Teenage wasteland. Last week, on my daily check-in with the kids over on the CCP’s memetic superweapon, I discovered the viral TikTok filter Teenaged Look, which makes an older person look like their younger self. As you might expect, public reaction to the tool was tremendous. In viral video after viral video men and women confronted a rough semblance of their teenaged selves with stunned silence, laughter, and what appeared to be genuine tears as creators grappled with feelings of excitement, nostalgia, and regret. On Twitter, the most popular videos were collected in a long, viral thread, and framed as a new AI story, in which technological advances — in this case, one user suggested, 3D facial reconstruction made possible by neural networks — are creating a future the average person isn’t emotionally equipped to process. But the feelings I experienced while playing with the filter weren’t exactly new, and I found them more than welcome. In a sense, Teenaged Look opened a portal to my youth, and connected me back to some vein of previously forgotten exuberance. The experience was fascinating, and moving. Most importantly, it helped me remember the main thing: we need to be living forever.

First, a few examples of the filter I found particularly evocative:

From the fountain of Herodotus and the legend of Alexander to the New World explorations of Ponce de Leon, an aching nostalgia for youth has been a major theme of western mythology through all recorded history. These days, we tend to frame youth entirely in terms of beauty, as if a little bit of vanity could be the only reason a man might long for the past. But everyone knows the truth: youth is strength, virility, mental sharpness, and the freedom of raw potential. More simply, our conception of youth is inextricably linked with our fear of death, which is why a fear of mortality has accelerated as religious belief has waned, and conversations surrounding youth have become more fraught.

With nothing left in faith to ease the horror of the end, dishonesty has become a kind of sacred language. Consider the phrase “you’re perfect just the way you are,” which is exactly wrong in every way; you’ve never been perfect, you never will be perfect, and self-improvement is a good thing, actually. Perhaps counterintuitively for a tool designed to distort a person’s appearance, the teenaged filter shattered our polite lie. We don’t want to die, we want to live.

Such honesty could not be tolerated.

Immediately, team “everything sucks and you are bad” raised the question of whether the desire to ‘look hot and young’ might in fact be dangerous. A yearning for that rosy cheek? A wistful recollection of that youthful glow? I regret to inform you your desire to appear ‘less dead’ is evidence of disordered, western thinking, and is actively hurting young women. Almost at once, Teenaged Look was framed as body negative, and lumped in with a broader trend of powerful new appearance modifiers purportedly making people miserable; over the last couple years, there has been a rapid evolution from filters that change your hair color, make you look skinny, or crudely swap your gender to TikTok’s most recent “glamour” filter, which alters your bone structure, plumps your lips, adds color to your skin, and fixes your janky eyebrows — it’s “psychological warfare,” we’re told, which amounts to “pure evil.”

Haters insist by celebrating the young, the thin, and the healthy we implicitly attack the old, the fat, and the disabled, none of which are “negative” qualities. We’ve simply been conditioned to believe the good is good, but we can just as easily be conditioned to the more ascended position that bad is good as well. Age is grace, big is beautiful, and what is blindness really but a different way of seeing? Unfortunately, this is all bullshit, and everybody knows it.

Hysterical screeching of woke Teen Vogue editors be damned, the national market for “anti-aging” products is something like $100 billion. Americans spend around $60 billion a year on weight loss products and services. And I’m sorry but the “blindness is a good thing” rhetoric is too ridiculous to even counter. We can lie to ourselves all we want, but there’s no escaping human desire, nor the tragic insecurity innate of distance from desire — 

Without getting too lost in the weeds of evolutionary psychology, and the question of whether our biases toward specific heights, weights, and ‘looks’ might actually be beneficial, it’s clear ‘society’ hasn’t provoked any new biases toward youth at all. Most of the great accomplishments through history were achieved by men old enough to benefit from wisdom and experience, while still young enough to tap their last reserves of youthful strength, stamina, and clarity. Really, once you break the aging process down into its most basic — a slow and painful weakening of the body, and a dimming of the mind — it becomes clear we shouldn’t be calling distance from the process “youth” at all. We should be calling it health, and I don’t need an app to convince me it’s better to be healthy than not. But there are a couple more exciting things about the appearance filters lost in the noise of “body positivity.”

My immediate experience with Teenaged Look, and the first reason I wanted to write this piece, was not “dehumanizing” at all. To the contrary, I found the filter powerfully and unexpectedly empathizing. It started with a single example:

I knew that girl. Or, that girl reminded me of the girls I knew from high school. It was maybe something in her smile, or the way she moved. I’m not sure exactly, but I felt empathy for her, and when the video switched back to the “real” @aboymombekah, that empathy — my empathy for a total stranger — only grew with what seemed a sense of who she really was. It wasn’t what she looked like, but how she remembered, and possibly saw, herself.

As with ‘society,’ appearance filters don’t create a bias toward youth. Our bias, if you can call it that, already exists. But technology like this does help us hack around the bias. In a world increasingly online, with a sizeable and growing fraction of the population working from home, it’s easy to imagine an immediate future in which most people present as they wish. I’m not talking about giant cartoon animals (though if that’s your thing, by all means, go off), but slightly altered versions of ourselves that better reflect how we feel. It doesn’t matter if it’s weird to wrap your head around because it’s all so new, there’s no good moral reason to tether our virtual selves to a physical hand we were randomly dealt, or to expect that in other people.

But then, about improving our physical hand —

I’ve never been a big “self-acceptance” guy. Not only do people want change, the positive impact of change is self-evident, both at the scale of the individual (wealth, health, fitness, relationship work), and clearly at the scale of our world (plumbing and electrical infrastructure, medical advances, cultural and legal institutions). If our ancestors self-accepted we’d still be living in caves. On some level, even the most delusional among us understand this, which is why the well-intentioned suggestion we all “love ourselves the way we are” is so incredibly frustrating. If you really love yourself, you’ll love yourself enough to grow. To this end, what would be more helpful than empty platitudes is some kind of assistance along our path of productive self-improvement, and better tools for visualizing precisely what we want seems the first important step to that end. This is bigger than a youth filter.

It's easy to imagine many helpful versions of these tools now within our reach. The absolute dumbest category I can think of includes better tools for trying out new hairstyles, or new outfits. But what about a mirror that melts off pounds, or builds up muscle, integrated with inputs from our life? Imagine a realistic visual promise of our fitness results some weeks or months in the future, given some specific set of changes to our workout and diet. Are you going to eat a little healthier, and jog a mile a day? If you keep it up, here’s what that will look like three months from now.

Still, my own experience with Teenaged Look was powerful in a manner less to do with my appearance (after all, I’m still painfully handsome). Staring at my younger self, I started to remember how I used to think about the future. Ironically, anti-aging was itself a thing I used to care much more about before the warring Clown years.

A decade ago, I did a lot of thinking about what we term today “technological utopianism.” We were talking about a lot of things back then: robotic automation; advanced genomics capable not only of curing all disease, but bringing back extinct species; augmented and simulated reality; an almost unlimited energy from nuclear fusion; filters of the kind we’re just now beginning to see on TikTok were considered the first step toward living whatever kind of parallel life we wanted in a virtual world; and the future of artificial intelligence was considered a way to greatly amplify our ability to think, and make all of these advances possible. If the singularity were real, this entire world could maybe even happen overnight. But for me, chief among the promises of technoutopia was our path to life everlasting — either by way of uploading our consciousness, or biological immortality.

Young forever.

No matter the many people working on anti-aging technology, and no matter the amazing progress we make, the entire subject is somehow always seen by serious people as fundamentally unserious. But my hope, now, is remembering the way we used to look and feel achieves exactly what the haters seem afraid of, and triggers a desire to dramatically expand our healthy years, because desire fuels demand.

Human potential necessarily diminishes as we choose responsibility for our families and communities with age, exchanging our time for progress. These are the decisions — the sacrifices — that define our lives, and so “getting old,” in this sense at least, is a good thing. But what if at the other end of responsibility were possibility again?

In the pages of Robert Heinlein, my favorite science fiction writer, life ebbs and flows between parenthood and youth and parenthood again, as his immortal hero Lazarus Long rides a kind of earthly rollercoaster for thousands of years. In Heinlein’s universe, death is not a thing that happens to us, but a right we have, and never have to exercise. All of this is possible, but the first step is believing it’s possible. Then, I mean, we should probably also go ahead and meaningfully fund the research.

How might priorities change in a world forever young, with time horizons well beyond a century? Imagine our entire human population at physical peak, but maximized with all the benefits of wisdom. Imagine the readiness with which men and women would shoulder responsibility knowing there’s relief on the other side, and another run at the game. Imagine the projects we would undertake knowing we’d be around to actually watch our children and grandchildren enjoy their fruits. Imagine the slow research we’d pursue, the skills we’d master, and the megastructural engineering projects we’d imagine on a thousand-year time horizon. And sure, there will probably be an old wizard in a tower somewhere, eventually, consolidating resources and power over many centuries for evil. But we’ll be young and hot enough to stop him, and most importantly of all we’ll be alive.

Anyway, this is what I saw when I saw the future, which was a window to my past. Call me body negative, I don’t care.

Let’s be young forever.

-SOLANA