Did People Used To Look Older?

It's funny to think that there will be a point where hoodies and baggy pants would be seen as clothes for old people

Vsauce is the guy who actually tries to figure out his shower thoughts

When I was a teenager, all the boys wanted to be 18 and no older. Old enough to drink in NY state, but not yet old enough (19) to be drafted to Vietnam.

I grew up watching Friends on TV and they were all in their 20s or early 30s but all were older than me. I'm 37 now and when I watch Friends, they still all seem older than me!

I distinctly remember being in 1st, 2nd, and 3rd grade thinking kids in 6th grade were basically adults and highschool aged kids appearing to be almost old enough to be my parents.

After all these years I still don’t want to tell Michael that my name is not Vsauce

Indoor Smoking laws really helped with people not looking aged. Better education about the effects of smoking. Also, being educated about the negative effects of the sun with better skin products has helped.

I went to a small high school and the graduating class pictures were on the walls around the freshman and senior lockers on the first floor. Every day we saw 18 year olds going back to the '40s, and there was a lot of spirited conversations around what were the factors that made some of those kids look straight-up middle-aged. We covered most of the topics you presented here- styles, makeup, photographic style and quality, aging of the photos on the wall, etc., and none of that controlled for all of the old kids we saw looking back at us on the wall. I think the most enduring impression I took from that experience was that all the grown folks running around making all the decisions were, at one point, just insecure idiots desperate to fit in, just like we were. I graduated in '90; I wonder how old I look hanging there on the wall looking down at these kids now?

When I was 9 I had a 14 year old babysitter, and to me at the time she may as well have been a grown woman. I ran into her again years later when I was 23 and she was 28, and it was so shocking to see her and realize we’re both adults in our 20s, in my head she’s still this way older authority figure lmao

I always find it weird how people seem to think that at some random point in the future they will suddenly start wearing "old people clothes" because "old people wear them now", but no, when we are old, we will still wear the same clothes we wear now, which will be thought of as old people clothes by the future young people. It's actually pretty interesting how this works.

1:42 nice to see Adam Friedland in the wild.

You do not look like a Michael. You look like a Steve. Great video by the way. I always had this mindframe and when trying to explain it to others, they couldn't relate.

I remember looking up to that 18 year old volunteer at our pottery course when I was a small child. She was so wise, and confident, and grown. Then I became 18 and didnt know what the hell was going on, and I was disappointed that I didnt feel wise, confident and grown at all. But children started to treat me as if I was all these things.

Nothing slaps harder than when that Vsauce theme kicks in

This hit the nail on the head. We used to wonder about that about some of the black soul singers from back in the day, the delfonics and the spinners. The dudes from friends of distinction. Those people were in their teens and early 20s in those old clips where they looked in their 40s and 50s. We were told those black folks lived harder lives along with the times

Good post. One observation among many: people today dress like toddlers did years ago. Years ago, men wore suits almost all the time. Women wore dresses and girdles. I was walking through a mall when there still were malls and I said to my husband that if my grandmother can back today she would think people were walking around in their underwear.

One thing he didn't bring up that I saw in a different documentary was the fact that being a teenager is a relatively new concept. For most of history once a person was in their teens they were expected to dress and act like an adult. It wasn't until post WW2 in the 1950's-1980's that teenagers started being marketed to separately with their own separate fashions and activities from adults. It wasn't fully realized as completely sperate fashions until the 1990's and early 2000's.

Michael literally comes around 1-2 times a year, drops a banger, doesn't acknowledge he's been lost for months, and people don't even question it. That's how good his videos are, quality doesn't need explanation.

I was telling my kids the same thing, I didn’t know there was a name for it. People in the past only look old because their styles are old. I noticed it years ago when I looked at my parents wedding pics and looked deep in their faces and saw their youth. Then I realized, the only thing that was old was their style of dress.

As for dreams, I remember having a lucid dream where I could see colors and thought "well that answers that question.". Then I was able to concentrate and switch the dream back and forth between color and black and white.