HHH Column: Living (Younger) Looonger: A Recent NEMO Exhibit and a New History of Aging Project by Isaac Scarborough and Brianne Wesolowski

The HHH column is a monthly blog in which History, Health & Healing members share their thoughts on research, current affairs, or anything to do with medical history. Each edition is written by a different member — in due time, we hope to offer everybody a chance to publish a contribution. This month, the floor is for Isaac Scarborough, assistant professor, and Brianne Wesolowski, postdoctoral fellow, both at the Leiden University Institute for History. In this blog they share their thoughts and reflections on a recent exhibit in NEMO about questions relating to getting older, staying young, and mortality.

Living (Younger) Looonger: A Recent NEMO Exhibit and a New History of Aging Project

Isaac Scarborough and Brianne Wesolowski

Since at least the 1950s, aging has increasingly caught the attention of scientists, researchers, physicians, government officials, and the general public. In popular culture, news feeds offer slews of articles documenting the latest research on how to stave off dementia, arthritis, or wrinkles, while a scroll through the accompanying advertisements reveals an endless loop of various serums, pills, and diets that promise to reverse, or at least stall, the aging process. Recently, these kinds of narratives have been countered with critiques aimed at how popular culture has traditionally portrayed older people (especially women); these critiques seek to open space for “aging gracefully” in the hopes of making visible the complex and dynamic process of aging instead of reducing it to depictions of decline. Museum exhibits have also begun to approach the category of old age, drawing attention to the cultural imaginaries, political and economic opportunities (or lack thereof), and experiences that give shape to how we come to understand and think of old age. Recently, an exhibit entitled “Living Looonger” appeared at Amsterdam’s NEMO Studio museum located at the Marineterrein. Oriented around questions surrounding getting older, staying young, and mortality, the exhibit presented various facets of aging, investigating how old age intersects with conceptions of care, gender, political persuasion, childhood, and basic needs, such as dietary choices and activity levels. 

Photo by by Isaac Scarborough

Along with psychosocial elements, the sciences were foregrounded in the exhibit. This was particularly visible in a section dedicated to “staying young,” in which the exhibit probes the various sciences involved in delaying the aging process, whether through rejuvenation or replacement. Examples include chemical injections that might initiate cell rejuvenation, knee separators used to encourage the regrowth of cartilage, or the exchange of blood with the young. The exhibit largely attempted a position of neutrality, but on the theme of staying young, it did highlight how tech billionaires, such as Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Jeff Bezos, have provided extensive funding for delaying aging. The exhibit questioned (if briefly) the ethical ramifications of billionaires being able to continue life (and continue to accumulate wealth/ resources) well past the life span of others. Indeed, the question of equality danced throughout the exhibit, shedding light on the ways that access to wealth increases not only the age to which one lives, but the quality of life in the last decades of life. 

While this initial critique of the ethics of extending life is insightful, there appeared to be a lack of self-reflection in terms of aging more generally. The exhibit was prescriptive, urging practices that help extend both the quality and quantity of life. The main hall, for example, encouraged viewers to ward off the aging process by engaging in physical touch with others, to play mind games or learn a new skill, and to continue to make social contact. Indeed, throughout the entire exhibit, the dangers of loneliness or, as presented in a short film, the dangers of isolation, loomed large. These prescriptions were aimed at aging “better,” but the exhibit did not engage the question of how (or by whom) “better” is defined. Nor did the exhibit question the prescriptions presented. The exhibit thus presented a normative take on aging based in European and North American assumptions that often approach old age as a problem in need of mitigation. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr recently noted, living longer (or looonger) through this lens is thus understood as living younger longer: the aim is to be older, but not, in practice, to age.[1]  

As with many ideas about our social and biological lives, this creates a sort of idealized “path” towards and in older age – a path, in fact, that almost all of us will deviate from to some degree or another.  Yet it is especially valuable to consider this path critically from the perspective of those who may deviate the furthest.  This includes older adults with chronic ailments, those with severe mobility constraints, and those, such as the lesser-abled, who may have followed their own paths for much of their lives even before reaching older age.  At Leiden University’s Institute for History, we and our colleagues, PhD student Jessie van Straaten, Assistant Professor Paul van Trigt, and Assistant Professor Evelien Walhout, have begun to investigate how conceptions of the “proper” trajectory for lifespan and ageing – including the concept of living younger longer – were developed in the twentieth century and how they have come to dominate both Western views of old age and some conceptions of disability.  Our project, “Human Development and its Outliers: A Global Microhistory,” suggests that a critical history of the ways in which models of human development and ageing have become endemic may help us to reconsider the actual multitude of ways in which people grow develop and grow older, and, we hope, to embrace many such aspects – including the practical necessity of an aged older age. 


[1] Daniel Immerwahr, ‘How the “Golden Girls” Celebrated – and Distorted – Old Age,” The New Yorker, December 2, 2024.