The Ageism Crisis Nobody’s Talking About

speaker-0 (00:03.83)
Hey folks, welcome back. Today we have Ashton Appewight, who’s an author who’s been focusing on the ageism side of things. Ashton, welcome. It always sounds better if it’s coming from the person I’m talking to, so why don’t you tell us a bit about yourself and what you’re doing.

speaker-1 (00:22.35)
I live in Brooklyn, New York. I’m a writer. I am 73 years old. I started thinking about age and aging about 20 years ago in my mid 50s when I looked in the mirror and went, this getting older thing is happening to me, which I think is a little bit like, I don’t want to think about it.

denial, but also, you we age slowly. And I think there’s part of us that just thinks, you know, I’m somehow going to get a pass. And I realized I was sort of free-floating apprehensive about the prospect of getting older. And I’m not an academic. I didn’t have any expertise in aging at the time, but I am nerdy. I like to research like you, Neil. I like to learn. So I started learning about longevity and

learned within, I felt like a matter of weeks, it was probably months, that almost everything I thought I knew about getting older was way off base or flat out wrong, way too negative, not nuanced enough, or just not based in the science. And it became also obvious that a big, had a blog, remember blogs, and a word cloud were the words that are.

occur the most often are the biggest and a very big word was ageism, which is judgments and assumptions about people or a group of people on the basis of how old we think they are. And so I became, I will say obsessed with ageism about how the culture in which we grow older shapes that experience and

with the fact that we needed to hear both sides of the story. Not that the scary stuff wasn’t real. There’s plenty to worry about around getting older, especially in a society that offers so few supports for people who need help of any kind. But we needed to come together, talk about that and operate from a fact rather than fear-based understanding of what might lie ahead.

speaker-0 (02:40.174)
So you wrote a book on this. I want to make sure that it’s not, I don’t butcher it. So tell me about the book.

speaker-1 (02:46.804)
I did. I will give you a slightly long answer because it will also provide a bit of biography. I write slowly. I did not ever intend to become a writer. I warned you, I’ve never had much of a life plan. But in when I turned 40, I ended my marriage. And in a way that only in hindsight, because again, I only figured this out in hindsight, I was very apprehensive. So I started interviewing women who ended

their marriages and figuring out, it just, you know, the future was, you know, is the depressed Dame on a bar stool who’s broken lonely. And ended up writing my first serious book called Cutting Loose, Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, which is not an anti-marriage book or an anti-man book. It is an anti-patriarchy book. It ended up being, which I learned as I wrote and learned about how sexism and

patriarchy and misogyny make it really hard to have an egalitarian marriage, an equal relationship, which is what I wanted in a society that values men and women differently. And then fast forward 20 years, I’m getting older, I’m apprehensive about it. And so was in a way a parallel thing. There are things to worry about. Ending your marriage is a serious decision and there are losses involved. I’m glad I did it, but it’s not something

to do, you know, likely. Likewise, getting older, it is the culture, it doesn’t occur to most of us, especially in such a individualism oriented society as the US, all this hyper, you know, effort on, you know, being independent and carving your own path, which is not our friend, that the culture in which we live and in which we age plays a very powerful role.

in shaping that experience. So then I wrote a book called, I have a terrible self promoter. So that gave her, I was writing a book was really valuable, but really awful, just a terrible experience. I thought I’ll never have to do that again. I can just blog and tweet and be a modern writer, but books change the culture, I think. And I ended up writing a book called This Chair Rocks, a Manifesto Against Ageism.

speaker-0 (04:45.614)
You know what’s int-

speaker-1 (05:10.146)
which is a really good book. It’s fun to read and I’m proud of it.

speaker-0 (05:14.83)
So for everybody watching, I’ll put the link to this book in the description of this video so that you can go and access it and see exactly what Ashton is talking about.

speaker-1 (05:25.294)
Thank you. And I will say the book is not free, although you can download the first chapter for free on Kindle. But I add that when I started thinking about this and learning about it, I started, in essence, thinking out loud on that blog. And all those thoughts are available for free, linkable, indexable by subject on my website, is thischairrocks.com slash blog or go to blog at the left hand list in the left. And you can track my thinking.

on any aspect of this vast and fascinating topic for free.

speaker-0 (05:59.714)
you go. It’s funny, I wrote a book myself, more on the technology side, because that’s the area I came out of. And the book that I put together was basically just the columns I had been writing, consolidated into the book itself. So one thing I noticed, like I’ve been interviewing people now for around two months, and the vast majority of people that I’m talking to in this space are female.

It’s really interesting. Any thoughts as to why that might be?

speaker-1 (06:33.886)
of thoughts. You know, if getting divorced is harder for women because we live in a sexist and misogynist and patriarchal society, growing older is harder for women because we age on that substructure. Women are doubly punished for aging because of the intersection of ageism and sexism.

We are punished for appearing to look our age and we are punished because under patriarchy, your value is linked to your reproductive capacity. We see that around a lot of conservative rhetoric now about how a woman’s job is really to produce a lot of babies. For people who don’t want babies or can’t have babies or couldn’t have babies no matter what age they were, that is a deeply hostile and to my mind offensive

relegation of women to second class status. In any issue where you have more to lose and more at stake, you’re going to be more involved. So there are more women engaged in talking about aging. think there’s a wonderful upsurge, I think, catalyzed in part by the pandemic when a lot of people form virtual communities of older women. And mind you, an older woman in this society can be 30.

I mean, there are teenagers now, are skin care routines marketed to children saying prevent wrinkles now and framing aging, framing signs of aging as the worst thing that could possibly happen to anyone, but especially if you identify as a woman. And that is a corrupt, corrupting and terrible message.

speaker-0 (08:23.502)
And it boggles my mind. was saying this to somebody earlier today, actually a couple of people. When I was doing research for this podcast, one of the things I discovered was 70 % of the wealth in North America is held by people over the age of 50. Yet all this advertisement is focused on the young. There’s no attention paid to the people who actually have it.

speaker-1 (08:48.928)
I mean, another culprit is capitalism, which tether the value of a human being to their conventional economic productivity. I’ve learned to be wary of that word. But even though older people do, you we’ve had more time to accumulate resources, very little stuff is actually marketed to us besides vacations and medicine. So that tells you something. Also, women control.

much more spending, household spending than men do. I want to point out though that there one reason that so little stuff is marketed to older people, those are the main reasons. mean, that you would think that older people, the only thing we were interested in was walking on the beach, looking after our grandchildren and falling apart. And as you age, and I think you could probably testify this, we are interested in the same kinds of things we always were, right? We don’t become

new kinds of people just because we got older. Although sometimes there are things we can’t do or can’t do the way we used to, but we remain interested in skiing or opera or bird watching or gardening or whatever the hell it is, no matter, you know, straight through life typically. One point is that a lot of older people don’t want to buy products or shop in at websites or stores that are targeting older people because of their internalized ageism.

Right? They have grown up being told by the culture that being old is bad, being around old people is sad and icky. And most of us, all of us, in fact, absorb those messages. And most of us have never thought to question them. So one reason marketers don’t try and sell stuff to older people is older people go ick. Like, I don’t want to go to the senior center. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard this because of all the old people there, even though the person telling me that might be 70, 80 or 90 years old.

That’s internalized ages and that too.

speaker-0 (10:46.702)
Yeah, it’s interesting. I interviewed somebody from Rural Scholar a couple of weeks ago and they’ve changed the language that they’re using when they’re talking to people because they’re focused on the older person traveling. But calling them elderly is like a swear word. So

speaker-1 (11:02.22)
Older traveler. Yeah.

speaker-1 (11:08.558)
You know, course, it shouldn’t be. mean, I have solved the problem of what to call old people, by the way. I was writing the this year rocks, the manifesto, I literally got tired of typing out older adults or older Americans. And I shortened it for my own purposes to olders and youngers. I will tell you, as a writer, I am very leery.

speaker-0 (11:31.512)
Nice.

speaker-1 (11:36.052)
of inventing words, of neologisms. We’ve got a lot of words already in English. But the lovely thing, there’s lots of nice things about olders and youngers. For one reason, everyone knows what you mean. you write, it doesn’t require explanation. I really like that it breaks down this imaginary line in the sand. Like you’re on the good side as long as you’re young, young. And then one day you wake up old and fall off a cliff and everything goes to hell.

We age in relation to others. It busts up that binary. There are no binaries. A four-year-old will assure you that she is older than her three-year-old sister, right? So we are elders and youngers, elders in one situation, youngers in another. And I also like that it’s neutral, right? Elder is a beautiful word. It’s used in indigenous cultures. A lot of African-American communities use it. It’s not part of my culture.

I don’t think that age should confer status in itself. I want a world where age is neutral, right? And that you don’t get put on a pedestal because you’ve woken up a certain number of times. You get respect and have a crack at a dignified life, whether from birth to death, all the way along.

speaker-0 (12:53.826)
Yeah, to me it’s, it’s the older you get, the more experiences you’ve had and you become in essence a reference book for people to.

speaker-1 (13:03.31)
But people say, does age confer wisdom? I think experience feeds wisdom. But there are lots of older people who don’t seem to have learned much along the way. So that’s another age. A stereotype can be benevolent too. I have plenty of wise younger people. And even you meet the wise child on occasion. Those kids just give you little shiver like, oh, there’s a lot in that little head.

speaker-0 (13:27.822)
lived a lot of previous lives type thing. You, one of the first things you said when you started describing your journey into this was that you went in with a lot of thoughts that were way off base.

what what do you think? What were some of the things that you were way off base about? And the reason why I’m asking, I’m asking this is, I’ve found I am not unique with people. If I’m finding stuff, others are. So you’ve made the effort to go and do that research to find out more. And you’ve determined what was way off base. That tells me others will have

have the same thoughts, right? What do you think are those thoughts that are way off base?

speaker-1 (14:16.911)
yeah.

speaker-1 (14:20.556)
Well, there are many. I mean, if you want a really brutal, ugly introduction to some of those stereotypes, take a stroll down the birthday card aisle at the local drug store and you will see all sorts of really hideous and even hateful caricatures of older people that they are sexless, that they are ugly. Why am I saying they? We, we, I am one of them.

A specific example, I think when I started out, if you had asked me what the odds were of ending up in a nursing home, I would have thought 20 or 30%. The percentage of Americans over 65, now mind you nursing homes that provide skilled nursing care, not just, right, or not like the villages in Florida, but assisted living. When I started out in this field, it was 4 % and it is down to two and a half

speaker-0 (15:09.518)
Assisted living.

speaker-1 (15:20.44)
percent.

speaker-0 (15:22.062)
Jeez, didn’t realize the numbers were that low.

speaker-1 (15:24.686)
Right, they are that low. A lot of people, might hurt yourself, but you might hurt yourself at 40, right? You don’t have to be 140. You might go into need rehab in a nursing home facility, but you typically don’t stay there, right? So that’s an example. I would say the more general answer is just that our, think of, here’s another one. We think of aging as something that old people do.

Aging is lifelong. You are aging from the minute you are born. In gerontology, the progressive viewpoint here is called the life course approach. That how we age, we age at different rates, physically, socially, cognitively, which is why, a little footnote here, but it’s a really important point. The longer we live, the more different from one another we become. And that was another assumption, like you sort of end up in some

gray blob of the elderly, right? Some indistinguishable gray, you’ve tattered off to the senior living and are lumped in a mass of old people. Say a senior living facility has people from 55 to 95, there is way more variability physically, socially, cognitively, all the ways than there is between a group of people between 55 and 25.

speaker-0 (16:49.336)
You know, it’s, this is one of my pet peeves right now.

speaker-1 (16:53.332)
good. I love pet peeves. I have so many.

speaker-0 (16:55.566)
When I, because this is all on YouTube, when I look at these stats that are provided by YouTube, they break it down by age, know, 18 to 25, 25, 35, 35, 45. They get to 65 and they stop. They go 65 plus. And I know I’m 61. My dad who’s still living is 94. We are not the same. Our way of thinking is not the same. So you’re consolidating.

speaker-1 (17:24.685)
There’s even more variation.

speaker-0 (17:26.485)
Yeah, but nobody breaks that down.

speaker-1 (17:30.104)
No, no, it’s maddening. And it is part of this sort of silencing and rendering invisible of older people that older people aren’t interesting. Well, we’re perfectly interesting or we’re boring. But if we’re boring, we were probably boring when we were 30, right? We’re boring because we’re boring. We’re not boring because we got older.

speaker-0 (17:51.47)
Mmm.

As society has aged, as that bubble moves into these older years, do you think it’s changing?

speaker-1 (18:05.612)
I know it’s changing. the, think you’re referring to the baby boom bulge in the Python is that.

speaker-0 (18:11.502)
Not just that but

speaker-1 (18:15.736)
Everyone everywhere is living longer.

speaker-0 (18:18.83)
So everybody is going there.

speaker-1 (18:20.814)
Everybody, in longer lives, are a permanent global demographic trend. speaking of pet peeves, this is often portrayed as a cause for concern and alarm. And all these old people are going to sink the ship. Well, there’s a million reasons why that is an ageist and ignorant assumption. Sort of example here, a way to think about that is people saying, oh, 60 is the new 40.

60 is not the new 40, 60 is 60, 73 is 73. I’m not 73 the way anyone else is 73. But being 73 or 60 or 40 is different than it used to be for a whole variety of economic and public health has changed a lot. There’s more older people. This is sounds, it’s a little counterintuitive, but there’s more older people as a function of lower birth rate.

right? More people surviving to a surviving childhood and people not which people say, we need more kids. Well, you don’t actually having fewer having more adults to look after and educate and care for children is a lot better for kids than when you had to have six or eight because a bunch of them died in infancy and because we were doing physical labor that exhausted us and made us sick and so on.

So the problem is never a too many old people. It might be a job shortage problem, right? It might be a labor market problem, for example, or a health equity problem. But the problem lies with the system, not with the age of people who need support and opportunity.

speaker-0 (20:04.526)
I interviewed Dr. Catherine Rickwood, she’s down in Australia, about workplace and getting older. And one of the things she’s starting to see is work sharing.

job sharing as people don’t necessarily stop. Yeah, but it’s increasing. People don’t necessarily want to stop work. They may want to go from five days, 40 hours a week down to 20 hours or something like that. They can bring on somebody else that’s younger. And now that you have that training aspect, because you have that knowledge

speaker-1 (20:39.416)
Honestly, it can switch. Here’s a way to think about that, Neil. Suppose a younger person has the job and wants to take time off to have a sabbatical, to go back to school, to spend more time with their young kids. They might bring on the age of the person they bring on is kind of irrelevant if they’re available. And that person, even if they are older, you might start a new career when you’re older. You would still need to learn from the person who does the job. mean, so often we give age more

spread it than it deserves. it’s much it’s rarely about age. It’s about opportunity. It’s about capacity. It’s about a million.

speaker-0 (21:18.412)
Yeah. Do you see what about age? Since we’re talking about work ageism as we get older, getting closer to the retirement age and quite honestly, yes, I’m 61, but I don’t see myself retiring anytime soon simply because I’d get bored stiff. But do you see any improvements or changing with regards to older workers?

speaker-1 (21:45.378)
You know, that’s a big question. I think the concept of retirement is becoming obsolete. And I think there are good reasons for that. People are realizing, with more older people, especially people approaching the traditional retirement age, which is an arbitrary and obsolete 65, is that, whoa, I’m at the height of my powers. I don’t want to retire. Often, I cannot afford to retire. Work is an enormous source of

of identity and social connection. And another important point is that the most, something I didn’t know when I entered in, if you’d said, what’s the most important component of a good late life, I would have said health. Second guess would have been wealth. It’s neither of those things. It’s having a solid social network. And often, especially for men, although I think this is changing as gender roles get more mixed up in a way that I think is terrific.

Work is often the primary source of social connection for men. So one of the changes I would like to see as we enter a world of longer lives is ways for people to transition gradually out of the workforce and share what they know, but also transition back in perhaps, right? Perhaps, as I mentioned, you might transition out.

to as a younger person because you want to start a family, because you want to change careers, whatever. So we need to have a much more fluid in and out and in again system because as it is now with people just leaving, companies suffer an enormous loss of institutional knowledge and older people, most of us don’t want to go from working nine to five to golfing, if you can even afford to golf, right? We want to share what we know and maybe, and keep our hand in.

speaker-0 (23:38.132)
Feel like we’re useful

speaker-1 (23:39.746)
or whatever. But let’s not forget, there’s a huge amount of privilege in framing it that way. That is where people have options that I suspect you have and I have. I’ve been self-employed for so long that I’m sure I have not gotten opportunities because of my age, but I have been mercifully ignorant of that because I never knew I was in the running. I hear heart-rending stories of people

sending out hundreds and hundreds of resumes and hearing nothing, or more like if the interview is virtual, a person expressing an interest and then it’s over the minute you turn on your camera. Or in real life, you enter the room simply because you are older, simply, honestly, simply because you are no longer young. And we spend most of our lives being no longer young.

speaker-0 (24:32.876)
Yeah. One of the things I’ve found and this, reason why I started this podcast is it was getting hard for me to find any more IT contracts. But the people I was talking to were in their late twenties, early thirties. And I don’t think they really wanted to hire their dad, their granddad.

speaker-1 (24:53.016)
hear you and of course I hear you and I believe you. That is of course ageism and narrow-mindedness on their parts. We know that HR, for some reason HR is predominantly most of the people in the field, the gatekeepers for job applications are young women and study after study, forgive the irritation in my voice, show that they say, you know, older workers are terrific, they’re dependable, they’re really great hires. No, wanna hire them.

And, know, bias is not rational, but this whole idea of culture fit, culture fit means someone like me. And it’s tempting, it’s easy, it’s comfortable. It is hard to reach across difference, but it is really, really important, ethically, socially, in my opinion. And also if you want your company to be a good place to work and to make money, age diverse teams, as well as teams that are diverse in other ways, work better.

and they make companies work better. And especially in the creative industries, they make companies more profitable. You have a more diverse workforce, you can reach a more diverse customer base and just your better placed to negotiate the complicated globalized world we all now in.

speaker-0 (26:10.38)
Yeah. Okay, so ageism is a real problem. I’m experiencing it. What are some of the solutions?

speaker-1 (26:20.878)
Oh, so many. I will start with, but let me start with the most essential task, which is the hardest and the most uncomfortable and the most necessary and also the most liberating, which is a function of the fact that bias, almost all bias is unconscious. Your subconscious mind is responsible for 95 % of your mental activity.

We grow up in an ageist culture. We see ageist advertising. We see or don’t see older people in movies and advertising and the media and so on and so on. And unless we stop to challenge those things, which requires a wake-up call, right? It doesn’t happen automatically. Those values become part of our identity. That is internalized ageism and we are all ageist. So the first essential step, because nothing

happens without awareness is to look at your own attitudes towards age and aging and think about the habits. Think about how you use the words old and young. That’s a really good starting place. Have you ever said, I don’t feel old, right? You know, or I’m too young for that. What do old and young mean? You might be too experienced. You might be too out of shape.

You might’ve done it yesterday. You might’ve not wanted to do it when you’re 20 and you still don’t wanna do it when you’re 60. It is never about age. It is about the experience or feeling or emotion or situation you bring to that. So think we all have a tendency to use young for insert positive capacity, know, a positive word and old for depressed, ignorant, incompetent.

I don’t know about you, but I felt more insecure and ugly when I was 13 than I have ever felt since. We can all feel those things at every stage of life. So think about that and start to question the value you attach to age because it should be neutral. It’s a number that we ought to be able to claim, but not have a whole set of fixed meanings that are attached to the number.

speaker-1 (28:42.286)
And I would also say that another thing you can do is try and break a couple of ageist habits. No judgment at all because we all do these things. But do you tend to make a beeline for people your own age when you enter a room? Most of us do. When you have a party, do most of the people that you invite tend to be around your age?

speaker-0 (29:00.878)
Hmm.

speaker-1 (29:07.106)
We, the U.S. is very age segregated. Higher education is a super age segregating facility. And it’s important consciously, deliberately, awkwardly. This is awkward, but social change doesn’t happen without discomfort. Everyone stays comfortable and repeats their habits and nothing changes. To reach across age gaps and try to mix it up. Making a significantly younger or older friend.

is itself an anti-ages act. You can’t just go out and grab an old person or a young person and say, hey, let’s be friends, but think of something you like to do and find a mixed age group to do it with. when you’re learning this thing, try to match up or query someone older than yourself. So those are all acts. I will say that even though this is uncomfortable, it’s no fun acknowledging that you’re biased.

The reason it’s so liberating is that it is like letting a genie out of a bottle. Because the minute you see this bias in yourself, it’s like a spell breaking. Then you start to see it in the culture around you. That’s what consciousness raising is, which is a phrase from the 60s, but that where women in particular came together and discussed frustrations or obstacles or threats in their lives that had to do with being women, you know, maybe

not having financial power in their relationship, maybe getting patronized at work or not promoted and went, you’re encountering that, you’re encountering that, it’s not my personal failure. This is a social and economic issue that we can come together and do something about. And that is liberating and empowering. So once you start on that process, the next step is then to recognize it and to say something.

when you see it, when you encounter it. And that’s brave, you know, it does take courage because it’s easier and safer to just stay in your lane. But if we stay silent, and there are times when you have to, if your boss has something ageist, and you don’t think it’s like the smart move to call him out in front of, you know, the whole company, maybe you can’t. But if you see someone, for example, on the receiving end of an ageist comment, you could go up to them after and say, I heard this comment come your way.

speaker-1 (31:33.73)
you know, it didn’t feel great to me, how did it feel to you? They may say, it’s fine, it’s nothing, but you know, show solidarity. We have learned a lot, especially in recent years about recognizing gender mistreatment and inequity in a workspace, racism in, you know, racial bias in workspaces and social spaces. Every individual’s experience is different. Ageism is different from racism, which is different from sexism.

But a lot of the things we have learned about how to recognize it and call it out are applicable. We have skills. And the important thing is to use those skills in whatever we can. Don’t buy that awful birthday card, even if it’s funny, because that card is gonna sit on someone’s refrigerator and whoever sees it is gonna absorb that derogatory message, for example, typically about being older, right?

You know, it’s about, there’s so many, I won’t dignify them with some examples, but likewise, that’s an example of a negative messages about ageism that ripples out if you question. If you are on the receiving end of an ageist comment, it’s often hard to think of the snappy answer in the moment, really good all purpose answer. What do you mean by that? You know, and that compels the person to sit back for a minute.

and think what they did mean. What did they mean? Why are they calling me a young lady? I’m not a young lady, you know? And to call me a young lady only, not only draws attention to the fact that I’m not young, but it implicitly suggests that I should want to be young, right? And it is those moments of reflection that change the culture. And lastly, I know this is a long answer, but you can’t start too late. You can’t start too small.

even if all you do and the even I’ll put in quotes because it’s hard is to reflect on how you think about age and aging, that’s gonna change how you see yourself as an older person in the world or a younger person. Ageism is any judgment on the basis of age and younger people get dismissed and silenced all the time. When you realize that it’s not okay and that you don’t deserve to be seen that way, you take that

speaker-1 (33:53.908)
new sense of yourself out in the world and that changes the air and the world around you.

speaker-0 (34:01.102)
wondering whether the awareness of ageism is increasing. Simply because, while you were talking, you were talking about what we were experiencing in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, the various different differences we were identifying as biases, sexism, racism, that sort of thing.

speaker-1 (34:05.74)
It is. Thank you.

speaker-0 (34:31.992)
but it’s that age group that’s been traveling through the aging process. And now that group is now entering into the seventies, sixties, seventies, eighties, and they are now seeing the ageism. So again, they speak out, but now about ageism.

speaker-1 (34:48.878)
I mean, older people can be the most ageist of all. That was another huge surprise to me. And I think because they have had a lifetime of internalizing the idea that age is not good and they don’t want the older people who don’t want to go anywhere near the senior center, right? Because they don’t want to be identified as old, calling someone old. how could you say such an awful thing? Well, I’m old.

me, but it does insult a lot of people. And you got to meet people where they are. it’s, you know, ageism against older people, when people think that way, they are discriminating against their own future older selves, which doesn’t make sense. But no bias makes sense. I take a lot of hope and heart from younger people who have grown up more aware and more willing to speak out.

I’m now I’m doing the ultimately ageist thing, which is to generalize about all younger people. And any generalization about an age group is inherently ageist. But they have grown up knowing about intersectionality, a lot of them, this idea that all these forms of bias inform and reinforce each other. So if I may say to a group of younger people, or not even younger, I don’t know why I put the younger in there. What do you think of as criteria for diversity? What makes a group diverse?

and everyone will say gender, people often say race, sometimes ethnicity, sometimes class. If age is missing, I say, about age? And nobody says that’s a dumb idea. And awareness of ageism is increasing. There’s now Ageism Awareness Day. There are now over 30 national anti-ageism campaigns around the world. I know that because of a website I want you to put.

speaker-0 (36:24.942)
Mm-hmm.

speaker-1 (36:39.87)
on your list called the old school hub. I’m happy to talk about that. And the first step in any social change is awareness, right? That it’s important no matter what it is, especially when it comes to values, because most of what we think about values is part of our subconscious processes and we’re not even aware of it. And you can’t challenge something you’re not aware of. So I think there’s a lot of people think, ageism is worse.

I do not agree that it’s worse. think that because people are learning to see it, they’re saying, I see it there. Wow, shit, there’s a lot of it.

speaker-0 (37:18.363)
We always thought about that on all sorts of different topics.

speaker-1 (37:21.941)
It’s positive development, not a

speaker-0 (37:24.014)
Yeah, yeah. It doesn’t mean that it wasn’t there before just because the metrics weren’t there. Exactly. It just means nobody was documenting it.

speaker-1 (37:32.962)
Right. they were just, didn’t know what it, you know, I also have a blog called Yo Is This Agist modeled on a preexisting blog called Yo Is This Racist because a lot of people, when I started out, here’s another indicator from your huge study of one person me, is that when I started out, a lot of people didn’t know what the word meant. And that’s not the case anymore. But a lot of people don’t know whether something they’ve

speaker-0 (37:54.702)
Hmm.

speaker-1 (38:01.038)
heard or seen or perhaps said or done is ageist and I try and answer and there it’s not simple answers, you know, because a lot of people say ageist things without meaning to, or they call me young lady because they think it’s a compliment. That does not let them off the hook. It matters, but doesn’t make it okay.

speaker-0 (38:19.918)
For me, as I’ve grown older, because my nature is to look ahead, I’ve watched my father and what he’s gone through and how he’s dealt with things. And I think a lot of the lessons that I’m learning may be the wrong lessons simply because I’m watching how he is doing things. Like, for example, right now he’s continuously apologizing.

speaker-1 (38:47.63)
No.

speaker-0 (38:48.895)
And it’s, I keep telling them, you…

speaker-1 (38:50.904)
that new? didn’t do that when he was younger?

speaker-0 (38:53.078)
No, no, he’s he’s I’m sorry. like he’s having trouble with his computer. He can’t handle his computer. Yeah.

speaker-1 (39:00.974)
I’m sorry, I need help. That’s such a huge thing, especially in this culture. We’re asking for help. It’s shameful. We all need help. We need help from birth to death. The whole discourse around aging independently. I would like to take that word out and throw it to outer space where none of us are independent ever. I’m so sorry.

speaker-0 (39:21.612)
Yeah, no, but that’s also the nature of our culture, the North American culture. When we look at other cultures, it’s a different, it’s a family oriented versus an individual.

speaker-1 (39:32.558)
impoverishes us as Americans. does.

speaker-0 (39:36.258)
Yeah, so now for me it’s it’s I’ve been learning, seeing what’s coming up, but I’m starting to learn to color it.

speaker-1 (39:47.352)
I love this, you are modeling, there’s a whole section in my book about becoming an old person in training, which is a font I appropriated from a geriatrician named Joanne Lin, which is simply to acknowledge that if you’re lucky, like another paradox, like everyone’s scared of getting old, but no one wants to die young, you know, what’s that about? And no one actually wants to go back to their youth. They think they do, and then they think, you know, I don’t wanna wipe this lake clean. I am the product of

you know, everything that’s brought me to this point. Becoming an old person in training is just a little, it’s not even a trick, but it’s acknowledge. If you’re lucky, you will be old. And instead of looking past or ignoring the older people around you, look at us and think about, you know, notice what we do and don’t do. And it is an imaginative connection to the older you who can be as far off on the horizon.

as she needs to be, right? As I started out saying, it is hard to imagine being old. I think that’s just as hard as we’re human and we age slowly. And you see an older person doing something, you think, that looks cool. File that away as something you can do when you are older. See your dad being so reluctant to ask for help. Make a note as indeed you are doing so. Props to you. It’s fantastic to say, you know what? I’m gonna try not to do that as I age. The whole asking for help thing is

huge. My partner and I, he’s 80. He will be 80 in two weeks, two weeks, three weeks. And he’s very afraid of falling. He’s on medications now that can cause bone loss. And we started a couple months ago to use canes. Not because we cannot walk without canes, but because we want to prevent the fall that would make us reliant on canes.

And I’ve written a blog post about that, a newsletter I’m happy to send you. People think it’s a great idea. I got a huge response. And then they all say, but you know, and I’ll do it soon. Not yet. I’ll get my cane out of the closet when I need it. And of course the point is to do it before you need it. But there is such a double stigma around age and disability that it’s really, really a hard ask.

speaker-1 (42:09.784)
People say, my friends, like they see me with a cane, what happened? Which is a completely thoughtful and logical question. And I say nothing. And it’s very interesting to watch the gears turn. Why on earth? And it was hard for me. By the way, full, full confession, my partner was out the door with his cane, day one. It took me two weeks. I don’t know. Every day I’d say like, well, I’m not gonna fall today. So I’ll try it tomorrow.

because I was reluctant to become what came up for me, like, you know, all the old lady, old people crossing the road with canes all hunched over. And I thought, I’m not that. And guess what? Now I am. And you know what makes you more likely to fall? Being afraid of falling. One. Number two, punching. Because it moves your center of gravity forward. And as we get

older and more afraid of falling because our balance tends to deteriorate. You do look down with the cane. It’s much easier. I know what the ground in front of me is. So I look up and I take bigger shuffling. That’s a fall risk. So the cane prevents me from falling. But of course, in the culture we live in, it does make me quote unquote, look old. That’s ageist. doesn’t, you know, but it makes me look frailer. And I that is a risk. That’s a whatever. That’s a

price except the hell with that, you know, that I have decided to pay and it has kept several, it has definitely prevented a couple of certainly stumbles and probably a couple of falls for each of us. And I know it preachy. It’s tough. You know, we’re doing, he’s doing it because he’s a fearful hypochondriac and I’m doing it because I want to walk the walk and set a proactive example if I can. And I don’t want to fall.

speaker-0 (43:45.646)
Hmm.

speaker-0 (44:04.482)
You know, it’s funny, while you were talking, a lot of the thought processes people have around ageism is the physical.

speaker-1 (44:13.688)
No kidding. that’s not actually ageism. That a lot of what we, it’s a great point, Neil, good for you. A lot of what we think of as ageism, which is stigma and prejudice around age, is actually stigma around how our minds and bodies might function differently. And you could become disabled at 12. You can be born disabled. You can be in a car accident and so on. Cognitive decline is not inevitable.

fascinating new research from Becca Levy just out last month shows that people with more positive and accurate understandings of age, cognition can actually improve, right? So we’re not stuck with any of this, but when you get the overlap of ageism and ableism, dual cooties, people are really, really resistant to thinking about.

for reasons that I understand and respect. These are dark fears about being human and much about that is not welcome. But by pretending it’s not gonna happen, right? Drumming our feet on the ground, we actually make ourselves at higher risk for exactly what we fear.

speaker-0 (45:24.11)
Yeah, it’s funny. I set up a relationship with the UCLA Longevity Center as part of this podcast. And one of the people that I interviewed was Dr. Helen Levretsky. Now her area of focus for research is Western medicine is typically just focuses on the physical, the heart, the muscles, the joints, that sort of stuff. Her area of research is combining the mind, body and soul.

And by combining all three, all of a sudden you’re living better, you’re living longer, more purposeful. The ageism, because it’s just focused on the body aspect, maybe a touching on the mind because of the concepts of neurological decline, it’s forgetting about the purpose. And because we have purpose,

For example, your talk with regards to the book and your focus on ageism, you have a purpose. It keeps you up in the morning. keeps driving you going. that helps with the body, helps with the mind.

speaker-1 (46:32.622)
And it helps with the social, it helps with it all. mean, the woman who’s done most of the research around the mind-body connection is named Becca Levy. It’s her amazing new study that just came out. She talks, it’s a very clunky academic phrase, but stereotype embodiment theory. If you think everything’s gonna go to hell when you get older, or that if your knee hurts, it’s because of your age, you know, it’s like the old gag. Does your other knee hurt? It’s just as old.

But if we think these things are going to happen as we get old, we are more likely to embody that prospect and that reality. And through that, both mentally and how we think and how we behave, it is more likely to become true. But so the positive piece of it is just as powerful, if not more so. Your knee may hurt. It may hurt because you may need a knee replacement, right? But if you believe that it’ll be worth it,

speaker-0 (47:13.294)
Hmm.

speaker-1 (47:27.208)
and that you will get back to if not running marathons, but back to walking, whatever the thing. We age well by adapting, right? All of life is adapting. your standard, again, very American, you gotta keep making more money to age well as to not appear to age at all, right? If you hold yourself to an impossible standard, you will eventually fail and that will be a lot more destructive.

to your sense of yourself and your place in the world. And if you acknowledge that, you know, things gonna change, they’re gonna change for the worse and they’re gonna change for the best.

speaker-0 (48:05.932)
I’ve always believed that the mind… you will go where your mind tells you to go. And if your mind tells you you’re old, then you’re old.

speaker-1 (48:14.168)
My mind tells me I’m old. I’m old. But old does not mean sad, right? We’re back, we’ve come full circle, thank you for that example, to what does old mean? Old to me means 73. It means I have a lot under my belt. It absolutely means that I have physical challenges that I didn’t have that I don’t welcome. But it also means that I, you know, I mean, especially for women, age is empowering.

For many women, older, later life is the best time of all, partly because we are freed, if not by choice or if not under terms that we got to dictate from these oppressive pressures to look and act a certain way, in particular to have power in a male dominated world. you’re so old, you’re no longer a sexual threat. Man, all bets are off.

speaker-0 (49:11.446)
Okay, we’re coming up to the end of the interview, Ashton. So the last question I always ask everybody is, if you were going to give one piece of advice, what would it be? And it can be anywhere in anything. What would your one piece of advice be?

speaker-1 (49:32.014)
I’ve given a lot of advice already. I would say to educate yourself about age and aging, which I’m okay. I will put my book. My book is really, it’s really good. It’s fun to read. There’s an audio book. I guarantee that you will come out of it way more optimistic about the years ahead and way more aware of the forces that want you to be afraid.

that want you to be separate from other people of different ages, that want you to buy crap that isn’t good for you, that’s a waste of money and so on. And that is liberating and to educate and to acknowledge that you are aging. Everyone is aging, aging is living, right? It is the universal human experience. It’s really powerful. It’s really interesting. And to look at it, to enter this, know,

pursuit of learning more with an open mind. If you can, it’s hard. It’s hard. Unlearning is hard, especially when it comes to values, but it’s worth it. And it is free except my book does cost money, but you can read all this other stuff. I have a Ted talk, da da da da. And oh, I know, go to oldschool.info, which is the old school hub. It is a website I co-created back in 2018. make zero, zero dollars off any of it. And it started as a resource hub.

So there is tons and tons of resources that are not me. I shouldn’t have answered in such a me-centric way about, and you can approach it from, if you’re interested in learning about ageism in the workforce or as an educator, whatever, there’s lots and lots of carefully vetted resources to educate yourself about ageism. And if you want to meet other people who are learning alongside you, we host a weekly open to anyone meetup. We have a yearly in-person get together.

There’s lots of people who are engaged in learning to think differently. And it’s really, it’s really, I don’t love the word empowering, but it’s empowering and it’s fun.

speaker-0 (51:42.122)
Ashton has given a lot of different links and resources. So all of this will be in the description of the video so you can access it. Ashton, I really appreciate it. For me, I love this podcast because I learned so much from everybody I’m talking with. That’s great. I learned a lot here. Thank you very much.

speaker-1 (52:05.87)
You’re very welcome.

speaker-0 (52:07.758)
And everybody, please feel free to click like and subscribe. The views on this podcast are phenomenal. We’re probably going to break 125, 135,000 views for April. it’s just growing like you wouldn’t believe. So stay tuned. Thank you very much, Ashton.