What the Longevity Industry Is Really Selling
When anti-aging culture prioritizes profit and fear over well-being, women become prime targets.
→ Read the full essay on PROVOKED
Editor’s Note: Off-Script—the why, what, and oh sh*t moments behind this article.
I like to think I’m rational. Educated. Confident to a fault.
Then a pitch like this one lands in my inbox and I realize I’ve been sold a bill of goods that profits off my panic.
And so have you.
We love to perform “age is just a number” while collectively dumping billions into products, potions, and pills that promise we can buy our way out of mortality.
The longevity industry isn’t selling hope.
It’s selling fear with better packaging.
Writer Joanne Helperin pitched this piece mid-panic spiral about her own aging. She’d figured out that her panic wasn’t just psychological—it was a profit center. So she stopped spiraling and started digging.
This one took a few rounds to get right.
Because it would’ve been easy to write another “wellness is a scam” finger-wag and call it done. But we wanted the mechanics. How the machine actually works.
Here’s how: Beauty brands and the trillion-dollar wellness racket don’t see complex humans with decades of hard-won experience. They see exploitable anxiety. Crepey skin. Sagging everything. Slowing metabolism. The lie that aging equals obsolescence.
They rebrand fear as empowerment and charge you $200 for it.
I wasn’t interested in influencer testimonials or sponsored studies or anyone who’s never sweat through a work call. I wanted the real question:
What happens when anti-aging stops being about health and becomes profit dressed up as self-care?
The answer isn’t comfortable.
But it’s clarifying.
We’re not here to sell you a fix.
We’re here to show you the con—so you can stop funding your own erasure.