Even as Taylor Swift racked up every accolade during her early music career, she received the message loud and clear: Show business has little use for women above a certain age.

At 22, she wrote “Nothing New” about her fear of aging into irrelevancy, imagining a radiant 17-year-old ingenue ready to take her place. Seven years later, Swift expanded on these anxieties in her “Miss Americana” documentary. “Women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they’re 35,” she said, bemoaning the culture’s impossible standards for maturing women. The pop superstar figured her time was almost up.

Now, just turned 36, Swift has released “The End of an Era” on Disney+, a six-part docuseries that chronicled the behind-the-scenes of her 2023-2024 Eras Tour. Between glimpses of the intensive effort that it took to stage 149 sold-out stadium shows across the world, Swift and her colleagues offered theories about how and why it became the highest-grossing tour in history, breaking records and boosting local economies whenever it visited a new city. At one point, Swift put it in the context of her legacy as an artist, saying that the tour “will live on as probably the pinnacle, foremost important thing that I’ve done” — and again zeroed in on ageism.

“I get very depressed about pop culture’s obsession with youth culture, and [how] we designate extremely young people to be the ones who have to tell us where culture is going,” Swift says in the final episode, which was released Tuesday. “And then the idea that an artist had, in my case, the privilege of developing to the point where you’re in your 30s and you do know yourself a bit more and then you were able to make the thing that they’ll know you for: There’s something very special about that.”

Although showbiz has plenty of stars well past their 30s still producing relevant work, it’s no surprise that Swift internalized the lessons as she saw female pop stars getting older and subsequently mocked for the way they look or torn apart by the internet for myriad reasons.

But Swift is now in a rarefied spot as she embarks on the third decade of her career, having just closed the books on her self-described peak. And it seems like the astronomical success of the tour, an anomaly that even took her by surprise, may have soothed some of those fears. Because Swift has made it very clear over the last several months: She’s not going anywhere.

This messaging started in earnest this fall while promoting her 12th album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” which she announced on her fiancé Travis Kelce’s podcast. Unlike her other recent album releases, Swift hit the TV and radio promotional circuit, sitting down with more than a dozen interviewers in America and the United Kingdom. On BBC Radio 2, host Scott Mills noted that some of her fans were concerned that Swift would soon get married and have children and never make an album again.

Swift looked taken aback. “That’s a shockingly offensive thing to say,” she said, as Mills quickly backtracked and assured her that fans were just panicking. “It’s not why people get married, so that they can quit their job. … I love the person that I am with because he loves what I do and he loves how much I am fulfilled by making art and making music.”

The singer admitted that she was enjoying a break after two exhausting years of 3½-hour concerts; she recoiled when one host asked if she was planning another tour soon. But she emphasized in interviews that she doesn’t do well when her mind is on autopilot, explaining that she recorded “The Life of the Showgirl” on her few days off from the tour during summer 2024, when she started to feel like she could perform the show in her sleep and needed something to stimulate the creative part of her brain.

So this is not someone who is looking to just sit around, even if she feels pressure from society to step aside. Swift communicates as much in the album’s title track, about the surreal challenges of life in the public eye, and sneeringly sings at rivals who she believes wish she would “hurry up and die.”

“I’m immortal now, baby dolls,” she croons, “I couldn’t if I tried.”

Recently, during an appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” she was even more straightforward after the late-night host asked her who she could possibly turn to for career advice. Swift named Fleetwood Mac legend Stevie Nicks and her longtime collaborator, producer Max Martin, and then talked about how she admires people who are constantly evolving.

“I think there are certain corners of our society that really love that and look up to longevity. There’s also corners that are like, ‘Give someone else a turn. Can’t you just go away so we can talk about how good you were?!’” Swift said. “And I’m like — I don’t want to.”

It’s possible Swift was calling out the criticism she’s received in the wake of “The Life of a Showgirl,” which sold 4 million copies in its first week, shattering records to become the highest-selling album debut since the invention of sales tracking technology. But factions of the internet weren’t pleased that she partially achieved that record by selling quite a few variants of physical CDs, digital versions and vinyl, some arguing that completist fans buying multiple versions to reflect every format unfairly inflate her numbers. Even her loyal fandom broke out in contentious debates over the quality of the album, which earned mixed reviews from critics, with some Swifties disappointed by what they saw as less-than-introspective songwriting.

The singer seemed to address this during an Apple Music interview, telling Zane Lowe that she welcomed the “chaos” of the initial reactions to the record, and she respected people’s “subjective opinions on art.” Plus, she pointed out, at least people were talking about her.

“The rule of show business is if it’s the first week of my album release and you are saying either my name or my album title, you’re helping,” she said.

Swift has made no secret that she takes criticism about her music to heart, and that she used to let it guide her instincts about her music. Now, after seeing the heights she could achieve — even as (gasp!) a 30-something woman — it appears that she might be ready to start letting all that go. During one radio interview, in which the host fretted that he offended her years ago with a joke about her sweaty appearance after a concert on a hot day, she reassured him that she’s more secure than that.

“People don’t need to bubble wrap me in their minds as much as they do,” Swift said. “I’m a pretty tough broad.”

Swift may have to take even more in stride next year, given that she will almost surely dominate global news with her upcoming wedding to Kelce. While she has repeatedly maintained on this press tour that she doesn’t check social media, her immense stardom means that she can’t escape knowing what people think about her. Near the conclusion of the “End of an Era” docuseries, she argued that the phenomenal success of the tour also reflected how she happened to fit into the culture at the time. Luck, in other words.

“There’s times, these very rare instances, where you make something and the wind is at your back,” Swift said. “Somehow culture and timing, and whatever mood there is out in the world about you that you can’t control, all lines up for this to go well.”

The film ends on a very deliberate message. After a sequence of text recapping recent milestones and measures of Swift’s achievements comes a final one:

On October 3, 2025 Taylor released her 12th studio album “The Life of a Showgirl,” the biggest album of her career.

After a pause, two more words:

To date.