We tend to think our obsession with youth is modern.
Social media. Hollywood. Filters. Algorithms.
But it didn’t start there.
It started much earlier—and much more intentionally than most people realize.
When I spoke with Phoebe Deer, what struck me immediately was this:
Youth, beauty, and image have long been used as tools of power.
his isn’t a new pressure we’re experiencing. It’s an inherited one.
And if you go back to Queen Elizabeth I, you can see it clearly.
Her image wasn’t accidental.
It was constructed.
Carefully.
Strategically.
The pale skin. The red hair. The controlled narrative around her identity, even her personal life—it all served a purpose.
Because her appearance wasn’t just about beauty.
It was about authority.
And once you understand that, something shifts.
Because you realize that what we often accept as “natural beauty standards” are actually shaped by history, messaging, and repetition.
They were designed to influence perception.
And they worked.
What’s interesting is how little has changed.
We still associate youth with value.
We still treat aging as something to resist.
We still measure appearance against a standard that was never neutral to begin with.
Only now, instead of royal portraits, we have curated feeds.
Instead of court politics, we have algorithms.
But the underlying idea is the same.
You’re supposed to look a certain way.
And if you don’t, you’re supposed to fix it.
But here’s the question we don’t ask often enough:
Who decided that?
And more importantly:
Why did we agree?
Because once you start questioning it, the entire structure becomes less stable.
You begin to see that what you’ve been trying to achieve might not even be your idea.
It might be something you absorbed.
Repeated.
Accepted.
And that’s where the opportunity is.
Not in rejecting everything—but in becoming aware of what you’re participating in.
Aging is not a failure.
It’s not something that needs to be corrected or hidden.
It’s something that has been reframed, over time, as a problem.
And when you see that clearly, you get to decide something different.
You get to step out of the constant comparison.
You get to stop chasing a version of yourself that doesn’t exist.
What I took from this conversation is simple, but not easy:
You don’t have to fight something that was never yours to begin with.
The pressure to stay young isn’t just cultural.
It’s historical.
And once you see that, you can start deciding what actually matters to you.
If this made you think differently, share it with someone who needs a new perspective.
And make sure you’re subscribed to Party’s Over—because these are the conversations that shift how you see things.