online but for some reason I want to discuss it. Perhaps some of the points and opinions I bring up will make no sense, I don’t think they will. But I feel an urge to connect dots on this topic with these thoughts and therefore shall. Deal with it.
I will start by explaining the phenomenon. I will then talk about some of the literal aspects of why this occurs. Some of the more mental aspects. Some theories that may solidify it further, before diving into a pyscho-conspiracy level discussion around how these effects extend into further spaces.
Retrospective Aging
Let’s set the scene here. You are flipping through your parents photo albums. For some reason, they are moving them around the house and left them on the dining table. So you decide to flip through them and see whats going on. You begin to think it’s funny that your parents had entire lives before you and here you are seeing the evidence. And your mom notices you looking at them, so decides to look over your shoulder and provide some commentary. It’s a sweet moment.
But after pointing at a picture of two people, you ask her, who are they? “Oh thats me and my brother, we were 19 and 21”. You stop. Your mind freezes for a second as your begin to process the information just provided. Thats a 21 year old? He looks like he is ready to go home to his family of 3 kids and wife and talk about the economy. We ain’t talking about a black and white photo here, this is color. It could’ve been a iPhone 4 photo with a classic instagram filter if it wasn’t stuck to the page of a photo album.
You leave that thought in the back of your head. You are confused, why does she look so old? I mean, maybe it’s just because I recognised my mom from her traits and I see her as my mom, not a 19 year old. Nevermind. It’s now throwback Thursday and you are watching a movie in the living room. Why not Grease? 1978 musical romantic comedy of the ages. Let’s check it out.
Wait a fucking minute? These are supposed to be highschooolers? Okay, this is just some classic Hollywood fakery, they are using actors way above their age for these roles. It happened with twilight, whatever. You do a quick google search. JOHN TRAVOLTA WAS 23 WHEN HE FILMED GREASE?
This is retrospective aging. Where people in the past decades appear significantly older than their actual age.
Literal Factors
There are quite literal real factors to why they seem older. Or, on the counter point, why we seem younger today at our age (visually). And thats actually because we quite literally are, the biological age of people (so the health and age equivalency of our bodies) is younger today. And this can be derived from healthier eating, a better understanding of how the world works, and better healthcare.
People like to talk shit about the modern world in this regard. More junk food than ever. My healthcare system sucks. Nobody knows what is going on. But in reality, compared to decades ago, we have a better understanding of this stuff.
I wear sunscreen when I go outside, making my skin age slower than someone who is in the sun all day. I mean other than that one time where I arrived at my hotel, immediately fell asleep in a sun chair due to jet lag and my room not being ready and I woke up with a body covered in sunburns that eventually peeled. But the peel has made me a younger version. Better. Cooler. And I learn from my mistakes
I drink more water and take vitamins. I would be surprised if taking supplements was something normal decades ago. I mean maybe it was but Im not entirely sure if the machinery and quality control, etc would be at the same degree that we have today.
Healthcare is better now. And even if you don’t have access to it, it’s also better in our foods. Foods are better scanned for mold and pests, animals are getting vaccinated and medicine when they are sick. The pipeline of what goes into our bodies has improved and therefore the age of our internal biological systems has also improved.
Consumer rights and protection has gotten better. I mean cmon guys, you are looking at pictures from the age of the world where we had lead in petrol and people are quite literally retroactively looking at the turmoil and serial killers of those ages and directly linking it (correlatively, not causally) to lead in fuel. I can’t imagine you look very young with toxic exposure being a common occurrence walking around the city streets.
Lastly, fucking cigarettes. I mean people nowadays may complain about a vape or actually more specifically, that one French guy with his IQOS but cigarettes used to be everywhere. And we know that ages you. We know that exposure to it ages you. And worse yet, even the cigarettes back then were worse for you than now.
We can keep looking at physical factors that may facilitate this, but it has to be more than that. Because I am sure that if you put a youthful person through the regiment of factors I mentioned above, they would still look younger.
Mental factors
Could it be as simple as an optical illusion? Or a mental concept?
One thing you could immediately point towards is just fashion. I know wearing clothing is literal but fashion trends is not, so yes, deal with it, it’s going in the mental factors section. Please direct any complaints to the SEC.
You look at these pictures and you don’t see the same brand culture you recognize. People wearing branded clothing, with a certain logo will immediately allow you to age a photo. Oh the champion logo changed in year x. And therefore, they just look older because we are looking at an older style of clothing. Because when youth of today try to copy those styles, nobody could take a filtered photo of them and convince you they are old. Not only because their faces look younger but because it would immediately call retro to your brain. Not old but retro.
But it could be less literal. The thing is that the hip 20 year olds of the 70’s are now 70 years old. And they may have some of the styles or traits of their past that create an association indirectly in your brain. Your grandpa wears thick glasses, so pictures of people wearing thick glasses make you think they are old. It could be the posture. Like a person is making a cringe pose in that photo, cringe based on today’s standard, so you think that it has to be an old photo.
But there are other standards that have changed. And thats also the impact of growing up with a camera on you at all times. There is a form of nonchalance that the newer generation has towards photos and photography. The first handheld digital camera came in 1975. It was not common for everyone to have one and therefore a photo was more of an occasion. Which lead to differences in poses, in reasons for photos to be taken and in the novelty of it. You will see more off balance or non aligned photos while today there is a larger focus on that and the skills to take good photos.
There is a relational factor too. Like I said before your parents are older than you. So you even past photos of them, they look old. Because it’s a connection you have made with that specific face to be old. It’s a face you recognize but 99.99% of the time, it’s a face you recognize as older than you. So disconnecting that connection is incredibly difficult to do casually.
Social expectations are different now too. You cannot deny that education, freedom and ability to be yourself has changed a lot from past decades. And if everyone is being more youthful and spirited about their personalities that changes things too. I’ll take an extreme example, but it probably wasn’t very cash money to be super happy go lucky during the Great Depression. And therefore the smiles look different due to weakened smile muscles and there are other social facial expressions.
I mean we already see this from country to country where Italians move their hands, Indians will move their head, and americans will be loud. These behaviours are taught from the environment and social circle in which you originate and it’s what allows you to look at a picture and recognize where someone might be from. This learned social behavior can be minor but have actual physical impacts on the way that you look. If none of your mates are smiling in a photo, you probably won’t be either. So these pictures end up being specific insights into this dynamic of taught social behavior changing the physical appearance of how you look.
My random thoughts
I actually wanted to explore this for a completely different reason. I think that generations of people end up looking more alike across a generation because of these social micro adjustments to your face and whatnot. And I think it’s become more prevailing with the age of social media and content that we are in. Kid’s liking a specific visual atheistic leads them to look at themselves in the mirror. Make micro adjustments to their smile and how their eyes move. Or maybe it’s more literal, and someone learned about lymphatic drainage and a certain amount of people get a guasha.
Its people getting their styles aligned. Their haircuts are the same. And overtime, you look at the older generations that are still alive and old now and you think I do not want a hairstyle of an old person. So you explicitly change it. The generations are purposefully changing themselves. Anywho back to the retrospective aging question here.
Ive mentioned the uncanny valley effect in a previous article but I’ll explain it a bit further. It’s that feeling you get looking at something that doesnt just quite look right. And it spooks you. It’s a survival instinct from way way way back when to teach us inherently to be cautious of things we do not understand. It’s like looking at the backrooms. Or an eerie hall way. Or an AI photo where something is just off.
I think there is a part of our DNA that actively tries to combat that uncanny valley effect too. The genetic pool of the world is more diverse than its ever been and yet there are generation by generation DNA similarities from people entirely unrelated to each other. The photo is actually from a study that people who look alike do actually have similar composition of their DNA.
So perhaps our bodies are trying to adjust to an expected indirect norm. Perhaps it’s more literal and it’s actually a reverse impact. Its not the older generations looked older, its the fact that the very nature of the younger generation is to disassociate with the older and therefore putting those older styles and faces into a new bucket. Or perhaps its health effects, and it’s not something we will see in future generations (Or will because of peptides, etc whatever).
Now this entire time I couldn’t let go of a specific thought. I had a dog growing up. His name was Brandy. He died a handful of years ago now but I remember when he was a puppy, he looked like every single other labrador out there. There was a specific bone, facial structure, whatever that I felt labradors, even if not in the same litter, had. And the newer generations of labrador puppies that I’d see around had a different facial structure but also aligned to their generation. I guess dogs have gotten healthier in recent years too? We aren’t feeding them as much calcium filled slop (thats where those old sun dried white dog shits came from and why we don’t see them anymore).
And with that, I actually entirely negate the entire mental factors aspect. The only mental aspect I can really understand is that if you look at a picture of your parents when they were younger, they did look older than you did at the same age. But I think thats purely because you have associated that face you recognize as a person older than you. It’s that simple to me. The reason that random people from that age look older though? Thats entirely psychical.
It leaves us with three actual answers to this. The Direct (Healthier people look younger), the Indirect (Many minor traits like style, photo quality and posture make people look older), and associative (people try to look their generation and therefore recognize outliers).
Who knows. It’s really not that important actually. I’m not entirely sure why I continually insist on beating dead horses (topic wise, not literally). If for some reason, you skipped to the bottom to find my perfect conclusion on the matter, you will get this advice: don’t bother reading the above.