What does it really mean to ‘age well’?

(Pexels/Monica Silvestre)

When we think about the quest to slow aging, perhaps no one is more monomaniacal about the pursuit than American tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson, who reportedly spends around US$2 million per year on anti-aging treatments and has become notorious online for his rigorous routine.

His mission — to halt his body’s natural response to time and gravity — includes numerous hours in the gym, intermittent fasting, red light therapy and swallowing over 100 supplements each day. At one point, he controversially co-ordinated trigenerational blood transfusions, injecting his 17-year-old son’s plasma and passing his own to his 70-year-old father.

In 2025, he claimed to have successfully slowed down his biological aging process so much that he has a birthday every 19 months.

Johnson’s fixation may sound dystopian, but it’s not uniquely modern. In fact, the question of aging well is something Shamita Sharmacharja, curator at London’s Wellcome Collection, ponders in her latest exhibition — “The Coming of Age” — a show that sweeps across five centuries, including more than 120 artworks and objects that deal with the reality of growing older, from the freedom and joy it can offer, to the accompanying illness and anxiety.

Its contents range from 19th-century anti-aging pills, to biologist Charles Darwin’s walking stick, to striking nude self-portraits by then-sexagenarian British photographer John Coplans.

“When I said I’m working on an exhibition about aging, (reactions were) invariably the same,” she said in the gallery space during the exhibition preview. People sighed, slumped their shoulders, or replied with the melancholic resignation that “it comes for us all.”

The response interested Sharmacharja, who wanted to include in the showcase “where our attitudes to aging come from.”

The selection of objects reveal how our obsession with reversing the clock is, really, old news.

It begins with a medieval woodcut from 1536, in which a throng of elderly people crowd into a spring-like bath, flinging their walking sticks in the air and emerging smooth-skinned, plump and spritely.

This myth of regenerative waters has long captured human imagination — though now, the so-called Fountain of Youth is not so much a fantastical pool as it is the name of any number of beauty serums, moisturisers and aesthetics clinics.

Discussions around aging have perhaps never felt more charged, or more pervasive than of late. Wrinkles, sun spots and sagging skin have become so demonized, that even teenagers — decades away from this reality — and increasingly men, previously exempt from this ruinous beauty standard, have started to fear, anticipate and prepare for their arrival. Facelifts, previously a rarefied surgery for the over-60s crowd, have been embraced by those under 40 and even 30. It was once an irrefutable fact that a visage would change with life’s seasons, but now an alternative reality has emerged: the “forever 35” face.

Yet as the exhibition notes, life expectancies are now rising higher than any other time in history. This presents its own catalogue of issues. A longer life does not equate to a happy one, as one’s financial means drastically impact not only how quickly we age, but our quality of life. In short: wealth is health. This disparity was particularly stark during the COVID-19 pandemic, which Sharmacharja said “really highlighted the way we talk about age.” Almost overnight, being older was discussed exclusively in terms of “vulnerability and responsibility,” said Sharmacharja. But the pandemic — which disproportionately impacted lower-income communities and ethnic minorities — also exposed health inequality on a global stage in real time. “The fact that there’s a gap when we’re born, and it just gets wider and wider as we get older,” she said.

Sharmacharja wanted the show to strike a balance: challenging ageism without diminishing the real experience of mid-life anxiety, and the complicated reality of illness and caring responsibilities. A single photo from Elinor Carucci’s series “Midlife” — a photography series capturing the first signs of aging as noticed by her and her partner — immortalizes the discovery of an early sprouting grey hair. Elsewhere, Paula Rego’s two self portraits from 2017 show the artist howling through expressive pastel strokes. After a serious fall at 81, Rego found solace in remaking her bruised face on paper. “I didn’t like the fall,” she is quoted in the exhibition as saying. “But the self-portraits I liked doing. I had something to show.”

Across the exhibition, it quickly becomes clear that the idea of growing older is about as elastic as a pair of pull-on pants. There is a cheeky, mischievous look on the face of sculptor and artist Louis Bourgeois, then aged 70, in a photograph taken by her friend Robert Mapplethorpe; while a 2022 video by the activist artist Gisèle Lalonde embraces her greying, silvering locks — which she affectionately called her “hag hair.” In another corner, two ornately framed images by Diana Kaumba, a stylist based in New York, depict a fashion shoot for her grandmother in Zambia. Posing with stacked gold platform heels and crystal-embellished sunglasses, Kaumba’s grandmother rebels against the stereotype of a muted, dowdy elderly woman through the medium of power dressing.

Aging well, invariably, means different things to different people. Of course, there is Johnson’s ilk — those we might define as chasing uncanny self-preservation at any financial cost. (Clips from the Netflix documentary about the millionaire, “Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever,” play on repeat in the exhibition next to a 1970s dewar flask once used in the pseudo-science of cryogenics). A smooth forehead, lack of wrinkles, quantifiable, low biological age is the goal for some. Self-acceptance, independence and dignity is the ultimate prize for others. In testimonies gathered by the Centre for Ageing Better and displayed in the exhibition, many simply define aging well as financial security — life with less worry, more rest.

“I’ve come out of researching the show having a more realistic view about aging,” said Sharmacharja. “And seeing that each stage of our life is really enriched, and constrained, by the stories that we tell about it.”

By Leah Dolan, CNN