I keep seeing people asking the internet, “How old do I look?” Each time, I want to tell them, “No, don’t do that, you’re going to get your feelings hurt,” not because people in the comments will be truthful but because they will be mean, on purpose, for sport.

The trend isn’t really about the individual person; it’s a reaction to the larger internet discourse around young people’s fear of aging. Thanks to essentially three viral posts, there now seems to be a culture-wide acceptance of the idea that Gen Z is “aging like milk” (i.e., poorly), beginning with a video last fall by 23-year-old content creator Taylor Donoghue sharing that someone mistook her age for early thirties. A podcast called Staying Up included a small segment about it in January, which went viral, and then significantly more viral when the popular TikToker Jordan Howlett made a response video about his own experience being mistaken for someone significantly older than his 26 years. Combined with the concurrent furor over tween girls asking their parents for anti-aging products and 10-year-olds taking over Sephora, there’s a general sense that kids today are freaking out about wrinkles and retinol way more than anyone else was at their age.

But it’s millennials, Gen X-ers, and boomers who are doing most of the freaking out in response. This is understandable: Every time a new cohort of young people realizes they are getting older, the main effect seems to be making everyone older than them feel even more out of touch by comparison — even if the idea that culturally defined generations are made up of distinct cohorts rather than a perpetually rising escalator is a false one. “If Gen Z feels ancient, then what are we?” the thinking goes, as if we forgot that a central experience of being in one’s 20s is the naive assumption that life ends at 30.

Many of the theories online veer into the conspiratorial: One woman suggested that Gen Z looks older because the quality of food is getting worse, which results in faster wrinkles; another claimed that it’s because food is getting better, and because millennials ate food with more preservatives in it than Gen Z, somehow those preservatives also preserved (?) their skin.

I’d argue, though, that the theory that Gen Z is somehow aging more rapidly than people a few years older than them boils down to three main components. One is that the “how old do I look” meme is taking place on TikTok, and it’s much more difficult to determine someone’s age through a screen. The second is that as the practice of injecting your face with fillers or sucking out certain pockets of fat becomes more normalized for young people, it further obfuscates someone’s age (if a 22-year-old brings their dermatologist a photo of, say, Kim Kardashian, they could understandably end up looking closer to her age). The third and most relevant component is the way in which social media has warped beauty standards that were already pretty warped to begin with.

This crops up in insidious ways. As the writer Mikala Jamison points out, the pop star Tate McRae is considered “plain-looking” to some simply because, unlike Gen Z stars Dove Cameron or Madison Beer, she “doesn’t have the extremes of Instagram face: extreme absence of buccal fat, extreme button nose, extreme angular jawline.” It shows up in discourse around beautiful actresses like Margot Robbie being “mid” or Aubrey Plaza “hitting the wall” (manosphere speak for “aging out of the tiny window of female attractiveness designated by incels”), or in the comment section of a viral TikTok showing a 28-year-old’s “raw” face (sample comment: “stay out of the sun jeez woman”).

We’re so used to seeing even regular people online wearing digital filters that give them the sort of creepily snatched, almost otherworldly beauty rewarded by algorithms that, by comparison, an untouched face appears bloated, saggy, and old. On social media, where extremes get the most attention, people have lost the ability to recognize what normal is.

“It’s a stigma we grew up with where it’s like, ‘You look like you’re aging. You’re old news,’” says Jordan Howlett, the 26-year-old who made the video about having spent his entire life being mistaken for someone significantly older. As a full-time influencer, he understands his generation’s aging anxiety because it mirrors the way the internet constantly demands the newest thing. “We always want to see the newer, younger, fresher thing. We correlate anything that’s older with [something] that’s already been seen before.”

In a follow-up to her viral post, Donoghue also suggested that the ability to endlessly examine oneself online is exacerbating young people’s anxieties. “We almost have too much access to comparison of our old selves and other people,” she said. “I can look back at Snapchats of me from when I was 12 years old so you can physically kind of really see your face change. If you’re not careful and cautious with it, you can go down a bad rabbit hole.”

Anne Maheux, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who studies adolescent development and tech, points to social media’s encouragement of appearance and “self-focused attention,” as well as American culture’s dismissal of older people, particularly women, as possible causes for Gen Z’s aging panic. There’s also the fact that young people today are delaying adult tasks, such as getting their driver’s license or going on dates, and “there may be a natural tension or confusion when social or cultural markers of adulthood are delayed, but the body keeps aging on a relatively consistent timescale,” she explains.

Doomerism may also play a part: Consuming depressing news content on social media can engender a sense of helplessness, and “many youth today may have internalized a bleak or fearful outlook about the future, perhaps including their own developmental aging process,” says Maheux.

This thinking could also be passed down by parents of Gen Z-ers, who were perhaps more careful about not reproducing the anti-fat messaging that was particularly present in the ’80s, ’90s, and 2000s. “Millennials weren’t taught to fear aging; we were taught to fear fat,” wrote Alexandra D’Amour in the Times. Kids who watched their mothers obsess over wrinkles might believe they need to “slow down the aging process” from the time they understand what skincare is; writer Jessica DeFino coined the term “serum mom” — a play on the diet-obsessed “almond mom” — to describe such parenting.

The fear of aging is, obviously, not unique to Gen Z. M. Night Shyamalan was 51 when he released Old, a horror film about a beach that makes you old. “The fear of growing old is so great that every aged person is an insult and a threat to the society,” wrote Sharon Curtin in the Atlantic in 1972. “They remind us of our own death, that our body won’t always remain smooth and responsive, but will someday betray us by aging, wrinkling, faltering, failing. The ideal way to age would be to grow slowly invisible, gradually disappearing, without causing worry or discomfort to the young.” Essentially all art is about confronting the eventuality of death and the knowledge that life does not last forever, but right now, amid fears that not even our planet will last another few generations, these anxieties are extremely marketable to an audience hungry for anything that might delay the inevitable. “The beauty standard is to stay young, and I do try to fit the beauty standard,” one 15-year-old told the Cut.

Or perhaps there’s something even more cynical happening here. I’ve been around long enough to know that asking the internet how old you look or how hot you are is almost always a losing game: It doesn’t matter if you’re 17 and have the poreless skin of a newborn baby, there will be middle-aged men in the comment section saying you look “mid-30s at best.” What they are really saying is that you have lost value, that you’ve expired like last month’s yogurt. That you are no longer worth looking at on a platform where “being looked at” is the only thing that matters.

Unless, that is, you know exactly what you’re doing. In an interview, one 30-year-old told the Times that she posted her “how old do I look” video for the simple fact that it would get attention. “I knew it would get engagement,” she said. “A comment is a comment. I don’t care if they are trolls. I don’t care if they tell me I look like a toad. I just want the comments.” You may not be able to look young forever, but you can always submit yourself to mass humiliation as part of the hottest new TikTok trend. And, in one small way, remain relevant forever.

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