Back to School Resource Guide
Back to School Resource Guide
The False Story of Anti-Aging
Counting Down
From the moment you are born until the moment you die, you are aging. Every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every month of every year, your life counts up to midlife and down to end of life. How does that make you feel? Does your chest tighten with anxiety? Maybe you feel pressure to accomplish something more or different with the time you have left. Or maybe you feel very little at all about the ticking away of your life’s time clock.
Perhaps more importantly, how should thinking about the countdown of your life make you feel?
I believe that how we think about aging, and, relatedly, the aged themselves can alter the course of our lives either for the better or for the worse. More than that, I believe embracing and living from a Christian view of aging is one of the simplest ways believers can shine like stars in our current generation. And it all starts with a story.
The Power of Stories
The stories we believe about God, ourselves, and the world shape our feelings and govern the way we live. These stories may be true or false or a mix of truth and falsehood, but they are ubiquitous, humming along in our subconscious, moving us down one path or another. We inhabit stories for every aspect of our lives. We believe a particular narrative, and we live in light of it. The story we believe about money—whether it is plentiful or scarce, whether to spend or save—makes us feel excited, anxious, or disdainful about it and governs the way we use it. The story we believe about technology— whether it is safe or scary, whether it is helpful or a waste of time—makes us feel overwhelmed, worried, or hopeful and governs the way we use it as well. So, how do you feel about aging? Just as with money and technology and all the other areas of your life, the story you believe about aging dictates how you answer that question, and it governs the way you navigate through each era of your life. Whether the thought of aging fills you with dread or with eagerness, or some mix of both, those feelings tell you something about the story you believe.
Dust to Dust
Jen Wilkin
In this biblical meditation on aging, Jen Wilkin draws poetic parallels between the first half of life and the second, inviting us to live fully at every stage.
The world around us is eager to supply us with false stories from which to live, stories that follow the path of worldly wisdom instead of godly wisdom. It wants us to believe money can buy happiness and technology can solve every inconvenience. It also wants us to think about aging in a way that is false, in a way that does not align with the way the Bible speaks of it. I propose that the way we think about aging and the aged has been overtaken and subsumed by a false story, and a potent one at that. It’s a false story that yields negative consequences for all who embrace it, a false story rooted in how we understand what we were made for and how we relate to time itself.1
The False Story of Aging and Its Consequences
For generations, Christians have believed and affirmed the true story that life is a gift from God in all of its stages. The Christian whole-life pro-life commitment is beautiful on our lips, but it is more beautiful as it moves to our hands and feet. We assert that all of life is valuable in all of its stages, but do we prove we believe that story by living in a way that reflects this conviction? One of the simplest ways for the modern church to live counter-culturally is to embrace, defend, and live as though we value all of life, including the latter parts. But to do so, we must grapple with—and, I believe, reject wholesale—the prevailing attitudes toward decline and death that make up a whopper of a false story.
What are those attitudes? In a word: anti-aging.
As I write this, I am in my mid-fifties. My social media ads want me to know that it’s not too late for me. I can “age backwards” if I just use enough serums and supplements. If I lift heavy and eat more protein, I can have the bone density and muscle mass of someone half my age. I can purchase medical procedures to make my face and body appear younger than they are. What previous generations of women would have seen as natural signs of aging, I am instructed to call “undesirable skin changes” or “avoidable collagen loss.”
Men, too, are invited to embrace anti-aging. NAD+ injections and creatine gummies can ensure the men in my life have a “biological age” lower than their chronological age. And the perfect gift for them is a military-designed weighted vest. For men, aging is presented as a game to win. But for women it’s a hazard to be avoided.
Aging is a topic to avoid and a process to be prevented, concealed, and denied.
Competing Narratives
The Bible tells us that youthful beauty is fleeting (Prov. 31:30), but the world tells us it must be maintained at all costs. The Bible speaks of aging as a gift (Prov. 3:1–2), but the world tells us it is a disease to be fought off. The Bible tells us that care for the elderly is a sacred charge (Ex. 20:12; Lev. 19:32), but the world tells us the elderly are a burden. The Bible says our days are numbered and are to be counted with care (Ps. 90:12). The world says age is just a number and that you’re only as old as you feel.
Don’t miss the underlying motivators of these two narratives. The world’s false story of anti-aging is motivated by fear: Don’t get old. You’ll be invisible, irrelevant, a has-been, a burden. The Bible’s true story of aging is motivated by joy: Embrace aging. You’ll grow in wisdom, depth, and value. No one is a has-been in God’s family.
How could the Bible and the modern world be so far apart in their assessments? What could account for two such radically different stories of aging?
Well, Satan. But also, statistics.
Living Longer
The false story of anti-aging has taken root in a generation that enjoys unprecedented length of years. At the turn of the twentieth century, average life expectancy in the United States stood at 47.3 years.2 As I write in 2025, it stands at 79.25 years.3 That’s a 60 percent increase, an additional thirty-two years. Take a minute to absorb the significance of this increase. As recently as 125 years ago, every previous generation of humans would have expected life to be much shorter. And they would have encountered death up close much more frequently than we do. The generations to whom the words of Scripture were originally written lived in a world where “untimely” death interjected itself with regularity.
The cross of Christ invites us back into the true story we abandoned.
Consider the life expectancy rates during the time periods the Old and New Testaments were written. Estimates place the number at twenty-eight to thirty-eight years during the Bronze Age and at twenty to thirty-five years during the Greek and Roman Empires.4 These numbers do not mean no one lived into old age. They indicate the average age across a population. Infant and child mortality rates, as well as deaths due to childbirth, disease, and warfare, impacted populations at higher rates than in the modern world, driving the average life expectancy downward. In other words, if a male survived childhood in Rome, he might expect to live well into his fifties or sixties if he avoided illness, accidents, or military service. If a female survived childhood, she might expect the same if she survived illness, accidents, or childbirth.
But infant and child mortality rates exacted a brutal toll. In the Roman Empire, it is estimated that 25 percent of births did not survive the first year of life, and half did not survive past the age of ten.5 I have four children. How would these statistics have looked for me if I had lived during Bible times? Assuming I had survived all four of their births myself, I could have expected that one of my children would die before age one and another before age ten.
Why should these numbers matter to us? Because they help to explain the dramatic gap between the way the current culture thinks about aging and the way the Bible does. The people who received the Bible’s wisdom on aging and the elderly inhabited a world in which length of days was a gift, and a rare one at that. For them, middle age was twenty-five, and gray hair was a novelty few lived to experience. They understood something our generation has forgotten: Aging is a privilege, and time is of the essence. How we feel about aging in this generation is, in many ways, shaped by the fact that we live much longer than our forebears.
But the true story of aging transcends any given generation, ancient or modern. Its truth is eternal. Each day of our lives, you and I will choose, consciously or unconsciously, between living in the true story of the Bible or among the many false stories offered to us by the world. The cross of Christ invites us back into the true story we abandoned. It reawakens us to truth, and by the Spirit we can walk in that story again. But as Joshua beckoned the Israelites, we must “choose this day whom [we] will serve” (Josh. 24:15). Author Stephen Covey is known for the maxim that “anything less than a conscious commitment to the important is an unconscious commitment to the unimportant.”6 When it comes to the stories we inhabit, anything less than a conscious commitment to the one true story of the Bible is an unconscious commitment to a false one. And the longer we commit to a false story, the more natural it will feel—and the greater the consequences. How might we summarize the contrasting stories of aging to better assess their relative claims?
The false story of anti-aging says: Outward decline signals loss of identity and fear of suffering and death. To age is to diminish.
The true story of aging says: Outward decline yields inward growth of spiritual and resurrection hope. To age is to deepen.
Paul nods to the true story in 2 Corinthians 4:16: “Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day.” Or, as I have heard it eloquently said, “Bodies decline, people develop.”
What story of aging will you live into? I propose we opt out of this generation’s false story of anti-aging and instead become students of the arc of our bodily decline, as well as the arc up and to the right of our interior lives. Both have much to teach us. From beginning to end, from dust to dust, we can live as those whose days are numbered. We can live lives of consequence, to the glory of God.
Questions for Reflection
Answer these questions as you consider which story of aging you are living under and how that story is shaping you:
- How much time have you spent contemplating aging from a biblical perspective?
- Consider the comparisons between the Bible’s story of aging and the world’s given above. How have you seen the false story of anti-aging at play around you? What harm (if any) have you seen it cause to you or to others?
- In your opinion, should the greater life expectancy of our modern age be seen as a gift or as a burden? Explain your answer.
- How have you seen the principle that “bodies decline, people develop” to be true of yourself or of someone else? How might this principle reshape your understanding of the aging process?
Notes:
- I am indebted to my friend and colleague, J. T. English, for helping me to think in true story/false story categories.
- “Table 4: Life Expectancy at Birth, Age 65, and Age 75, by Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: United States, Selected Years 1900–2018,” National Center for Health Statistics, CDC, accessed September 14, 2025, https://www.cdc.gov /nchs/data/hus/2019/004-508.pdf.
- “United States Life Expectancy,” Macrotrends, accessed September 14, 2025, https://www.macrotrends.net/.
- Sharon Basaraba, “Life Expectancy Then and Now: 1800 vs. Today,” Verywell Health, August 8, 2025, https://www.verywellhealth.com/.
- “The Roman Empire in the First Century,” PBS, accessed September 14, 2025, https://www.pbs.org/.
- Stephen R. Covey, A. Roger Merrill, and Rebecca R. Merrill, First Things First (Simon and Shuster, 1994), 32.
This article is adapted from Dust to Dust: Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World by Jen Wilkin.
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