'How social media has totally screwed up our ageing process'
As one of the first generation of women to age digitally, author Megan Angelo is not just wrinkle obsessing but says social media has stunted our internal growth too
As one of the first generation of women to age digitally, author Megan Angelo is not just wrinkle obsessing but says social media has stunted our internal growth too
If you start at the beginning and click through all of the pictures of me online, you might only see a visual saga—the story a woman who, in the face of staggering evidence to the contrary, believes, deep down, she’s supposed to have bangs. But I see myself ageing fifteen years in ninety seconds.
I for one, am haunted on nearly a daily basis. The apparitions are terrifying, and always there, piling up on social media: There’s bridal me, bridesmaid me, pregnant me. Going out every night in New York before children me, not-a-care-in-the-world-what-are-cares-me, in college. There’s teenage ballerina me, courtesy of someone who has a photo scanner. There’s the me who used to love that jumpsuit that no longer fits, the me who had a column in a magazine that’s no longer in print.
I used to use social media to snoop on other people; now, all too often, I use it to stalk my former selves. The nearness of those ghosts is messing deeply with the way I grow older. I wonder, as I scroll: Why has my skin deflated? (Cue me toppling into a serums e-commerce hole.) How was my hair that full? (Surely, if I just browse two or three thousand haircuts on Pinterest, I’ll find the key to replicating the volume.) When did I stop making such nice efforts to get out, to do my makeup daily? (Witness me resolving to do both things more, despite knowing full well that I have three children under five.)
I’m not the first thirty-five-year-old woman to obsess about what she used to look like. But I am part of the first generation of women to have fewer of those old photos in a shoebox on a shelf and more of them sitting on platforms I visit every day. Which can screw with one’s head: when it’s so easy to click over to your former, bouncy-skinned self, it’s hard to understand why it’s impossible, now, to hold yourself to that standard.
I didn’t imagine I’d end up here, when I got on social media. I can remember the day I joined Facebook. It was 2003. I was in my second year at college, sitting at the desk bolted into the wall of my dorm room. If my friends and I didn’t click accept at the exact same moment, cult-suicide style, I’m sure we came close. Facebook had just widened its ranks to include our school, and we cared only about what it could do for us within the world we already knew. Maybe it would give us more info about the guys we liked on campus, or give us clues as to who had partied where the night before. (As a contacts list, it was supplementary: We had a paper facebook, lowercase-f, filled with the pictures and hometowns and landline extensions of everyone in our class.) I had no interest in meeting anyone new, or advertising myself. I didn’t upload a profile photo for week - digital cameras, what a hassle! - and I certainly couldn’t conceive of a future in which all my aunts would show up and poke me. I didn’t imagine a future at all. Facebook, I thought, was a college thing. Like party themes with 'ho' in the name and pizza fries at 3am.
But here we are, in the year 2020, and I am still on Facebook, along with Twitter and Instagram. Social media is the longest and least intentional long-term commitment of my life. And I think it’s hurt my ageing process more than the sun and those aforementioned fries combined. It’s not just the wrinkles-related obsessing; it’s stunted my internal growth, too. There’s an arc to this habit I’ve had, for decades now, of seeing everyone I know online: When I was in college, it was perfectly natural. Why, I’d just been with my high school friends all day, every day, a minute ago. When I was in my twenties, it seemed necessary - how else, but social media, to keep up with all the jobs and engagements? My thirties is where things have gotten weird. I’ve been watching these people now for so many years since I actually, physically knew them. Decades-old events and reputations inform my context of full-grown adults. Of course, I think, reviewing an old classmate’s holiday family photos. She always had to have everything just perfect. Remember the Halloween parade float debacle of ’99? On the internet, I am never not seventeen. Which is not a good thing when, as soon as you look up from your phone, you’re supposed to be thirty-five. I suspect that it won’t be any more flattering when I’m fifty, sixty, seventy.
Marie Claire Newsletter
Celebrity news, beauty, fashion advice, and fascinating features, delivered straight to your inbox!
So how, as the first generation of women ageing digitally, do we put the past away? A shoebox on the closet shelf doesn’t work. We don’t have anything to put in it. It’s all online, and if we detag or deactivate, we’ve just erased a half-life’s worth of memories.
What I’m working on, instead, is trying to detach. To try to see everyone, including myself, as people who grow and change and age because we’re actually supposed to. To accept that the ghosts aren’t going anywhere. To ignore them, for the most part- I routinely un-install Facebook from my phone, for a break- and to try to reframe their presence when I fail. They’re evidence of how lucky I am to have been alive this long, in an able body, enjoying so many experiences, meeting so many people. And they’re good reminders not to get bangs. The temptation never goes away.
* Followers by Megan Angelo, £7.99 (HQ, HarperCollins) is on sale now
Maria Coole is a contributing editor on Marie Claire.
Hello Marie Claire readers – you have reached your daily destination. I really hope you’re enjoying our reads and I'm very interested to know what you shared, liked and didn’t like (gah, it happens) by emailing me at: maria.coole@freelance.ti-media.com
But if you fancy finding out who you’re venting to then let me tell you I’m the one on the team that remembers the Spice Girls the first time round. I confidently predicted they’d be a one-hit wonder in the pages of Bliss magazine where I was deputy editor through the second half of the 90s. Having soundly killed any career ambitions in music journalism I’ve managed to keep myself in glow-boosting moisturisers and theatre tickets with a centuries-spanning career in journalism.
Yes, predating t’internet, when 'I’ll fax you' was grunted down a phone with a cord attached to it; when Glastonbury was still accessible by casually going under or over a flimsy fence; when gatecrashing a Foo Fighters aftershow party was easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy and tapping Dave Grohl on the shoulder was... oh sorry I like to ramble.
Originally born and bred in that there Welsh seaside town kindly given a new lease of life by Gavin & Stacey, I started out as a junior writer for the Girl Guides and eventually earned enough Brownie points to move on and have a blast as deputy editor of Bliss, New Woman and editor of People newspaper magazine. I was on the launch team of Look in 2007 - where I stuck around as deputy editor and acting editor for almost ten years - shaping a magazine and website at the forefront of body positivity, mental wellbeing and empowering features. More recently, I’ve been Closer executive editor, assistant editor at the Financial Times’s How To Spend It (yes thanks, no probs with that life skill) and now I’m making my inner fangirl’s dream come true by working on this agenda-setting brand, the one that inspired me to become a journalist when Marie Claire launched back in 1988.
I’m a theatre addict, lover of Marvel franchises, most hard cheeses, all types of trees, half-price Itsu, cats, Dr Who, cherry tomatoes, Curly-Wurly, cats, blueberries, cats, boiled eggs, cats, maxi dresses, cats, Adidas shelltops, cats and their kittens. I’ve never knowingly operated any household white goods and once served Ripples as a main course. And finally, always remember what the late great Nora Ephron said, ‘Everything is copy.’