Damn, 50 used to be "old"!

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Wil Wheaton was born in 1972, so he’s 47 now.

Patrick Stewart is 77 now. He was 47 when STNG started in 1987.

Yes, Wesley is now Jean-Luc’s age.

Wil looks a lot younger than Jean-Luc ever did. Some of that is the hair (or lack thereof) obviously; that makes a huge difference.

Overall though, I think people are not falling into the appearance stereotypes that were expected in earlier generations. Hair coloring and dressing fashionably. Taking better care of yourself via exercising etc. helps even if you don’t have access to Hollywood-level surgery etc.

I’m 60 - and I think I look younger than my mother did at the same age. To be fair: she was a lifelong smoker which really aged her face; it was not helped by a lifetime of spending time in the sun pre-sunscreen. And I’m carrying around a bit more weight so any incipient wrinkles are pretty well plumped out, but doctors have actually been surprised when I told them my age.

Look at photos of your parents at your current age. Who looks younger?

42

I think the prevalence of sunscreen and the dramatic decrease in smoking in the 45-55 set relative to years past has made a huge difference in how we look compared to people who turned 50 in previous decades.

I also think that a lot more people are more concerned about their appearances and/or some combination of more spending cash or cheaper cosmetics have made it possible for more hair dye, baldness treatments and the like to be in play for people turning 50 nowadays than in say… 1983. Stuff like Rogaine sells like hotcakes to younger men worried about losing their hair, and there are all sorts of male-oriented hair dyes and the like nowadays, when back then it was “Grecian Formula” and that was about all there was to be had.

Hair loss in men does a LOT for making you look older. Look at these pictures of Patrick Stewart playing a character with hair, and his actual look when he was 35.

43

I turned 50 last Thursday, and I still think 50 is old (just not ‘me’ old).

44

That’s guy’s ill.

45

I don’t know if that’s a good example, though. Swanson was made-up and lit to look-- well, disturbing, actually, and not particularly young. And the fact is that even today, you couldn’t begin a career in Hollywood playing ingenues, the way most women do, at 50.

And there were people in the Golden Age who just looked young.* In I Remember Mama*, Irene Dunne had to wear age make-up to convincingly appear-- the age she actually was! Dunne had successfully lied about her age since the start of her career, first slicing about 3 years off to be 24 when she was 27, then it took her another 5 years to turn 30. She stuck to her story after that, and kept everyone convinced she was 5 or 6 years younger than her real age. And even believing her fake age, the producers of I Remember Mama thought she needed age make-up to look right for the part.

My favorite example of what used to be “old farts” to Baby Boomers," and now are practically youthful is 43. That’s how old Edith Bunker was during the first season of All in the Family. Really. There’s an episode where Edith goes to her 25th high school reunion.

The first episode of that show is Archie & Edith’s 22nd anniversary, which means Edith was 21 when they married, in 1947 (after Archie got back from “the big one”). But Gloria was even younger when she married Mike. My mother was married in 1963, at 23. Cripes, it was a different time.

I think it’s marriage and kids that age you.

I’ll tell you when I felt old, though. It was when Star Wars turned 40. Stars Wars was at that point, older, than the Wizard of Oz was when I was born. It’s now older than Metropolis was when I was born. Man, am I an old crank. I’m only 40 years younger than talking movies.

46

In Psycho, Marion steals $40,000 and goes on the run to pay her boyfriend’s debts so she’ll marry her. She’s desperate, because she’s never been married, and she’s IN HER MID-THIRTIES!

We’re never told her exact age, but she makes several references to “a certain age,” which most people would assume was 34, 35 or 36 (ie, on the backside of 30, or the precipice of it). Janet Leigh was 33 at the time.

There was a nearly shot-for-shot remake of Psycho in 1998, with the film set in 1998-- $40,000 becomes $400,000, etc. Someone should have clued them in that they needed to update Marion’s motive.

47

My mom travels a lot, and she’s been trying to get all of the exotic places checked off her list before she gets old. Her most recent trip was to Uzbekistan and environs, with the trips before that being to Mongolia, Tanzania, and Antarctica.

She turns 80 this spring.

48

It’s also true that we are not surprised when people who have lived in poverty, or working poor, look older than their age. But in those days many middle class people had hard labor jobs we would now associate with working poor. Even daily factory work today seldom requires the kind of back-breaking labor it did back then. The bodily toll is in small, repetitive hand movements or bending that slowly wear down joints or inflame tendons.

In the 50’s and 60’s, and job ad that said “must be able to lift 40 lbs” really meant you would be doing that several times per hour all day long. Now a conveyor belt would transport those goods for you. Even farmers - while they still get a whole lot of exercise - by and large do a lot less lifting and pushing than they used to.

If you go to places like mining towns, where true back breaking labor is the daily norm, 50 is still plenty old.

49

I wasn’t kidding when I said marriage and kids age you. I think the trend toward marrying older and having fewer kids has a lot to do with people staying youngish longer.

I have one child, and I had him when I was 38. Right before I got pregnant, I still looked about 30, 31. By the time my son was 2, I had aged about 5 years.

My mother had just two kids, which was a small family for my time, and she had them relatively late-- not very, just slightly. She was 27 when I was born, and 32 when my brother was born. She looked her age when she was younger, but she aged slowly, and by the time she was 70, she could have passed for 58. Then she got cancer, and the chemo aged her fast. But before then, she looked really young.

I also wonder if the reason a lot of people in Hollywood looked much younger than the typical US adult from the start of cinema until recently (when the general public has closed the gap quite a lot) is that Hollywood performers, especially women, have tended to have many fewer children, and the really famous ones have been able to hire nannies, and send the kids to boarding schools.

Your point is well-taken about physical labor aging you, but I suspect even that has eased somewhat, because things like workman’s comp and short-term disability, have forced employers to train employees to “work smarter.” When I was an interpreter, I was in a lot of different workplaces, and I saw supervisors call out employees for lifting incorrectly-- ie, through the back, not the legs, and soforth. People wear lifting belts, and while they are not exactly treated like princes, they get better care now than they used to. People get care for injuries on the spot, and get time off, because employers know that giving a little now saves them a lot later-- it’s less about caring, than about what saves money in the long run, but it does make people’s lives better.

Even among the hardest working, 50 is still the new 40. Maybe not the new 30, like it is among the middle and upper classes, but still, there have been gains for everyone.

50

The reason a lot of people in Hollywood look younger than typical US adults is that they are selected for their youthful attractiveness and then utilize significant resources to maintain their appearances as such.

I find it amusing that they “de-aged” Stewart for a scene in one of the X-Men movies. Here is a picture of in Dune at age 44, where he apparently stopped aging:
https://www.google.com/search?q=patrick+stewart+dune&rlz=1C1CHBF_enUS853US853&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiHotbJ0fXmAhULheAKHfscCTIQ_AUoAXoECBgQAw&biw=1523&bih=706&dpr=1.25#imgrc=VrZgGcCvn_1o_M:

51

Country singer Grandpa Jones started that bit when he was in this 20’s.

52

I thought Swanson looked kinda hot in Sunset Boulevard!

53

There have been huge changes in hair and clothing styles also - in a lot of older pictures, men tend to have a style that comes off as very old that is generally avoided today. It used to be that a guy going bald would wear his side hair somewhat long and maybe go for a combover, and men didn’t dye their hair. Now guys don’t tend to go for that balding ‘Benjamin Franklin’ look, they either go for treatments to avoid it, modern hair enhancements (which look better than older toupees), or they embrace the lack of hair and go for a shaved or almost shaved look, which doesn’t scream ‘old guy’ as much. Same with greying hair, dying is a lot more common now on both men and women. It also doesn’t help that a lot of pics come from the 70s, (and late 60s/early 80s) where there was a thing for longer hair and a more ‘natural’ look. Similarly in clothing, at one time people would just switch to ‘old person’ clothes as they got a bit older, now people are more likely to wear stylish or casual clothes than the bland polyester of yore.

So while the stuff about health and skin is true, I think that there’s a lot of style that comes into it too. If you take the original and have Paul Rudd put on 40 pounds, grow his hair and moustache out, and dye them white like Wilfred Brimley, he would still look younger but not the steep contrast you see there.

54

I think a lot of it has to do with lifestyle these days. In the old days, people tended to get married young, have kids and work the same job for the rest of their lives. So I think there was both a tendency to associate age more closely with what was going on in people’s lives and a tendency to sort of let yourself go once you got “locked in”. Like Archie and Edith looked “old” because they hadn’t moved from the couch in 30 years.

These days, people get married later, they change jobs, they get divorced. Some never have kids or get married. So I think that tends to make people seem “young” in many ways. Or at least less “old” in a sense of not doing anything and letting their appearance go to shit.
I’m 47 and my kids are 5 and under. And I actually have a fair number of friends and relatives all within about 3-5 years age with kids around the same age as mine.
I ran my first Spartan obstacle race when I was 41.
This week I’m in new hire training for my job and much of my class is in their 40s and 50s. And this is a cutting edge Silicon Valley tech company.
A couple of the guys my age in class (as well as a few of my friends) are divorced and constantly talk about all the dating apps they are into.

It’s not so much anyone my age is going to pass for a 30 year old. I think it’s more like people don’t associate getting older with just sitting around the house waiting to die.