At a literary party in June, a camera was held up before me as a mic was palmed into my hand. Unprepared but rarely one to turn down a photo op, I acquiesced, delivering a short spiel about a book I’d recently read. Shortly after, an ambient dread about the video began humming in the back of my mind: the camera had been close, the sun high in the sky, my expressions nervous and animated.
At 11pm a few weeks later, splayed on the sofa at the tail-end of a record-breaking heatwave, I received a request for a joint post on Instagram. The reel before me – already dispatched to the screens of 220k followers and more by way of the algorithm – confirmed that my concern had not been without reason.
The June light may as well have been surgical, illuminating the shallow hollows and fine lines of my famously expressive 30-year-old face. The camera took priority interest in my nasolabial folds; the faint grooves on my forehead that I had ceased atrophying with a needle a few months prior; my teeth, worn at the edges by decades of anxiety-induced grinding; the tug at the left side of my lower lip when I speak, which appears to have become more pronounced with age.
Though I had a faint idea that the hand of time was beginning to make itself known across my face, the specifics were charitably hazy. The mirror is a sit-com I’ve seen a thousand times: It shows mercy, bends to my biases, dutifully reflects the pose and angle I serve it. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t walk past it and aggressively mew.
The photo or video, however – captured by someone unfamiliar with our self-perception – is less sit-com, more body horror. With its flash and distortion and high definition, it’s primed to draw out the features our mirrorly pose lets us suppress. Indeed, ever since cameras found their way into homes over a century ago, people have been confronted with images they don’t always recognise as their own: their faces and bodies beset with new developments, not all of them welcome.
Historically, such images were confined to family photo albums, dust-filmed yellow Kodak packets and negative photo strips. But today, a couple of decades after MySpace selfies and Facebook photo albums, millennials are the first generation to watch ourselves go from children and teens to 30- and 40-somethings on the internet; to witness our shifting forms – unprepared and illuminated by unflattering lighting – be disseminated throughout the digital ether, to crushes, exes and competitive nemeses, with or without our consent, often before we’ve made peace with them. It’s a state of surveillance that’s only becoming more real with the rise of META glasses.
Granted, there’s a counter argument that this is reality. That seeing bodies in motion and bad lighting is a necessary truth, so we may as well steal our outsized egos and face it. But though ageing online is something experienced by everybody, it can feel as though millennials are uniquely unprepared to do so. Thanks to “Instagram face” – the “single, cyborgian face” wrought by social media, and the fact that an aging face is aberrant to the algorithm – many of us are used to making compensatory poses and editing our photos to meet feed osmosis. So for us, being confronted with our faces and bodies in all their aging reality can be particularly disconcerting, and, at worst, devastating: public proof that we’re diverging from the beauty standard we were told made us worthy (I feel for Gen Z and Gen Alpha after us). Celebrities – the only group who witnessed themselves age in the public sphere before social media – should serve as a cautionary tale. The last few years have seen a colossal uptick in celebrity faces pinned at the ears by facelifts, and GLP1s being employed to dissolve evidence of a lifetime of meals. Celebrities have also been open about the psychic toll of aging before the world – with many of them pushing against damaging narratives.
It goes without saying that, in an ideal world, visible aging wouldn’t be an issue. If society saw aging as evidence of character, expression, nature’s map to past ecstasy and heartbreak, seeing ourselves grow older online wouldn’t be so jarring. Instead, we’re accused of “aging badly”, as if aging is a skill, not a biological inevitability. In the words of the author Melissa Broder, “I should be processing, with a bunch of long-pubed witches, my transitionhood from maidenhood to whatever comes before crone,” not getting Botox. But a society obsessed with aesthetic optimisation does not see aging as a sign of character, or even just a neutral facet of existence – and only a steel-willed few seem to be immune from internalising wider society’s incessant messaging.
That sticky summer evening, in an impulsive panic, I approved the cross-post. I wish I could say it had been a win for self-acceptance, but if I’m being honest, it was more to do with the writerly tug towards self promotion than my inner witch prevailing. A few weeks later, the author of the book I cited followed me, proving that – even if it’s rendered by unnatural technology – insecurity is rarely worth a lost opportunity. Still, if I’m being real, a part of me wishes I’d never seen that video.
In Nora Ephron’s seminal 2006 essay, I Feel Bad About My Neck, she writes that “you have to cut open a Redwood tree to see how old it is, but you wouldn’t have to if it had a neck”. You also wouldn’t have to if it had an Instagram “tagged photos” section.
