Bryan Johnson, 48 years old and worth hundreds of millions, has his teenage son’s blood plasma pumped into his own veins. He eats exactly 2,250 vegan calories a day, swallows dozens of supplements and spends twenty million crowns a year on what he calls “Project Blueprint” – biohacking to make his body younger. In another time, a man of Johnson’s fortune might have built a concert hall or founded a university. Instead, he fights against the one thing he cannot buy his way out of: time.
He is not alone. Elon Musk, one of the richest men in the world, spends his days convincing anonymous extremists on the Internet that he is the best at computer games. Politicians rule through memes and viral nicknames. Ten-year-olds line up at Sephora to buy retinol creams for skin that never imagined a wrinkle. Teenagers want to be day traders. Middle-aged people are big consumers of Labubus, Disney things and Lego.
Something has broken in our ability to grow up. Or maybe: Something has broken in our ability to let go.
With photographer Christopher Anderson While the unflattering portrait of Trump’s inner circle hit the Internet like a high-speed train late last year, it was the close-ups of White House press secretary 28-year-old Karoline Leavitt that evoked strong emotions. Commenters raved about the puncture sites of her lip injections and frowned at the fine lines and texture accentuated by her thick layers of makeup.
Punishing women for visibly aging is, of course, nothing new. What was more interesting was the reaction: the threads in which hundreds of posters posted selfies as a counterattack. Photos taken in flattering light, sometimes with filters that blur skin and contours. Completely ordinary pictures of middle-aged women, all of whom stubbornly claimed to be constantly mistaken for 20-year-olds.
Whether and why millennials look younger than they actually are has been hotly debated in recent years, particularly on Tiktok. Theories range from the availability of sunscreen, fillers and Botox to less air pollution, smoking less and drinking more water, and a matter of ease of styling. Regardless of the truth, the debate has given even online middle-aged people a new personality trait: a refusal to age. Sometimes it’s expressed in selfies and videos with smug captions to reveal the subject’s age, like a magician revealing there’s nothing in his top hat: “Thirty-eight, forty-one, you couldn’t believe that, could you?”
It would have been easy to dismiss it as another result of the diffuse “millennial shakeup” – a concept that haunts the generation that were the first cool kids on the internet but are now, according to the internet itself, neither cool nor kids. Read as a symptom of something larger, it instead becomes one of many expressions of the difficulty of living in a world in which aging is seen as an expression of a lack of self-control.
The entire structure of how everyone experiences and interacts with the outside world has become infantile
Unlike previous generations We grow up with high-definition documentation of history. The storage capabilities of apps regularly and with algorithmic clarity deliver images and everyday posts from our own past, and recurring trends on social media encourage people to, for example, post pictures of what we looked like ten years ago and now. But it is difficult to contrast the present with a past that has already been filtered, curtailed, and enhanced by memory and technology.
A strange form of temporal dysphoria arises. Aging is no longer a forward movement but a competition in which the opponent is yourself at twenty-five, frozen in digital amber, forever young and forever superior. You are asked to win over your own mind.
But it’s not just about vanity or the eccentricities of the rich; There are structural reasons why entire generations seem to be stuck in limbo. We live in an economy in which the things that once formed the foundation of our adult credentials—homeownership, secure careers, self-proclaimed authority based on experience—are no longer difficult or impossible to secure. In a job market that demands immediate results and constant change, a youthful appearance signals energy and malleability. To look forty is to look tired. To be tired is to be spent, unsellable.
If you can’t own a house or three downtown, you can at least own your collagen production. When power over your existence isn’t offered to you, the self-deprecation remains – “growing up” as a verb rather than the permanent state of adulthood you once imagined but which feels far out of reach.
Nostalgia will then not only be there Sentimentality without a kind of escapism. Even if you’re one of the richest people in the world, you can’t live to be eighteen again. You can’t retroactively secure a stable career path or enter a housing market you’ve already missed. The “Disney Adult” subculture (adults who are obsessed with all things Disney), many newly manufactured and expensive Lego bricks for adults, our obsession with restarts – it all points to the same longing for a time when the world felt simpler because you were a stupid child who didn’t understand how things worked or what would be taken away from you.
The problem is that if enough people get stuck in this state, the framework itself collapses. The “everyone is twelve years old” theory – coined by Bluesky user @veryimportant.lawyer – puts into words the sentiment that we are in an age marked by collective regression. It’s not just that we’re putting on pajama pants and consuming superhero movies with an enthusiasm that was once reserved only for summer vacation mornings in front of the TV, but that the entire fabric of how everyone experiences and interacts with the world around us has become infantile.
The Trump administration — with its schoolyard logic, chaotic bully energy, and memes as statesmanship — may mark the first full-fledged post-adult presidency. The one who showed that the burden of office itself can be replaced by childish responsiveness and that politics can be reduced to maximizing reach setbacksverbal slaps. That nothing needs to be taken seriously anymore. And when the adults in the room themselves start screaming like twelve-year-olds, they are helping to undermine the belief that there is any order in which to grow up.
Online culture may not be the cause of all this, but it is at least a clear object of research. It rewards the immediate, hyperbolic and reactive. The childish. We communicate through emojis, gifs and reaction images with exaggerated facial expressions. We roll our eyes and hide behind “nothing ever happens” memes, an image macro used to dismiss dramatic world events as manipulated or insignificant.
It acts as a cynical shield against the knowledge that we have been robbed of the ability to imagine a future that doesn’t look exactly like the past – while simultaneously reducing the past to a level of nostalgia ready for reboots or propaganda.
By the mid-1980s, television series like The Golden Girls (with the much better Swedish name Pantertanter) were able to portray women in their fifties as socially capable women with the competitive elements of youth traded for authority and a free pass from constant judgment. Old age came with a uniform: shoulder pads, short perms and nylon stockings.
Maybe it’s as simple as we don’t yet know what the markings would look like today if we didn’t have secure pensions or shoulder pads. Maybe every generation feels like they’re drifting and unable to be adults properly, and the difference is that we’ve made our insecurities visible. Made it possible Contents.
But even if that’s true – even if our image of adulthood is simply outdated, designed by costume designers in the ’80s – there’s something dark about the way we refuse to age. Because in the long run it is a refusal to leave the room. Bryan Johnson goes from an eccentric health regimen to literally sucking future generations dry. Musk’s obsession with impressing internet strangers is not only pathetic, but also directly contributes to forces seeking to dismantle democracy that younger generations have barely had the opportunity to experience.
Political power is hoarded by septuagenarians who still talk like they are rebels
When those who should pass the torch refuse to let go, the system shuts down. Career paths that should be open to new talent are blocked by those who refuse – or cannot afford – to retire. Homes that should be in circulation are being held back by those who already own ten properties. Political power is hoarded by septuagenarians who still talk like they are rebels, even though they are now the establishment itself.
Infantilization seems to be increasing in the void between the dead old adulthood and the reshaped new one. It’s more a question of symptom than cause. If nothing knows what it means to grow up, if there are no markers left, there is nothing that really drives us forward.
And as long as the torch is never passed, as long as those in power continue to behave like twelve-year-olds instead of securing the material adult space of others, the question remains unanswered.
And the skin stays smooth.
And the blood plasma continues to flow.
And the algorithm continues to show you as you were at twenty-five.
Read other texts by Mya Åhbeck Öhrman, such as “How Eating Disorder Content Spreads on Social Media” and “How Should We Understand Terror in the Age of Brain Rot?”
