If you're in your mid-20s, you're just starting to get to the age where you look at pictures of your "adult self" at 18 or 21 and see a genuine marked difference in how old you look. Imagine that weirdness projected a hundred times over, and that's how these women who aged themselves 40 years in a recent BuzzFeed video felt. Using technology from AprilAge Inc's aging software, which can digitally estimate what a face will look like over large periods of time, the women in this video quite literally looked into the eyes of their future selves.
They conducted the experiment by sending current photos of themselves, which were then aged into versions that were 10, 20, 30, and 40 years older than they are today. Most of the women expressed some trepidation at seeing their older selves reflected back at them — and honestly, when you think about the rapid sense of mortality it would give you, who can blame them? Usually we have time to ease into the changes in our bodies, so much that we barely notice them, but these women were drop kicked with them while a camera was in their face. It's enough to make anybody feel a little too existential.
Interestingly, the none of the women were fazed by the acceleration of the first 10 years. They were all in their 30s or 40s in those projections, and one even remarked that she thought she looked better older than she did now. As time progressed they noted the specific places they had wrinkles and the prominence of their projected graying hair. It wasn't until the leap past 30 years, though, that they genuinely seem stunned by the image of themselves.
Once they got over the initial shock value of it, though, they examined their older counterparts and were even able to notice some resemblance with older family members they know now.
And while we can't expect anyone to accept the inevitability of their old age in the matter of a four-minute video, at the very least we can all take comfort in the fact that old age is seriously going to rock. After stress and emotional instability peaks in our 20s, we can enjoy a higher life satisfaction with every passing year, according to Ran Zilca, Chief Data Science Officer at Happify and author of Ride of Your Life: a Coast-to-Coast Guide to Finding Inner Peace. All those wrinkles are just a badge of honor that you made it through the Terrible Twos of adulthood. When you think about it that way, seeing yourself in old age is actually kind of comforting. Onward and upward, everyone!
Check out their reactions and the before-and-after transformations here:
Images: YouTube
