Too Old to Be an Influencer? Maybe That’s Exactly the Point.

By Tamra Fakhoorian

When I was 65, I gave some serious thought to becoming a TikTok influencer. I already had around 3,000 followers, mostly from posting about the 50 countries I visited thus far.

I liked doing it. I liked sharing what I found. But there was one thing I could not seem to get past.

I was 65 years old and looking at myself on camera.

Lordy.

I would move the phone, change the lighting, try another angle. I would turn a filter on, then turn it down because now I looked like I had been laminated. I wasn’t trying to look 23. Even I knew there were limits to technology. But could I look 55? I could work with 55.

Now I’m 68, and I notice even more things about my face on camera that I would rather not notice. I suspect plenty of women my age know exactly what I’m talking about.

But looking back at it now, I realize something. Nobody had told me I was too old to be on TikTok. Nobody had told me people wouldn’t want to watch a woman in her 60s. Nobody had said my face was the problem.

I had decided all of that myself.

Maybe We’re Doing Some of the Ageism Ourselves

Ageism is real. I’m certainly not suggesting otherwise. But I’ve started wondering how often we give it a little help by deciding we are too old before anybody else gets a chance to think anything about us.

Too old to make videos. Too old to start a podcast. Too old to build a website. Too old to learn AI. Too old to start another business. Too old to walk into a room where everybody appears to be 30 years younger and say, “I belong here too.”

Those ideas can start sounding like facts if we repeat them long enough.

I had plenty to talk about and plenty I still wanted to do. Yet somehow I could look at everything I had experienced and learned, then look at myself on a phone screen and decide the problem was the wrinkles around my mouth.

That is a little nuts when you think about it.

Since When Did Interesting Have an Age Limit?

There are some things younger people can do that I can’t do anymore, or at least not without regretting it the following morning. I’m fine admitting that.

But being interested in the world doesn’t have an expiration date. Neither does having something to say.

By the time you reach your 60s or 70s, you may actually have more material than you have ever had before. You have lived through things. You have changed your mind about things. You have made mistakes, learned skills, watched the world change and probably reinvented yourself more than once.

Maybe you know how to grow tomatoes better than anybody on your street. Maybe you have spent 40 years repairing engines. Maybe you started painting at 67 and discovered you are pretty darn good at it. Maybe you have a completely different perspective on something because you have been around long enough to watch it happen twice.

Why would any of that become less worth sharing because your face looks older?

The more I thought about it, the stranger that idea became.

The People Watching Aren’t All 22 Either

It is easy to look at social media and assume everybody there is young. They aren’t. And younger people don’t necessarily want to hear only from younger people, either.

Lillian Droniak is a pretty spectacular example. She started making videos with her grandson and became a TikTok celebrity in her 90s. She talks about dating, relationships, getting older and whatever else strikes her as funny. The Guardian interviewed her when she was 92 and she already had millions of followers.

She later described herself on Good Morning America as “the grandma for the internet.”

Think about that for a minute. She didn’t wait until somebody figured out how to make a 92-year-old look 42.

She showed up as 92.

And people loved her for it.

Looking Your Age Might Be Part of What Makes You Interesting

This is the part I had backward.

I worried that looking like a woman in her late 60s somehow made me less suited for social media. But if I am talking about life at this age, then looking this age is part of the story.

If you are starting a business at 72, learning to make videos at 65 or trying something completely new at 68, somebody your age may see you doing it and think, maybe I can do that too.

That doesn’t mean I’m giving up good lighting. Let’s not get carried away. I still want to look good. I just don’t think looking good and looking younger have to mean the same thing.

Maybe Courage Is the Real Issue

I think that may be what sits underneath a lot of this.

It takes a little nerve to put yourself on camera. It takes a little nerve to start something new when you are old enough to know how many ways things can go wrong. And it takes nerve to walk into a space that seems to belong to younger people and decide you are going to participate anyway.

But being nervous about doing something is very different from being too old to do it.

Sometimes I think we use age as a reason because it feels safer than admitting we are nervous. I know I have.

You are allowed to be curious. You are allowed to learn something badly at first. You are allowed to be a beginner again. And you are allowed to be seen.

The Bottom Line

If you have been thinking about making videos, building an audience, starting something new or putting yourself out there in some way, don’t reject yourself because of your age before the world even gets a vote.

You do not have to look younger, act younger or pretend you are at a different stage of life. What matters more is whether you are interested, whether you have something to say and whether you are willing to show up.

Take a chance. You never know. At 90, you might discover that millions of people have been waiting for someone exactly like you.

Lillian Droniak did.