America Isn’t Health-Obsessed. It’s Youth-Obsessed.
At this year’s awards season, the commentary wasn’t just about performances. It was about faces.
Who looked “ageless.” Who had “done too much.” Who had “aged naturally”—a phrase that has somehow become both praise and accusation.
We say we care about health. We say we care about wellness. But hearing how we talk about aging in public, and how my patients talk about themselves in private, I’ve started to wonder if that’s true.
In my exam room, a different pattern emerges. People aren’t coming in because they feel strong, energized and well and want to build on that. They’re coming in because something visible has changed—a hollow under the eyes, a loss of volume, a new line that won’t go away. The concern is rarely, at first, about health. It’s about looking like themselves again. Or, more honestly, like a younger version of themselves.
A young woman in her 20s sat across from me recently, frustrated by changes in her face. She is disciplined, high-achieving and does everything she believes she’s supposed to do. When I asked about her diet, she hesitated before admitting she barely eats during the day – just coffee until the afternoon then a small meal at night. She also smokes to suppress her appetite.
“I know it’s not healthy,” she told me. “But I just want to look good.”
She isn’t confused – she’s just responding to the incentives she’s been given. In her world, thinness is rewarded immediately. Health is abstract, distant and largely invisible.
Another patient, decades older, came in distressed by the changes of menopause—thinning skin, loss of facial structure, a sense that her face was disappearing. She wanted a procedural fix. When I suggested we also look at her underlying biology—hormones, sleep, metabolic changes—she pulled back. She had spent years hearing that hormone therapy was dangerous. She wasn’t rejecting care; she was trying to protect herself.
Then there was a man who, by every measurable standard, had succeeded. His biomarkers were pristine. His biological age lagged years behind his chronological one. He had invested heavily in longevity—tracking, testing, optimizing.
He sat in my office and told me, quietly, that he didn’t want to live.
“I have everything,” he said. “And I don’t want any of it.”
We are living through a period of strange contradictions. Americans spend billions of dollars each year on wellness, anti-aging and longevity, reflecting not just a desire to live longer but to look as though we haven’t aged at all. We track our sleep, monitor our glucose, optimize our workouts and take supplements designed to extend our lives and yet many people feel exhausted, anxious and disconnected from their own bodies.