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We hit a second adolescence in our 60s, when beauty isn’t skin-deep but ‘life-deep’

In our culture, beauty is synonymous with youth. But there is another kind that emerges as we age

Ursula Le Guin. Photograph: Marian Wood Kolisch via The New York Times
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Laura Kennedy
Mon Aug 05 2024 - 06:00

Ageing is supreme in public discourse. There are topical products which claim to help us look younger, or to stave off the imprint of time. Studies suggesting which foods and habits accelerate ageing (sugar, according to the American Heart Association last week). It’s always the fun stuff.

There are the media profiles of American tech CEO Bryan Johnson spending millions of dollars in a slightly terrifying and psychologically fascinating attempt to age backwards. He undertakes constant voluntary medical tests and treatments, invites celebrities to his house for dinners at which he doesn’t eat anything himself because he’s intermittent fasting, and then he goes to bed at 8pm. With that sort of lifestyle you might wonder at the desire to live forever. But Johnson isn’t alone in his obsession with youth – he just has more budget than most. Many of us are fascinated with celebrities like Jennifer Lopez and Victoria Beckham precisely because they don’t look their age.

While Johnson’s anti-ageing mission is clearly more than surface-deep, within our culture youth is synonymous with health and beauty as well as status. It always has been. As we age and change, a certain amount of alienation from the self happens. There’s a loss of identity which can occur as our self-image recedes from our physical reality.

[ A tech entrepreneur chases immortality: Bryan Johnson is 46. Soon, he plans to turn 18 ]

Writer Ursula K Le Guin, whose science- and speculative fiction is some of the best philosophical literature we have, wrote about this with wonderful humour and realism in her book of talks and essays, The Wave in the Mind. She writes: “I know what worries me most when I look in the mirror and see the old woman with no waist. It’s not that I’ve lost my beauty – I never had enough to carry on about. It’s that that woman doesn’t look like me. She isn’t who I thought I was.”

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A child’s body is easy to live in, Le Guin tells us, while an adult’s is not. She suggests that we have a second adolescence in our 60s or 70s, when we look in the mirror and don’t recognise ourselves. “…that is me?”

Our conception of beauty – which is so deeply knitted through with our worship of youth – can feel oppressive to live under. Like a standard we fail to meet by our very biology. Like a pinnacle represented by celebrities whose ability to look so much younger than they are is achieved by enormous sums of money as well as a winning ticket in the genetic lottery.

It can be a comfort to read 18th century Irish philosopher Edmund Burke, who probably wasn’t writing with a failure to meet beauty standards in the 21st century in mind but whose ideas apply anyway. In his work on aesthetics – A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful – Burke tells us that some of the features which characterise beauty are inherently pleasing to us, others are influenced by cultural factors and personal experience. Our taste is the product of education and culture, and while Burke didn’t take a hard view on whether it is objective or subjective, Le Guin argues compellingly that the subjective element matters far more.

She dismisses the “beauty-game ideal” as a shallow, constantly shifting standards most of us simply cannot ever meet (wherein lies its great power) but describes another concept of beauty – one articulated through the body without being limited to it. This is a kind of beauty that emerges, according to Le Guin, as we age.

“For old people, beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with bones. It has to do with who the person is. More and more clearly it has to do with what shines through those gnarly faces and bodies.” She reminds us that there is something radical in embracing the subjectivity of beauty – that it exists to some degree in everyone, and it does not merely have one face.

With time, Le Guin’s essay shows, there is a kind of beauty which is revealed to us that is not “skin-deep but life-deep” where something timeless shines through a face and body marked by years spent and survived in the world. Le Guin is right in suggesting that young people are always beautiful – their youth makes them so.

But with age comes a conception of self and a deeper kind of beauty. One that survives despite all our bodies may go through. That is beautiful by any standard.