“Play this video at my funeral,” says the ninety-four-year-old Lillian Droniak while enthusiastically addressing her some 14 million TikTok followers, who know her simply as Grandma Droniak. What comes next isn’t sappy or sentimental but outright hysterical. “Don’t be sad,” she continues. “I slayed every day, and now I’m going to lay every day. I hope you slay while I decay.”
Droniak later clarifies that she’s not dying—at least not yet—but, at her age, she says it’s good to be prepared. Her feed is a mix of videos you’d expect to see on any influencer’s page—with an endearing spin. She has a “Get Ready with Me” series, which she films ahead of various outings: her ex-boyfriend’s funeral, an appointment to sign her will, a trip to see her gravestone (“It was $3,000 and better look good,” she says before slathering on a coat of pink lipstick). In some videos, she dances; in others, she offers dating advice, warning viewers to steer clear of guys who don’t like bingo.
Social media has long existed in silos: Gen Z tends toward TikTok; millennials, Instagram; and Facebook is for the boomers. But Droniak has joined a clan of “granfluencers” who are blurring lines and defying stereotypes. There’s Helen Elam Van Winkle, a.k.a. Baddie Winkle, whose Instagram bio reads, “Stealing yo man since 1928.” At ninety-six, she posts photos of her over-the-top outfits—tight rainbow swimsuits, sequined raver gear, her signature baby pink bedazzled cane—and does, indeed, look good enough to turn heads. Joan MacDonald, seventy-eight, is a fitness influencer with triceps worthy of being immortalized in marble. Her workout videos show her dead-lifting and bench-dipping with ease. There’s also the Old Gays, a group of five friends in their sixties and eighties who keep up with TikTok’s dance and meme trends. In a recent video, filmed to the backdrop of “We Got the Energy” (an Irish children’s rap hailed as the song of the summer), they strut out in neon outfits, dancing and lip-synching with animated force, as if they had six cans of Red Bull for breakfast.
For the average scroller, this content can feel like a gift from the algorithmic gods. When I signed up on Instagram in 2012, I revelled in dog videos, selfies from friends, and food photos with terrible sepia filters. These days, digital joy is harder to find, buried under ads, viral reels, and an increasingly grim news cycle.
Granfluencers offer an escape from the monotony of social media. Watching seniors thrive on TikTok makes me feel instantly at ease. Perhaps it’s because I miss my own grandparents, who were my bridge to an earlier world, passing down a “waste not, want not” ethos from the Great Depression and teaching me how to bake a pie and play cards. Since they died, I’ve felt a generational disconnect. But granfluencers have narrowed the gap, offering perspectives from a life well lived. Having the “two generations speaking to one another,” said Old Gay Mick Peterson on the show Today, is “not only therapeutic but I think it just helps the world.”
Granfluencers portray dimensions of aging helpful for both the young and old alike. Last year, while I was working on a story about recasting the role of seniors in our society, I spoke with gerontologist Stephen Katz, one of the founders of the Trent Centre for Aging and Society. He told me that when he teaches classes about aging, he always asks his students how old they can envision themselves being while still feeling like themselves. The majority say sixty-five. “There’s no blueprint beyond that—no model of life that looks attractive into the last third of life,” he told me.
Granfluencers are supplying that blueprint. While Droniak has used her platform to speak openly about the less glamorous parts of aging—the transition into an assisted living facility, the difficulty of being the last one alive in her family—she’s also quick to highlight the joy she’s discovered in her twilight years. She fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming famous (something she wishes her late husband was around to see, even though he would probably be jealous) and fell in love again in her nineties.
Her unapologetic outlook is long overdue, especially in the West, where anti-aging sentiments are everywhere. Walk into any drugstore and you’ll see shelves of creams and serums that promise to dissolve wrinkles and give your skin a youthful glow. As of this year, Statista reported, the worldwide anti-aging market is worth $76.6 billion (US). Birthday greetings for people above a certain age often feel more like insults than well wishes. On Etsy, one of the top results is a card with flames that reads: “The secret to having a smoking hot body in old age? Cremation.” Another bestseller, its cover adorned with drooping breasts, says, “If you’re old and you know it, clap your tits.” Seniors are frequently depicted as lonely, frail, naive, or grumpy. While strides have been made with other types of diversity—mainly around race, body, and sexual orientation—positive portrayals of greyness are few and far between.
The past few years have seen progress. In 2023, model Carmen Dell’Orefice was on the cover of Vogue Czechoslovakia, at age ninety-one, under the apt title “Eternal Glamour.” That same year, Martha Stewart became the oldest model to ever appear on the cover of a Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. And in September, ABC debuted The Golden Bachelor, its spinoff of The Bachelor, featuring a cast of women over sixty who compete for the heart of seventy-one-year-old Gerry Turner.
But trends take time before they’re mainstreamed into popular culture. Social media, however, gives everyone a platform, and granfluencers are shifting the narrative. On her Instagram page, Grece Ghanem, the fifty-nine-year-old Canadian Lebanese queen of “ageless style,” showcases outfits that look pulled straight from a designer catalogue: Ghanem drinking an espresso in a red and white checkered picnic dress, strutting across the street in a full denim jumpsuit and wearing a two-piece green satin. “We are still here, we are still working, we are still beautiful, we are still contributing to society,” she told British Vogue.
After my conversation with Katz last year, I spent a lot of time thinking how old I could picture myself being while still being myself? It’s not something I’d ever really considered. Probably because I, too, had fallen into the trap of assuming that getting older meant decline and decay. Grandma Droniak recently turned ninety-four. On her birthday, she posted a video of the festivities, which included her getting ready in her floral wallpapered bathroom, a hot pink deely bobber, complete with glittery pom pom crowns, perched atop her head. It cut to a shot of her cake, which had “Hotter Than Ever!” spelled out in blue frosting. She makes getting older feel like something to celebrate.
