By Carita Rizzo
My inbox is currently filled with LinkedIn posts with headlines like, “The frustrating thing about a mid-career layoff – you’re over 50 and you’re out.” French newspaper Le Figaro recently published an article declaring that “aging should no longer be visible in the workplace,” detailing the injections French white-collar workers are getting to appear less tired. Social media is bombarding us with videos emphasizing upcoming “losses” – hair loss, collagen loss, bone density loss – while Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman are showing us what the new 60 should look like.
The physical changes that come with aging can be challenging – that isn’t exactly a surprise. But the questions we’re asking seem entirely focused on what we’re doing to postpone it, when perhaps we should be asking why we are so deathly afraid of this natural progression in the first place.
My real-life takeaway from middle age is not yet dramatic. Physically, I feel largely the same at 47 as I did ten years ago. Okay, so I can’t party on a school night. My friends and I talk a lot about cholesterol and estrogen. My LASIK surgery has reverted and I have hip tendinitis, which my doctors heavily imply is age-related. Despite regularly working out, the only ultra-defined muscles in my body are the lines in my forehead and the bands in my neck. None of the above constitutes a crisis. Irritating, sure, but not life-altering.
Yet the culture we live in continues to drop hints that the good times won’t last, which means that every ring on my neck and shadow of a jowl triggers a fear that my face will soon betray me, and I won’t fit into the life I now live. I’ll have to find a job that isn’t so public facing (if I can find one at all), quit my yoga studio, where rarely a 40+ woman dares enter, and bid farewell to underground clubs.
I’m kidding, of course – I haven’t seen an underground club in years – but becoming irrelevant in middle age is not an unwarranted concern. According to AARP’s 2025 insights on women, 66% of women aged 50+ who are working or looking for work say that older workers face age discrimination in the workplace, such as assuming they are less tech savvy and are resistant to change.
Additionally, across 25 European OECD countries and the U.S., 69% of people who remain steadily employed through their 50s are employed at some point in their 60s. In other words, maintaining employment through your 50s is strongly associated with being able to work in your 60s. Start looking for work in your 50s, however, and you’re now too young to retire, too old to be hired, and disproportionately affected as a woman.
As someone in a contracting media industry, for whom a new career in her fifth decade of life is looming, is it unreasonable to try to maintain age ambiguity when no one around you looks a day over 35? If I can exude the youthful energy it takes to work long days and even longer nights, I can convince others (maybe even myself) that I still have the stamina and tech savvy to do so. If I look young enough to “hang,” I blend in at events. But become someone your peers associate with their parents, and it becomes a lot less fun to gossip with me over coffee or cocktails.
These anxieties are not just something I have conjured up, but instead fears that are actively being sold to us. “There are powerful billion-dollar industries that would prefer to keep us in that state of tension,” says gerontologist Dr. Tracey Gendron. “They want us to think, ‘In order to fit in and be desirable, I have to look younger. I have to take care of my skin and dye my hair.’ And because that industry has been such a powerful force, there’s truth to it.”
Even academics and activists who are actively trying to combat ageism acknowledge the realities of age discrimination, particularly in the workplace. “I had a woman come up to me after a talk where I was a little preachy about dyeing your hair, to cover the gray,” recalls Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Aging. “She said, ‘You don’t get it. If I didn’t dye my hair, I’d lose my job and I have children to support.’ I was like, ‘Got it,’ and thanked her for the correction. I completely understand why these strategies are necessary.” That doesn’t mean these mechanisms aren’t ultimately working against us. “They buttress a system that exploits and degrades us and pits us against each other,” says Applewhite. “We are doomed to fail.”
As Applewhite and Gendron point out, the goal of an ageist, sexist, capitalist patriarchy is to make women feel like they are never enough, and then to sell them the fix. “Women can’t win in the current system,” says Applewhite. “It’s most clear in the workforce where young women aren’t taken seriously because they’re too cute or sexualized. Then they’re too fertile. Studies show that when a man says, ‘We’re going to have a baby,’ he gets a promotion. When a woman says, ‘I’m going to have a baby,’ they are penalized.” Just when you think you’re safe from the fertility trap, you reach an age where you’re phased out for not being malleable enough. “Women in the workplace are never the right age,” says Applewhite. “These are standards that are impossible to meet.”
Understanding that money staves off signs of aging, but there is no amount of outwardly assistance that keeps a woman from being numerically undesirable in the workplace, the obvious course of action would be to reject anti-aging solutions altogether. “We cannot buy the products,” states Gendron. “Now that’s a big dream, but it takes a critical mass of people and one person at a time that chooses to say, ‘This is my age. This is what it looks like.’ Eventually they will stop making it if they can’t sell it. That’s a huge ask.”
It is an enormous ask. If you, like me, are still an avid consumer of creams and lotions and an enthusiast of any scientific discoveries to firm a jawline, use them because you enjoy it, not because a marketing message says you must. “Don’t buy products that shame, buy them because you think it’s the best version of you,” says Gendron. “I never want to shame anybody for any decision they make. What I don’t want is for someone to be like, ‘I will feel embarrassed if I don’t do this.’ To me, that’s not a great source of motivation.”
A far easier step toward age acceptance is not participating in the toxic discourse about physical appearance, online and in real life. Stop speculating, stop judging, maybe just assume everyone’s doing the best they can. “Systemic forces want us to fight, they want us to snipe, they want the 22-year-olds to compare themselves to the 18-year-olds,” says Applewhite. “We are all up against the same thing – a society that devalues us as we age. We need to find solidarity as women. The culture in which we age amplifies the worries because people benefit strategically from us being separated and fighting.”
Both Applewhite and Gendron believe that the most powerful way to counteract ageism is through inter-age solidarity. “Surrounding myself with people of all ages, both younger and older, is a huge protective factor,” says Gendron. “Knowing people that are authentic, that have shared values and are of different ages, you see you’re not in it alone.” That, for us, also means setting an example for women of a younger generation. “If more young women hung out with older women, they would see what we enjoy about being the age we are, and they would be less afraid,” says Applewhite.
When it comes to our actual physical and mental decline as we age, studies show that looking to the future with hope will have a meaningful impact on your wellbeing. “Recognize that the more you fear it, the more likely you are to manifest it,” says Gendron. “It’s called stereotype threat. If you think that aging is going to be about depression, decline, and cognitive impairment, you’re more likely to manifest those things than thinking about aging as something more aspirational. Our attitudes about aging are actually a modifiable risk factor for how well we age.”
As someone who just wants to hold on to what she has, the real inner work is being open to meeting your future self – even when that means a new physical identity. No one’s saying it’s easy. “I’m an ageism advocate, and I still have moments when I look in the mirror and don’t recognize that version of myself,” says Gendron. “My body is so different than it was even 10 years ago, and that still can [provoke] an emotional reaction. We need to acknowledge that part of aging is loss – loss of identities and loss of past versions of ourselves. And then reframe it. The truth is, I still wouldn’t want to be a younger version of me.”