When you look at old photos or watch old movies, you may have wondered why young people, or even all people, look much older than they are. While not everyone ages the same way, a video from Vsauce that examines at least part of this perception has to do with the way people look at things, from the clothes they wear to the hairstyles they wear, that are associated with being “older” as they age, rather than actually being old. says it is.
As Michael Stevens of Vsauce explains in the video, there have been changes in aging rates over time due to factors such as living standards, improved healthcare and lifestyle choices. Of course, these changes also differ depending on where you are in the world and your personal situation.
Aging slowed down; but that’s not the real reason
While it’s not surprising that better living standards can affect how you age (it probably shouldn’t surprise anyone that an office worker ages better than a 20-cigarette-a-day chimney sweep in the 1800s), it may be surprising that this change is noticed in just a few decades.
A study published in 2018 examined changes in biological aging (with markers such as blood pressure and lung function) that varied with chronological age between 1988 and 2010. They found that even during this short period of time, there were significant differences in aging, with newer generations being “younger” than their biological predecessors.
“Over the last 20 years, the biological age of the U.S. population appears to have decreased for men and women in the age range,” the research team wrote. “However, the degree of change has not been the same for men and women, or by age. Our results showed that younger men improved more than younger women. This finding may explain why the early adult mortality rate is decreasing more in men than in women, contributing to the narrowing of the gender death gap. Additionally, improvements were greater for older adults than for younger adults.”
The study highlighted lifestyle factors such as the fact that men began to smoke less, which partly explains why the gap between men’s and women’s biological ages is closing, while drug use also leads to improvements in health, he said.
The real reason may be our prejudices
While these factors may play a role in why people from the past seem older to us, they are certainly not enough to fully explain this perception. As Michael from Vsauce points out, the results of this study might have been enough to explain why 60-year-olds look 56, 40-year-olds look 37.5, and 20-year-olds look 19.
According to Vsauce, a big factor outside of health tech and personal care is simply our biases about how we view old-fashioneds. Because we associate old fashions with being old (you might think your father refused to stop wearing the shirt he’s worn since 1980), we retroactively associate these fashions with being old, even when looking at photos of young people wearing the same shirt in 1980.
Adding selection biases on top of these associations and health improvements, we get a good reason why people in old photos look older than they do.
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