I want to write about my mother’s friend G again, because I wrote about her once before in a different article, and what I want to describe today is something I noticed about her last summer that I have been turning over since.
G was at my parents’ house for lunch. She arrived a few minutes before the rest of the guests. She was wearing what she usually wears, which is unremarkable. She had, by all visible evidence, not done anything special with her hair. She came into the kitchen, kissed my mother on both cheeks, and accepted a glass of wine.
What I noticed, while she was standing in the kitchen, was something I had not, until that afternoon, had words for. G did not, at any point during the half hour we spent in that kitchen, check her reflection. She did not, when she walked past the small mirror by the kitchen door, do the half-second glance most people do without noticing. She did not, when she sat down, adjust herself for the angle she was being seen from. She did not, when my father told her she looked well, perform the small visible micro-verification that most people do when they receive a compliment.
She just took the compliment. She thanked him. She moved on.
I sat with this for the rest of the afternoon. I had been, until that point, half-certain that the striking quality I had noticed in G was something about her face. After lunch, I revised my theory. The striking quality was not about her face. It was about the absence of an activity her face had stopped performing. The face was, in some real way, the same face she had had at fifty. The activity was what had changed. The retirement of the activity was what made the face look the way it looked.
The activity I am describing
I want to try to describe the activity, because I think most people who do it have no idea they are doing it.
The activity is the small, almost invisible monitoring that most adults run, more or less continuously, on how they are appearing to others. It includes the casual glance into the shop window when walking past. It includes the small adjustment of posture when sitting down in a room with people in it. It includes the brief check of the bathroom mirror, not for any particular reason, but to confirm that the face is still the face. It includes, perhaps most notably, the tiny half-second pause after receiving a compliment, in which most people perform a small internal verification: is this true? do they really mean it? do I look like the thing they are saying I look like?
None of these activities are, individually, dramatic. None of them, on its own, would be visible to anyone watching. They are all, in their way, micro-events. The micro-events happen in the small spaces between the larger movements of a day. They happen so frequently, in most people’s lives, that they have become invisible even to the people performing them.
What they are, collectively, is a continuous low-level performance of self-presentation. The performance does not stop. It runs in the background of consciousness, all day, every day, for most people, for most of their adult lives. It is the cost of being a person who has been socialized to care, even slightly, about how they are being seen.
This performance, like the imagined-glance protocol I wrote about in another article, takes energy. The energy is invisible. The energy is, however, real. The face that is performing this monitoring all day is, by the end of the day, slightly tired in a way that has nothing to do with what the person has actually done. It is the tiredness of having been, every minute, slightly available for assessment.
The aggregated tiredness of decades of this monitoring is, I now believe, what makes most people’s faces, in their fifties and sixties, look the way they look. The faces are not, primarily, marked by age. They are marked by the cumulative effect of having been, every day, in performance.
What stops the activity
I want to think about what makes some people, somewhere in midlife or later, stop running this monitoring program.
The honest answer is that I do not fully know. I am thirty-eight, and the monitoring program is still very much running in me, in ways I am only beginning to notice. What I can offer, instead, is what I have observed in the small handful of people I know who appear to have, somehow, retired the program.
The first observation is that they did not, in any case I am aware of, do it on purpose. None of them sat down at fifty-two and decided to stop checking. The retirement happened, in their telling, slowly, almost without their noticing. The activity simply got, year by year, slightly less compelling. The reflection in the shop window got less interesting. The compliment stopped requiring verification. The internal audit, which had been running for forty years, slowly went quiet, and they noticed, at some point, that they had not run it that day.
The second observation is that the retirement seems to correlate, loosely, with a particular kind of internal shift. The shift is hard to describe. It involves something like a relocation of where the person’s sense of themselves lives. In their younger years, the sense of themselves had lived, partially, in the mirror. The mirror was the external check on whether they were the person they were trying to be. By their fifties or sixties, the sense of themselves had relocated. It now lived inside them, somewhere they could not see, and the mirror had become, in some real way, irrelevant. The mirror was no longer the source of the verification. The verification was no longer required.
The third observation, and this is the one I find most interesting, is that the people who have retired the activity tend to be more present in conversations. Not because they are trying to be. Because the labor that used to be flowing into the monitoring program is now available for other things. The energy is freed up. The freed-up energy goes into being in the room. The being-in-the-room is what other people register as a particular quality of attention, of presence, of magnetism. The quality is not a thing they are performing. It is, on the contrary, the absence of a performance the rest of us are still running.
Why the rest of us are still running it
I want to be honest about why the program is so hard to retire, and why most of us, including me, are still running it well into middle age.
The program got installed early. For most of us, it started somewhere in adolescence, when we first became aware of being looked at, and accelerated through our twenties, when the looking-at had real social consequences. By our thirties, the program was so deeply embedded that it was running on autopilot. By our forties, the program had become, in some real sense, identity. Stopping it would feel, if we even noticed it was running, like a kind of self-amputation.
The program is also, in some real way, defended by the wider culture. The culture rewards the people who are still running it. The well-presented version of yourself, in most professional and social contexts, is the version that has been monitoring its own appearance carefully. The version that has stopped monitoring is, in some contexts, read as having “let themselves go.” The reading is, in my view, almost always wrong, but it is the reading the culture defaults to. Stopping the program means accepting a small ongoing risk of being misread.
What is so striking about people like G is that they have, somehow, accepted that risk. They have stopped monitoring. They have, by the standards of certain social environments, “let themselves go.” And what has emerged, in the absence of the monitoring, is the quality the rest of us, watching them across rooms, find ourselves trying to describe when we say someone looks well. They look well not because they have been working harder on their appearance. They look well because they have, finally, stopped working on it at all.
What I noticed about my own face, after watching G
I want to describe a small experiment I tried, after the lunch with G, because the experiment told me something I had not previously suspected about myself.
I went home that afternoon and tried, for one hour, to not check my reflection. Not the bathroom mirror. Not my phone screen. Not the windows of the shops I walked past. I tried to be, for sixty minutes, in my own face without looking at it.
The experiment was much harder than I had expected. I caught myself, repeatedly, glancing at surfaces. The glancing was almost completely automatic. I had not, until that hour, registered how often I was doing it. The estimate I would have made, before the experiment, was maybe two or three times in an hour. The actual number, in the hour I was watching for it, was somewhere upwards of fifteen.
What I also noticed, by the end of the hour, was that the small ongoing labor of not-checking was, itself, exhausting. The labor of suppressing the monitoring was, in some sense, almost as expensive as the monitoring itself. The monitoring program had become so integrated into how I moved through a room that fighting it was a full-time job.
This told me something. It told me that the program was not a peripheral feature of how I existed in the world. It was, in some real sense, central. I had built, over thirty-eight years, an architecture of self-presentation that ran, more or less continuously, in the background of my consciousness, and that the architecture was, by now, structurally indistinguishable from how I knew I was me.
The retirement of this architecture is, I now suspect, the work of the second half of life. It is not, by any reasonable measure, the work of the first half. The first half is, for most of us, when we built the architecture. The second half is, for those of us who manage it, when we slowly take it down.
What I’d say to anyone reading this
If you have ever looked at an older person and thought, with some confusion, that they look remarkably well, and you have not been able to identify what specifically is making them look that way, you may have been encountering exactly what I am describing. The thing you cannot identify is the absence of an activity. The activity is the small monitoring program that most adult faces are running, all the time, that you do not consciously notice on most faces because almost every face is running it.
The face that has stopped running it does not have a feature. It has, instead, the absence of a feature. The absence is what reads, to your eye, as a kind of glow or magnetism or simple wellness. The absence is not anything you can buy in a bottle. The absence is the quiet retirement of an interior labor that the person has, somehow, given themselves permission to put down.
You cannot, easily, retire your own program by deciding to. The program is too deep. What you can do, slowly, over years, is start to notice it. You can catch yourself glancing at the shop window. You can catch yourself adjusting in the chair. You can catch yourself, after a compliment, performing the half-second internal verification. The catching does not stop the program. The catching introduces, however, a small distance between you and the program. The distance, applied repeatedly over time, can begin, eventually, to loosen the grip.
The face that has stopped monitoring is not, at any point in this process, your face. Your face will keep monitoring for a long time. But somewhere underneath the monitoring, the version of you that does not require the verification is still there. That version, in time, becomes more accessible. The accessibility, in time, becomes the quality your friends will, decades from now, find themselves trying to describe when they say you look well.
G is not doing anything special. She has, more accurately, stopped doing the thing the rest of us are still doing. The stopping is the secret. The secret is, in some real way, available to anyone willing, eventually, to put the program down.
I am not yet able to put mine down. I am, however, beginning to see it for the first time. That, I now suspect, is the first step.
