Aging & Wisdom Quote by W. L. George

“Vanity is as old as the mammoth” lands like a sly corrective to our favorite modern delusion: that our era invented narcissism. W. L. George doesn’t bother arguing; he time-travels. By yoking vanity to the mammoth, he drags a supposedly contemporary vice back into prehistory, when humans were still sharing the landscape with enormous, indifferent beasts. The joke is in the scale. Mammoths are extinct, heavy, and mythic; vanity, George implies, is just as massive, just as enduring, and apparently impossible to hunt to extinction.

The line’s intent is less moralizing than deflating. It punctures the self-seriousness of any age that thinks it’s uniquely decadent. If vanity predates civilization, then it can’t be blamed on social media, consumer culture, or “kids today.” Those are only new costumes. The subtext is both cynical and oddly leveling: humans have always been rehearsing versions of themselves for other humans, polishing their status signals, curating an image around the fire long before there was a camera to do it for.

Context matters: George wrote in a world where modern advertising, celebrity culture, and mass media were accelerating the performance of self. By invoking the mammoth, he widens the frame, suggesting that technology amplifies vanity but doesn’t invent it. The wit is prehistoric camouflage for a sharper claim: progress changes our tools, not our urges, and the oldest instincts often survive every new age that congratulates itself on being new.