How Do I Want To Age?

Lately — maybe since last year — I’ve been spending more time thinking about how I want to age.
What I want to look like.
What I want my life to feel like when I’m older.

When you’re young, it feels almost impossible to imagine the day you’ll become someone’s grandma.
And, just as strange, it’s hard to look at an old person and truly picture that they were once a restless, wide-eyed twenty-something too.

I don’t know how I’ll feel about aging when it finally arrives. Maybe by then, “looking old” will no longer be something people choose, but something technology quietly edits out. With how natural and affordable cosmetic procedures are becoming — just look at Korean actresses in their fifties, or Kris Jenner this year — We’re already living in an era where the boundaries between aging and anti-aging blur.

But _for now,_ I think I want to age gracefully — naturally — with silver-gray hair and visible wrinkles.
A face that tells stories instead of hiding them.

Because, as Susan Sontag said, “A woman has to be young — or nothing.”
Aging is brutal for women in a way that it simply isn’t for men. The social construction is still deeply misogynistic: old women are either invisible, pitied, or turned into caricatures — desexualized, grotesque, or “past their prime.”

As a thirty-something woman in Seoul, I already feel that quiet pressure creeping in. I started Botox at twenty-five — not out of vanity, just because here, it feels… normal. Seoul is like the Silicon Valley of skincare: a city of clinics, lasers, and perfect jawlines.
It’s complicated — part self-care, part submission to beauty culture. I can’t quite tell where one ends and the other begins. I do it partly because I like how it makes me feel, and partly because everyone else is doing it. Maybe it’s both empowerment and insecurity disguised as one another.

Still, the question “How do I want to age?” feels like a lifelong project — something I’ll be exploring until the very end.
And just like my thoughts on marriage or kids (a topic for another day), my idea of aging will probably keep evolving.

For now, I just want to plant a seed — a small, clumsy moodboard for the future version of me.
I know it’s naïve, maybe even a little cliché, but that’s okay. You have to start somewhere.

A Moodboard for Future Me

The first names that come to mind:
Lily van der Woodsen from Gossip Girl (and yes, Kelly Rutherford herself), Cate Blanchett, Agnès Varda, Susan Sontag, the parents in Call Me by Your Name (directed by Luca Guadagnino), Tilda Swinton in I Am Love, Rebecca Ferguson, Jhumpa Lahiri.

I know.
Mostly white, mostly rich women. The most predictable list possible.
But fundamentally, what I imagine isn’t about race or money — it’s about energy.

The Kind of Woman I Hope to Become

Elegant and graceful — aging naturally, matching the beauty of my age rather than clinging to the past. Every decade has its own kind of charm. Trying to hold on to your twenties forever just looks uncanny and sad.

Emotionally and intellectually mature — someone who accepts the natural flow of life, reflective, honest, capable of love, curious about the world.

Healthy and financially comfortable — toned, and with enough stability to fill my days with things I choose.

Bright, curious eyes that never stop learning — auditing university classes out of pure curiosity; maybe philosophy, physics, economics, art history, anthropology.

Feeling fabulous, but grounded.

A Question That Stopped Me Mid-Thought

“Why is elegance or graceful aging still visually coded as white and wealthy?”

As someone who grew up and still lives heavily influenced by Western pop culture, it hit me how whitewashed my image of “graceful aging” is. It wasn’t intentional — but when I started visualizing it concretely, I realized all my references were Eurocentric.
I guess it’s partly because of the subtle _cultural colonization_ in media that’s shaped my subconscious since childhood, and partly because I simply haven’t taken the time to look for role models from other ethnicities and cultural contexts.

It’s unsettling to see that bias reflected back at me. But maybe this awareness — this tiny discomfort — is exactly where the unlearning begins.

Context Matters

Of course, the way we think about aging looks very different depending on where and who we are.
I’m speaking from my small, Seoul-centered bubble — a city obsessed with skincare, appearance, and youth. It’s a place where women in their 20s casually get fillers during lunch breaks and where anti-aging isn’t a taboo, it’s maintenance.
So this reflection isn’t universal — it’s deeply personal, shaped by my environment, privilege, and the media I consume.

Wrapping Up

I know my vision of aging is still shaped by the same social gaze I’m trying to question. It’s full of contradictions — a little vain, a little patriarchal, a little fantasy.
But I guess that’s where I am right now.

You can’t skip the naïve part of self-understanding. You just have to start — somewhere, honestly — and let the idea grow old with you.