Bit of a whine, I suppose, and I'm feeling delicate so be gentle please.
Just what the title says, really. I'm feeling quite down about this tbh. We keep being told people are having to work further and further into life, well into their 60s we're told, and yet virtually every working environment I've had any dealings with in the past 4 or 5 years seems packed to the walls with millennials, that's not meant to sound like I'm anti-millennials BTW, I'm not at all (although I do envy them their youth, having only reluctantly let go of my own 
). I just don't understand where all these older people actually are that are supposedly in the workplace.
OK, so I'm self-employed and my field is publishing/media, which probably gets people thinking 'well, WTF do you expect then??' (fair enough), but it seemed to be the same story when I took a year out from my business and went to a salaried job in retail. I was simultaneously the oldest person in the department (bar none) and one of the most junior. The hit to my morale was one of the many reasons I quit and returned to freelancing, but it just seems to be the same story everywhere. Nobody's actively doing or saying anything to make me feel past it, I just do.
Most of the freelance work I do atm is for a company that seems to consider itself quite hip, they make heavy use of FaceTime/Skype etc, for training calls and general collaboration, which makes a lot of sense as they have freelancers all over the world. It's not their problem that it makes me feel my age, but it really does. My face isn't up to shit like Skype, I suffer from chronic fatigue so always have dark shadows under my eyes, I've got a fat face (even fatter atm as I'm overweight, though I'm trying to address that) and I'm at the age where my face is starting to get saggy and droppy and - well, 51-looking, to put it in a nutshell. Meanwhile, if I didn't know it was against the law to put 'only gorgeous-looking people need apply' on job ads, I'd swear they'd done exactly that, I've never seen an older-looking, overweight or unattractive person among them. I just imagine these bright young things thinking 'OMG she looks so old!'' - probably a silly mindset as I take a lot of care with my appearance, wear make-up/have my hair done and generally haven't let myself go, don't especially present myself in a 'middle-aged' way, but I can't help imagining them being taken aback when they see me on camera after having only seen my profile pic before (well, of course I chose a flattering one though it's not airbrushed or anything.)
I realise that as someone who's never had what you'd call a fast-track career (I'm a creative and my career path is probably best described as 'mild to moderate with occasional highs'), being managed by/answerable to people in their 20s is likely to be par for the course, and I'm not bitter about it, though it does make me feel awkward. And I suppose they way I'm feeling is partly a symptom of the fact that I hate the fact that I'm getting older and feel past it and ugly. But I'm genuinely curious: where in the modern workplace actually are all the older people (by which I mean 40s/50s and, gasp 60s??!)
I didn't put this in AIBU because I'm not looking for sarky/unsympathetic retorts, lol - but AIBU to ask whether anyone else out there who's no longer a young thing has felt this way at work too?