Society's Youth Obsession Is Draining Our Wallets – YouTube Dictation Transcript & Vocabulary

1.have you ever dreamt of a better version of yourself younger more beautiful more perfect we have a problem and that is that we as a culture are obsessed with not aging you know what's wrong with that though if you are not aging you are dead there's no way around it but anti-aging culture does not want you to realize that which is why they instead push expensive products and treatments and procedures on us constantly they put youth on a pedestal that even the young can't reach and they profit off our insecurity and our fears around mortality this topic of anti-aging is a huge one but I'm going to try my best to dive into it today so that we can at least start the conversation about how anti-aging culture is keeping all of us miserable and of course poor if you are new here I am Cara and my channel is all about discussing the different intersections of money media and culture i have videos on things like how FOMO culture keeps you poor and influencers faking halls and also ones dissecting financial concepts like being house poor or car poor i also write a Substack newsletter that dives more into money and media called the Pop Finance Report so go subscribe to that too if you want some essay goodies in your inbox but back to how anti-aging culture keeps us poor in this video I want to talk not just about the specific expensive products that are shoved down our throats by the beauty and wellness industries but also the underlying anxieties that drive us to throw money at anti-aging in the first place i mean how did we get here to a place where we have billionaires openly spending millions a year trying to stay young and where girls younger than 10 years old have expensive multi-step skincare routines but first comes first let's talk about the most obvious part of anti-aging culture and that is the insane number of products and procedures sold in the name of looking young a lot will happen in your life wrinkles just won't here's a list of just some of the popular anti-aging products and services out there and their estimated costs that you funnel your hard-earned money toward you got retinol cream for $100 vitamin serum for 50 peptide creams for $40 collagen supplements for $25 light therapy mask for $500 micro needling for $1,000 a session Botox for $400 every 3 months chemical peels for $300 IV drips for $250 a session add in some newer age biohacking offers and you've also got yourself cryotherapy for $100 a session hyperbaric oxygen therapy for $400 a session and if you really want to go all out and experiment you can even throw down $50,000 plus dollars on stem cell therapy the worst part isn't just that this is an incomplete list meaning there are plenty of other anti-aging costs that you could rack up no the worst part is that none of these costs are one-time expenses anti-aging isn't just a product that you buy it is a lifestyle that you rent forever according to Statista quote "The global market for anti-aging products was valued at around $47 billion in 2023 and is expected to increase to nearly $80 billion by the beginning of the next decade in other words this is only the beginning it's hard to say how much people are on average spending on anti-aging but we do know that millennials and Gen Z's spend on average over $2,000 a year on beauty products and that according to Refined MD the average American is spending $15,000 on skinincare in their lifetime in my newsletter the Pop Finance Report our first post was titled "I can't retire but at least I was hot in my 20s." And it touches on the opportunity cost of spending so much money on beauty as I mentioned in that post if the crazy amount of money toward beauty products was instead invested even just a portion of it was invested we would likely end up millionaires by the age of retirement but instead that money is going toward companies that are marketing the perfect product anti-aging is the ultimate offering from a business perspective because it can never truly be achieved so you always have to keep chasing and buying anti-aging itself is a madeup marketing phrase one that promises an outcome that nature will literally not allow to happen its desire stems from something that everyone experiences the passage of time and it's a product that taps into our primal fears aka our fears of dying insecurity is profitable and based on how many anti-aging products are out there rest assured that how we are framing aging and our culture right now is making us collectively insecure speaking of insecure you 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minutes after breakfast I will squeeze in a few additional therapies daily I do red and near infrared light therapy 6 minutes a day currently I have two additional therapies one is hyperbaric oxygen therapy and second is focused shockwave therapy which I'm doing for my entire body first in world his anti-aging regimen one that's ethos is characterized by his tagline don't die is a peak into where anti-aging culture is heading because skin care serums Botox micro needling treatments they're all heavily focused on just looking young but Brian Johnson is a great example of the biohacking that's becoming popular in anti-aging discussions where there's a move from buying the aesthetics of youth to the biology of youth to be clear I don't think that this is inherently a bad thing i think it's good that we as humans are pushing science to upend previous beliefs if we didn't continue doing that we would still be in a world where getting an infection is a death sentence or cataracts meant that you would never see again and so I'm not interested in demonizing what Brian Johnson is doing he's using his own money he publishes his learnings for free but I do think it's still worth being very wary of how anti-aging culture is developing newer and more expensive methods for us to invest in that don't yet have meaningful results like yes you could buy your very own $145,000 hyperbaric chamber which is a popular anti-aging gadget these days but that money could also go to a lot of other places that could more likely make your life longer and more enjoyable that is the crazy thing about all of this while I was writing this video I was thinking about how the things that we know really move the needle when it comes to health and even just how young we look cost very little a lot of times anti-aging is actually about what not to consume versus what to consume like not drinking alcohol not smoking avoiding drugs going to bed earlier going outside for walks those things are all free if not things that would actually help you save money in the long run i made a video a while ago on how alcohol keeps you poor and in it I calculate that investing the money that you would have spent on alcohol over your lifetime leaves you with over $4 million with $4 million lying around you could sure splurge on one of those hyperbaric chambers or you know you could spend on things that have a way stronger case of extending your lifetime like annual doctor visits flossing on a daily basis a gym membership so you can do resistance training or even something as basic and simple and cheap as just getting new carbon monoxide testers in your home we don't think about these things as anti-aging expenses because remember anti-aging is a marketing term for a specific type of product or service and yet it's things like regular physicals and blood work and flossing where your money could realistically translate into a longer healthier life as for looking younger and the hordes of money that we throw at various skin care products and procedures I always come back to this one stat and that is that it is widely accepted that around 90% of visible skin aging is a direct result of sun exposure let me say that again because I think this needs to be sunken into our cultural consciousness 90% of visible skin aging is a direct result of sun exposure the serums the retinol the face masks the micro needling the vampire facials the collagen supplements the preventative Botox the effect of those treatments if they have any effect at all is minuscule compared to just putting on sunscreen and yes you can find plenty of expensive sunscreens these days but you can also find very cheap and very effective sunscreens to show how big an impact the sun has on skin wrinkling take a look at this man who drove a truck for 28 years where half of his face was exposed to the sun there's a visible difference in the two sides of his face because of it now this doesn't mean that avoiding the sun is going to keep all visible signs of aging away at the end of the day we are all still meatuits and meat suits lose muscle they lose facial fat they lose telomeres plus being in the sun and enjoying the day is part of being human it's part of being alive so don't think that this is me advocating for us all to become cave dwellers who only come out at night i do think that everyone should try to wear sunscreen every single day for the cancer reduction effects alone but I think we also need to interrogate why we are so terrified of looking our age it's easy to pin all of this anti-aging stuff on social media or latestage capitalism and not to say that those aren't playing a role but this stuff is not entirely new ancient Roman elites would rub animal fat and crocodile dung on their skin for youthful glows and ancient Chinese emperors took what they thought were immortality elixirs made of mercury and jade powders which no surprise here often ended up shortening rather than lengthening their lives i mean it was mercury what are you expecting our fear of aging is deeply deeply human because underneath all the elixirs animal dung fancy Korean skincare products beneath all of it is this primal fear of death we don't want to die and aging is this physical marker that time is passing and we are changing with it oh I'm like the crypt keeper that being said I do think that there is a cultural element to this one that we can learn a lot from yes we are all animals who want to survive but our cultural upbringing informs how we think about death and aging and thus how obsessed we might be with anti-aging culture in the bits of research I could find it seems like cultures that explicitly value elders and acknowledge the unique gifts that you gain as you age they appear to have less agism and less obsession with retaining youth the book Aegism marks the cultural divide as one between collectivism and individualism saying quote "While individualistic cultures are perceived as adhering to a more youthoriented worldview and having more negative beliefs regarding the elderly and the aging process collectivist traditional cultures are perceived as cherishing values that support and honor the elderly in other words I think that our extreme anti-aging culture and thus the money that we are willing to pour into it is influenced heavily by how we embrace the elderly in our society and it makes sense i'm American and I definitely feel like we have a culture where you're basically tossed aside and deemed irrelevant at a certain age i know people and transparently I've been that person sometimes who can sometimes roll their eyes at an older co-orker when they say something and like honestly that is not cool and this idea of being past your prime is so nefarious as much as I participate in this joke with friends too I think we should even question the use of the phrase boomer constantly beneath some of the well-intentioned criticism of boomer culture I think it's also a way for us to completely dismiss an entire group of people just because we see them as irrelevant to modern culture and I think that ends up hurting us in the long run i watched the movie The Substance recently i called it research for this video and the movie dealt with the same idea of becoming irrelevant as you age especially as a woman in media i'll try to avoid sharing major spoilers from the movie but if you don't want to hear a single detail about it just skip ahead on this part i have timestamps in the video but in the substance Elizabeth receives a bouquet of flowers that read "Thank you for all your years with us you were amazing." Were past tense as if she's dead similarly the man at the diner tells her quote "It is hard to remember that you still deserve to exist that you still matter." And while yes parts of the culture around Elizabeth are telling her that she's past her prime and irrelevant so much of the movie struggle comes from the internal message that Elizabeth tells herself when she's Elizabeth she's just waiting to be Sue again it's like she doesn't feel as if she deserves to participate in her own life or to even be perceived that leads her to what I found was one of the most heartbreaking scenes of the movie where she keeps doubting her look before a date comparing herself to the young aesthetic on the billboard and ultimately she skips the date altogether okay no more substance specific details from here on out but I do want to reiterate how I think that women experience the pressures of anti-aging culture even more than men at least when it comes to appearances like how women are seen as expired while men can be silver foxes i do want to talk more about that another time i want to make a whole video about the insane beauty pressures that are put on young girls but for now all I will say is that if I wanted to create you know a patriarchal system to keep women from embracing their independence so that they were reliant on men alone I would tell them that their peak value is in youth specifically like late teens early 20s you know before the frontal lobe is fully developed and I'd bet you it would be mighty effective at controlling those women but moving on saving that conversation for another video since this video is getting quite long I want to end with one final section how can we combat anti-aging culture we know that anti-aging culture is making us poor and miserable but how do we fix it in my opinion the most important step is to start refraraming aging for ourselves here's what I tell myself and no I'm not over anti-aging culture i too have absorbed decades of anti-aging propaganda i still worry about it too much but this is a mindset that has helped me a little bit and that is that for one not everyone gets to age aging is a privilege something I think about are the people my age that I knew who passed away at different points in my life friends and family friends classmates local news stories i've known people who were my age who passed away when we were both seven when we were both 14 when we were both graduating high school when we were both in college and I think about them often because I think it helps me recognize that every day I live and every wrinkle I accumulate is one that they didn't get to have and for that alone I should be so incredibly grateful in other words every mark that we have is evidence of a life lived i think if we really want to address our fears around aging and mortality the actual best remedy is living a life that we are proud of living you're so beautiful i know it because then we can look back at every sign of aging with pride and joy and nostalgia rather than envy for a younger time i want to go out thinking "Wow that was a great life i had so so much fun and thinking more positively about aging isn't just some woo woo thing that helps you cope it could actually help you live longer too jane Fonda the 87year-old activist and actress did a segment with anti-agism advocate Ashton Appleite about positive aging beliefs people with more positive age beliefs lived an average of 7 and 1/2 years longer than people who equated aging with disease and decline in other words one way to live longer is just to have a good attitude and what I found most interesting from that segment which I'll link down below is that community is critical so what do we need to make that happiness curve rise it's having a solid community the most important component of a good old age the whole segment is worth watching but that part stood out to me because it made me realize this if we really want to invest money and time into anti-aging efforts we should be investing money and time into our communities hosting friends checking in on family and neighbors paying for art classes or group dance lessons sure buy a few nice moisturizers keep your sunscreen stocked and maintain healthy habits but if you're going to spend money spending it on enriching your social connections seems like the best way we can get a life return on investment but what do you think what are your thoughts on anti-aging culture and do you think that anti-aging spending is going to get worse or better in the future let me know your thoughts in the comments below and if you want more videos like this one go watch my video on how FOMO culture keeps you poor if you want to support this channel besides subscribing which you should definitely go do you can also find links to my Patreon Etsy and the newsletter all down below and a huge huge thank you for watching today i'll see you next time bye