Man Offers Perspective On The Aging Filter Even Though He Looks Like A 'Cryptkeeper' — 'I'd Be Grateful To Stick Around Long Enough To Look Like This'
The TikTok aging filter has everyone forgetting an important truth — it's a privilege to grow old.
@kylescheele / TikTok A man on TikTok is drawing applause for his take on getting older amid the furor surrounding the TikTok aging filter.
The "aged" filter is TikTok's newest trend, a feature that renders an image of what you'll look like in your golden years that is supposedly so realistic it's even surprised dermatologists and plastic surgeons with its accuracy.
Accordingly, it's spawned countless videos of people expressing shock and horror at what they're supposedly going to look like in their gold years, including ones from dismayed celebrities like Kylie Jenner.
But author and motivational speaker Kyle Scheele has a different perspective on the TikTok aging filter.
He offered a humbling perspective on the TikTok 'aged' filter, saying he will feel 'lucky and grateful' to see himself grow old.
It's one of life's fundamental truths that only the luckiest among us never have to face — all too many of us die way, way before our time. In his TikTok video, Scheele revealed that he has a lot of personal experience with this often heartbreaking part of being human, and it's shaped the way he's responded to the "aged" filter trend.
Using the filter, Scheele discussed all of the people he's lost to illnesses, accidents, mental health problems and other struggles long before their lives should have been over.
"When I was in high school, we lost two of my classmates before graduation, one to a brain aneurysm and the other to a drug overdose," Scheele said, before going on to talk about a college classmate's suicide and his beloved Uncle Ronnie, "who dropped dead in his driveway of a massive heart attack while clearing snow one winter."
Photo: @kylescheele / TikTok
"I have lost people to cancer, I've lost people to drugs, I've lost people to mental illness, all of them way before their time," Scheele went on to say, and it's given him a completely different reaction to the TikTok aging filter than most users have had.
"Do I look like the damn Cryptkeeper with this filter? Yeah, I do," he said. "But I would be so lucky and so grateful if I can stick around long enough to see this face when I look in the mirror."
Scheele's response to the TikTok aging filter and others like it highlight an often ignored truth: it is a privilege to grow old.
I'll admit that I, too, posted a horrified response to my own aged face in the TikTok aging filter, and much like Scheele I should know better. Aside from my own life-threatening struggles in the past, I've also lost several people I loved before their time.
My best friend Michael died out of nowhere when we were 23 of a heart condition nobody, himself included, knew he had, and it was probably the single most defining moment of my and many of my friends' lives. You aren't prepared to face death at that young an age, after all, just when your life is really beginning.
Mostly when I think of Michael, it's the mundane parts of life I wonder about — what would he think of Taylor Swift and online dating and "Real Housewives" and a reality show host as President and all the myriad little ways life has changed since he left us in 2002. And of course, I wonder what he would have become if he'd been able to even be an adult of 44 like me, let alone actually grow old.
It's hard, especially for women and, to a lesser extent, gay men, who all face much tougher scrutiny when it comes to physical appearance, to embrace aging and what we've been socialized to believe is the moral failing of our faces ceasing to look acceptably beautiful
But caterwauling over how ugly you think you look in a TikTok filter seems downright absurd when you think about the bigger picture, and many others have started to feel the same way.
Scheele's post and others like it have made many people reconsider their own feelings about aging.
"I'm in my thirties and I celebrate every gray hair," one woman commented on Scheele's video. "You're SUPPOSED to grow old. It's a tragedy if you don't." Another wrote of her husband who was supposed to die of cancer in 2015 but instead has lived on to enter his golden years.
One man wrote of feeling like he got a glimpse of his passed father. "I see my dad in that filter," he said, "and I never got to see my dad that age." Even icons like Amy Poehler have taken to TikTok to post similar perspectives, using the image of herself grey-haired and wrinkled to talk about how misplaced our fears of aging really are.
Along with her video, Poehler included a simple five-word caption that really sums it up: "may I be so lucky."
People like Poehler and Scheele really are right. Especially in our increasingly fraught world, to grow old really is a gift. May we all be so lucky, indeed, and may we all get better at accepting it.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.