I will admit something that feels sillier than it was at the time. Around the time I turned 30, I got low about getting older. Nothing dramatic. I had put on weight, I felt slower than I used to, and there was a quiet sense that the good part was somehow behind me. Thirty is not old, I know that. But the feeling did not check my birth certificate before showing up.
So when I came across what Jamie Lee Curtis said about all this, it landed harder than a celebrity quote usually does. Speaking at the Radically Reframing Aging Summit in 2022, the event hosted by Maria Shriver, Curtis said: “This word ‘anti-aging’ has to be struck. I am pro-aging. I want to age with intelligence, and grace, and dignity, and verve, and energy.” It is a values statement, not a study. But it names something most of us absorb without noticing.
I am not a doctor or a psychologist, and none of this is advice about your body or your mind. It is one person reading the research and thinking out loud, and the studies here are findings from particular groups of people, not settled science or rules that map neatly onto any one life.
What “anti-aging” is actually selling
Look at the word for a second. Anti. Against. The whole framing treats a normal process every living person goes through as a problem to be defeated, and there is real money riding on you believing that. The global anti-aging market was estimated at around 78 billion US dollars in 2025, projected to climb past 149 billion by 2035. That is a large industry built on the premise that the years happening to you are something to be ashamed of and, ideally, paid to slow down.
The objection is not that skincare is a scam or that wanting to look after yourself is vanity. It is narrower than that. It is the framing. The default story we are sold is that aging is a decline to be resisted, and Curtis’s small rebellion was to refuse the premise. In her view, growing older is not a defect. As she added in the same conversation: “I don’t want to hide from it.”
What our beliefs about aging seem to do
This is where it gets more interesting than a slogan.
There is a body of work from Yale’s Becca Levy suggesting that how you think about getting older is not just a mood, it may track with how the rest of your life goes. In her 2002 paper, drawing on 660 people aged 50 and older from the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, people with more positive self-perceptions of aging lived longer than those with more negative ones. Levy wrote that “those individuals who reported more positive self perceptions of aging demonstrated significantly longer survival than those who reported more negative self perceptions of aging.”
I want to be honest about what that does and does not show, because it is easy to oversell. This is one correlational study. It found an association, a population-level pattern, not a proven cause. The often-quoted figure of around 7.5 additional years is an average across a group, not a guaranteed prize for thinking nice thoughts. Whether attitude causes the gap, or both grow from something else, is genuinely contested. I would not hand anyone a positive outlook as if it were a treatment. What the work does do, gently, is suggest the story we tell ourselves about aging is not weightless.
What changed for me, and what it did not fix
The thing that pulled me out of that thirty-something funk was not a reframe. It was doing something. I got back into fitness, which had drifted while I was busy being miserable about it. These days I work out at home and prefer it that way. No commute, no audience, just the same handful of movements most mornings.
The strange part is that the attitude followed the action, not the other way around. Once I was moving again, I stopped dreading the next birthday. I started feeling something closer to what Curtis describes, an actual welcoming of getting older rather than a low-level wince about it. The verve and energy she lists are not abstractions when you have just done something physical with your body and it cooperated.
What it did not fix is the part nobody can fix. The years still pass. I am still slower at some things than I was, and no amount of pro-aging thinking reverses time. The point was never to win against aging. That was the whole problem with the word. The point was to stop treating an ordinary, universal thing as an enemy, and to put energy into what I can actually affect.
So I have kept Curtis’s distinction, not as a mantra but as a small daily preference. Anti-aging is a posture of resistance against something that is going to happen anyway. Pro-aging is just deciding to be on your own side while it does.
If the weight of getting older, or anything underneath it, is sitting heavier than it should, a qualified therapist or counsellor is worth far more than any article, mine included.
