Aging & Wisdom Quote by Lara St. John

Aging isn’t framed here as a tragedy imposed by a fickle audience; it’s recast as a shift in attention, even a strategic withdrawal. Lara St. John flips a familiar complaint about sexism in the arts - the “women have expiration dates” narrative - into something sharper and more uncomfortable: what if some women stop auditioning for the world because the world has been auditioning them, relentlessly, for decades?

The intent feels double-edged. On one level, it’s a refusal to be reduced to a victim story. St. John, a performer who has navigated a classical music industry that still markets “youth” as a proxy for relevance, suggests agency where people expect injury. On another level, it’s a quiet indictment of the terms of visibility: if staying “interesting” requires constant self-display, constant compliance with taste and desirability, losing interest can be read as self-preservation, not defeat.

The subtext points to fatigue - not just physical, but existential. The world’s attention is rarely neutral; it’s a transaction. For female performers, it often comes bundled with scrutiny, sexualization, and the exhausting requirement to remain legible in a narrow frame. Choosing to disengage can be an artistic statement: prioritizing craft, privacy, family, or simply a life not organized around being consumed.

Context matters: in music, especially classical, credibility can deepen with age, but the promotional machinery still rewards the photogenic and “new.” St. John’s line punctures that contradiction with a musician’s practicality: maybe the problem isn’t demand. Maybe it’s that the cost of supply stops being worth it.