Aging with Anxiety

The Politics of Aging Bodies

‘In the morning if my face is a little puffy, I’ll put on an ice pack while doing stomach crunches. I can do 1,000 now. After I remove the ice pack I use a deep pore cleanser lotion. In the shower I use a water-activated gel cleanser, then a honey almond body scrub, and on the face an exfoliating gel scrub. Then I apply an herb-mint facial mask, which I leave on for 10 minutes while I prepare the rest of my routine. I always use an aftershave lotion with little or no alcohol, because alcohol dries your face out and makes you look older. Then moisturiser, then an anti-ageing eye balm followed by a final moisturising protective lotion.’

In the evening, I do the same routine again. Once I am done, I head for my date. On my Hinge profile, it says that I am 29 years old. I am, in fact, 35.

This fictional character, whose little daily self-care routine we’ve just read is 90% Patrick Bateman from American Psycho and 10% my own brainchild. It illustrates something that I’ve been noticing more and more often in my daily life.

Ageing now appears as an increasingly threatening risk for men and many would do anything to stop that process. This is a notable shift. Masculinity was once associated with maturity, authority, and accumulated experience; now it is increasingly tied to performance, competitiveness, and visual vitality. Which got me thinking – why is this now becoming a problem? Sure, there was always the celebration of youth in societies gone past, and it’s only natural we were to merely follow in their footsteps. But upon further reflection, I realised: it’s not really that we are celebrating youth; there is a reason why so many young (men) are gravitating towards fascism.

In this article, I will deal with the temporal dimensions of the politics of (male) bodies. How for men especially, ageing signals not wisdom, but decline: diminished productivity, fading desirability, and loss of status. This is a continuation of my previous article which dealt with the depoliticization of (male) bodies. Now let’s see first how youth and ageing have been conceptualised in the past, so that we can make sense of how we look at it in the present.

Putting a Premium on Ageing

There were many societies that valorised age and experience – and I’m not talking about the US, where clearly you must be an octogenarian if you want to be President. Maybe I will talk about the US, but let’s start elsewhere, let’s start with some places with some actual history. In most ancient, hunter-gatherer societies, one’s aging was marked with various rituals. Moving from childhood to young adulthood, to complete independence, and finally to a venerated elder was a cause for celebration, with each having their own ritual to mark the occasion. These communal events signposted your temporal journey, and once you have moved into a new phase, your freedoms and your responsibilities would have also changed.

This also meant that living the ‘good life’ meant very different things in various life stages: you didn’t have to compete with 60-year-olds who gave better advice in your 20s. Additionally, cohorts of children of the same age would most often go through life together, not really mixing with younger/older cohorts. Each age-group would have their own part in the life of the community – be it playing, advising, warring, or toiling the land. But there was very little confusion about what you were supposed to do at any given point in your life – midlife and quarter-life crises are modern malaises indeed. Long story short: distinct, ritually separated live stages with different telos (goals) involved were the norm in most pre-agricultural societies.

Then, you had the Romans – they loved old people. This affection you can see from their statues – contrary to the pretty twinks of the Greeks, Romans often depicted old senators and consuls with their fat rolls, warts, hairy nostrils, and oh so many wrinkles. Why? Because age was not something to be ashamed of, rather, it was a sign of the accumulation of authority, wisdom, and power. Their entire political system (at least in the Republican era) was designed with the various age-groups in mind. If you wanted to enter politics, you had to climb the cursus honorum – the ladder of political offices. Essentially, you entered public service at 28 earliest, and you could only reach consulship (the highest honour), once you were over 42. The youth were looked upon as unruly, governed by their temperament, and just generally too…what would Treebeard say? Oh yes, hasty! This framing also meant that instead of looking at age as something that eats away at your potential, you couldn’t wait to turn 40. Man, oh man, how excited people today would be for their 30^th if it would mean that they could finally be elected as a senator!

This ladder, with their distinct age groups mirrored the stable life-course sequencing of earlier societies, and provided a narrative of continuous successes for an individual. For each age, there was a level, which you could aspire to achieve and once you’ve done that, there was an end to that race, you have indeed ‘succeeded’, and a few years later you had earned your entry and you could join the heavyweights. Or you know, in this case, the old farts.

The US was established by people who were veritably obsessed with the Roman republic (they probably thought about it multiple times a day), so it is no surprise that they integrated the age-limit idea into their system. However, overall, the ladder is much less fixed, and in most modern democracies, age really is just a number (in the case of the US, this number probably has three digits if you are a high-ranking official). What the Roman example shows, however, that our current anxiety about aging is not a natural feature – rather, it is a historically contingent, socially influenced phenomenon.

Young, Dumb, and Full of Communism

Another example, for how aging can be looked at from a different perspective, let’s look at fascism and communism in the first half of the 20^th century. While the youth were looked down as hot-headed, rash, entirely unreliable and generally silly by the Romans, the Cs and the Fs looked at youth as standard bearers of their future societies.

I have covered the body-obsession of various political sides in my previous article on this topic; what is important here to know, however, is that the youth was seen as aspirational. They were linked to the transformation of the world. Their zeal, their radicalism, their openness to fresh, new ideas were all fundamental to their respective political projects. As both were fundamentally revolutionary movements that defined themselves against the status quo, the restlessness and drive of the youth was something to be harnessed, rather than feared.

One of the most famous Hungarian poets (not even a card-carrying communist!) dedicated a poem to a left-wing student group in the 1910s, capturing precisely this sentiment:

‘Fire, blood, fever, passion, blessed change/Pure creation blazes in their eyes/Eternal spring, eternal revolution/Oh, grow ever more beautiful, ever more radiant./Rise up, you young troops of fever/ Flash, gaze, our world-conquering sword/ Out in the fields, Spring roars/Roaring Spring, march with us in our struggle.’

The youth were looked upon as something malleable, for sure – that’s what various youth organisations tried to exploit, from Communist Youth Leagues to the Hitlerjugend. However, they possessed qualities that any given political regime wanted to appropriate. Probably the best example of this is the Cultural Revolution under Mao, where the 72-years-old Chairman organised, channelled, and ultimately hijacked the radical sentiments of teenagers.

In these decades, youth was looked upon as a sign, a totem, a promise of collective transformation. They were the custodians of a better future, therefore, there was no anxiety about their aging. Their coming of age meant a fulfilment of promises, of the arrival of a ‘better’ crop of humans (excuse my language, trying to convey the sentiment of the age). However, this was all to change as with the advent of the ‘end of history’, the neon-lit 90s and the neoliberal hegemony.

The Flattening of Age

The essence of the neoliberal system is the flattening of value systems with multiple variants into a single one: money. This means that human capacities, talents, histories and labour is to be understood only in terms of its monetary value. This, with the increasing deregulation of markets worldwide opened up dangerous abysses for those on the labour market – and globalisation meant that competition now increased to the level where human capital experienced a continuous depreciation.

With the markets reigning supreme, the most important quality of a human being became their position as a labourer and as a consumer. And unfortunately, we both work and consume most in the middle period of our lives. Children and the elderly are ‘unproductive’, and thus, irrelevant (children are only becoming relevant to markets as potential consumers – all the hyenas on the internet peddling shit to children should be pilloried).

What all this means in terms of aging is that becoming older becomes risky – financially and in terms of relevance. Each birthday marks a step towards eventually irrelevance and obscurity. Additionally, as Zygmunt Bauman pointed out in Liquid Modernity, earlier social structures have become completely liquified. This includes rituals that differentiate between different age groups (this mixing of various age groups into one big pot is what happens on the internet – but I digress). With rituals gone, and our lives becoming more and more organised according to the logic of the market, age is flattened. It is everyone against everyone, competition devours difference, you are in the game as long as you can keep up the appearance of youthful production and consumption.

Age Is Just a Number

And the invisible hand of the market did a fist pump, said ‘heck yeah’ and started exploiting the blossoming insecurities. Anti-ageing markets and maintenance industries sprung up. As of 2024, the global anti-ageing industry is valued at 75 billion USD and is projected to exceed 140 billion USD by 2033. For comparison, the entire printing industry is currently estimated at 400 billion USD; or, the biggest free-trade agreement in history between the EU and India is expected to facilitate a trade volume around 75 billion USD annually. TLDR: that’s a lot of fucking money for anti-wrinkling cremes.

Social media and various platforms have also been speedy to jump on the bandwagon. Platform visibility regimes privilege youth-coded presentations, so you end up with the absolutely awful images of 75-year-old politicians doing tiktok dances and saying ‘oh yes I love assassino capuccino’. It is profoundly demeaning.

Various platforms and apps help us track ourselves, optimise our body, our looks – it’s all about longevity, that extra little bit that we can last, that few extra years we can squeeze out of our time as ‘valuable’ members of society.

There is a push to avoid ageing at any cost – a sort of Peter Pan epidemic is sweeping our societies. Keith Heyward brilliantly tackles this in his book, Infantilised. The author argues that modern society is plagued by a dual crisis: the infantilization of adults, who cling to juvenile hobbies and avoid responsibility, and the adultification of children, who are prematurely exposed to complex sexual and political themes. This process results in a state of generational mulch, where distinct life stages collapse into a single, immature behavioral type. A similar process has been documented by Neil Postman in his The Disappearance of Childhood. Both of these texts underline that the capitalist order profits from the permanent adolescence of large portions of society.

And this is the essential shift, the counterpoint to the Soviet bodybuilders. We are not celebrating youth – we don’t see them anymore as tokens of a brighter future. At best, they are looked at as newer and newer waves of consumers, new markets to be conquered by companies. But they don’t carry political meaning in them.

Similarly to the (male) bodies that I’ve analysed in my previous piece, the youth is also depoliticized. We don’t try to stay young, because we want to be free and radical – we do it, because we are afraid of ageing and becoming irrelevant. The elaborate maintenance routine is no longer coded as feminine excess but rather a rationalised masculine obligation.

Thankfully, the youth always have something new up their sleeves. They are like Rocky – they will be looked down on, underrated and laughed at but somehow, they will always come back and take what’s theirs. Even with the powers of global capitalism and technocracy stacked against them, more and more countries see Gen Z-fuelled political change. New York got a Socialist mayor largely due to the youth supporting and showing up for him, while in Nepal, they managed to bring down the government (same in Hungary!). So maybe, the situation is not as dire as it first seems, and the political nature of younger generations will always bubble up.