Today I talk to Ashton Applewhite, the author of “This Chair Rocks, a Manifesto Against Ageism” and a leading spokesperson raising awareness on ageism and how to dismantle it. She is a leader for Old School, a clearinghouse website for anti-ageism resources, and the voice behind the blog, "Yo, Is This Ageist?" You may have heard her Ted Talk or seen her on CBS Sunday Morning. Today she answers the questions; what is ageism, why does ageism exist, what does ageism do to our mental health as we get older, and why addressing ageism will make you feel more comfortable about aging. Ashton breaks down this “ism” so well that by the end you will feel nothing but empowered by your age.
Today I talk to Ashton Applewhite, the author of “This Chair Rocks, a Manifesto Against Ageism” and a leading spokesperson raising awareness on ageism and how to dismantle it. She is a leader for Old School, a clearinghouse website for anti-ageism resources, and the voice behind the blog, Yo, Is This Ageist? You may have heard her Ted Talk or seen her on CBS Sunday Morning. Today she answers the questions; what is ageism, why does ageism exist, what does ageism do to our mental health as we get older, and why addressing ageism will make you feel more comfortable about aging. Ashton breaks down this “ism” so well that by the end you will feel nothing but empowered by your age.
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welcome to I Am This Age Proof You Are Never too old to make a big change. I'm Molly Sider a certified professional life coach and real life change maker in my forties. Today is a very special episode because I got to talk to Ashton Applewhite. The author of this chair Rocks a Manifesto Against Ageism and a leading spokesperson raising awareness on ageism and how to dismantle it.
You may have heard her TED talk or seen her on CBS Sunday morning today she answers the questions, what is ageism? Why does it exist? What does it do to our mental health? As we get older? What can we do about it?
And why? Addressing it will not only make you feel more comfortable about aging, it will encourage you to stop chasing youth, which is both physically impossible and mentally harmful.
Ashton breaks down this ism so well that by the end you will feel nothing but empowered by your age.
So put down the hair dye and turn up the volume because this episode is going to completely change the way you think about aging.
Real fast. Before we get started, I am currently taking just a couple of clients, so if you are someone struggling because you just lost a job or you ended a relationship and you're feeling lost and unsure of which direction to turn or what to do next, click the link in the show notes to get in touch with me, and I will email the next steps to get you started on your journey forward.
Okay, now, Ashton Applewhite.
My name is Ashton Applewhite. Uh, believe it or not, I live in Brooklyn. I am a writer and public speaker, and I am working to raise awareness of ageism and to help educate people about how to dismantle it and help catalyze a grassroots movement like the women's movement to put it on our radar and help us mobilize against.
Yeah. Thank you so much for coming. I'm really excited to talk to you. I never do this, but I wanted to start by telling you a little story about me and why I'm here.
I forgot to say how old I was. I'm
Oh. Thank, thank you.
So here's my story.
On my 40th birthday, a friend of mine who had also recently turned 40, looked me in the eyes and said, well, no one is looking at us when we walk into a room anymore. Meaning we are no longer the attractive, sexy head Turners we once were. Now that we're 40, she was already married with kids. I was single, no kids.
And when she said this to me on my 40th birthday, I was devastated. I needed to believe that someone could still find me sexy. I still wanted to find a partner, and so I became desperate to find proof that not only was I going to be okay, but there was still time for me to grow and thrive, and that's why I started this podcast.
Yeah, with friends like that, who needs enemies?
Okay, so now on to Ashton. She tells a story about a guy she worked with who appeared in a way that to her and perhaps other people, made him seem well old. He wasn't in great shape. He talked about all of his aches and pains and his plans to retire to Florida, and when Ashton discovered that she and this guy were the same age, she panicked and she didn't want anyone to know, and then she got curious.
About her panic, and rather than doing all those things that we often do to try to look even younger, she turned her panic into a movement to address ageism in our society. And she wrote a book, it's called This Chair Rocks, A Manifesto Against Ageism.
So I wanted to know what the transition looked like from being fearful of people knowing that she was the same age as this guy, to recognizing this fear as ageism.
Well, I will say that I do. Tell the story in the introduction to my book more thoroughly than I could do it, um, now and more articulately. And it is, you can download the introduction for free via Amazon. So to get the long version you know, I knew that that impulse was ugly. and I knew that it was dopey.
I mean, we worked in the same office and people are gonna form their own opinions of Ray and of me who are very different people. So I, I could tell that it came from a part of me that was not a part I liked. and it that was indeed internalized bias. Everyone is full of bias of all sorts. Age bias is no exception and I think is more prominent because we haven't thought about it as much as we have about racism.
And sexism, and it's always a mistake to compare isms. They're all important. We all have work to do on all these things, but most of us haven't really stopped to think about age by us. And one of the things I learned early on was that older people can be the most ageist of all, which makes no sense, but no prejudice makes sense.
But we. . We can't confront bias unless we're aware of it. Most bias is unconscious. Unless you enjoy being a bigot, which some people do it, most of us would like to think, oh, I'm not biased. I'm fair. No one's fair , no one's unbiased. And we live in a culture that barrages us with messages about how awful it's gonna be to get old, how tragic it's gonna be to encounter any kind of incapacity.
And so the, the older you are, the longer. a period of time you've been exposed to this stuff, and unless we stop to challenge them, they, these messages become part of our identity and I was no exception
I remember when I started telling people about wanting to make this podcast, I remember some people saying to me, I think you're just having a midlife crisis and , and I remember responding with a. Yeah, obviously like that is the point. I'm having this midlife crisis and I'm not sure there's a reason for me to be having this midlife crisis, and I sort of wanna get to the bottom of that. What sort of,
a life crisis because you live in a culture that tells you that it's all gonna, that, that it's all gonna be horrible. And especially as a woman, aging is gendered. So you have this double whammy of being punished for God forbid, you know, appearing to age and having your face and body change over time.
So, That is the problem. One of the many things I learned very early on once I started learning about longevity, you know, cuz that's sort of, I'm a nerdy person and that's how I deal with stuff was about the uur of happiness. Which is the, this, if you imagine like, you know, a smiley face, it shows that people are happiest in childhood and at the ends of, of long lives.
And I'm happy to talk about the neuroscience behind that, but I remember thinking. It was completely not believable how o obviously it was all going to be bad and get worse. Uh, I also interviewed a bunch of older people and I remember meeting someone, this marvelous woman named Marsha Moth, who was a folk artist in Santa Fe, and she, at that time was in her eighties.
She didn't have a lot of money. She had had to, uh, stop teaching at Elder hostel because. Breathing difficulty. She was on an oxygen tank and she said, life in my eighties is more wonderful than it has ever been. And she wasn't preaching or anything. And I was to think about that. I had to write, I found it literally hard to believe.
And then I encountered this uur of happiness, and then I was like, well, that's just if you're rich or if you're healthy. It obtains across cultures. It obtains across class. It obtains across marital status. So the good or bad news, Molly, is that you are in the trough. Midlife is the time of life.
And I would say in, you know, forties is, you know, uh, odds are you'll live to be 80, maybe 90, perhaps more. But it is the time when I think we, we have maximum sort of career responsibilities in our screwy hyper capitalist society. We, if we have kids, we're still in the thick of them being at home.
Probably if we care about older people, they're likely to start encountering health problems, et cetera, plus, It's the time where you go, oh, I might not be a ballerina. You know, that lifelong dream of X, Y, Z I might never realize. And that's hard. That's a real reckoning. And it is things like that that make midlife so hard.
And the also the fact that we haven't adjusted our. Milestones in the way we think about moving through life. We haven't adapted them to the longer lives that the lucky among us will enjoy. So, cheer up. and remember being, being young is hard too. And that it for almost, you know, for the vast majority of the people, life does get better.
I mean, I will say as a woman, it has been hugely liberating when you get older. Hugely.
It's such a relief, and thank you for all that. I'm glad that you brought up the uur. I am 44 and I suffer from anxiety. Um, my first panic attack was at the age of 40, and I can't think. of a friend around my age who doesn't suffer from some sort of anxiety or depression.
When I was reading your book and I first read about this urf of happiness, I felt like somebody had like strapped me into a seat and pressed a button and like I zoomed out of out, out of my like hole in my life. Yes. it was such a, it's such a relief and it's such a relief again to hear you say that.
And it makes so much sense. Like, let's get
I mean, when you zoom out, you see the structural forces and the shared reasons. If everyone you know is depressed and anxious by any chance, are they living in a terrifying period in 21st century? You know, the planet Earth with these. Terrifying, you know, and fascinating. But, climate change, obviously political partisanship, the rise of ai, there is so much uncertainty.
I sort of feel like, you know, if you're not anxious, you're got your head under your pillow. But when a condition like that affects everyone, it's not because you are, weak or broken or delusionary or whatever. It's because of forces larger than all of us, and one of them is, you know, ageism in society that says, well, this is as good as it's going to get, and you can look forward to, you know, becoming an evermore useless, hideous ack of shit.
And if we believe that, which it's hard not to, then it further adds to the stress and, and demoralization of course.
Yeah. Yeah. So what were some of the first steps that you took to override your own ageist beliefs?
Well, I did it by l by learning. I mean, I remember you know, just educating myself and I've done all the work for you. You can just read my book. I mean, not that there are other points of view, but I should also say I started blogging. I never wanted to write another book. Writing a book is horrible, but I digress.
But I thought, oh, I'll just be a modern, Writer person and I'll just cheat and blog and I won't have to ever write another damn book. So I have been thinking out loud in blog form since 2007 at my website is this chair rocks.com/blog. So you can go back and it's searchable by topic if you have the, the desire and the energy to see how I have been thinking about this and how my thoughts have evolved.
But I. and then another sort of seminal thing that happened. Bad adjective. We need to, we need to do one better ladies,
Seminal. L O l. I think Astrin has a point here, ladies. Okay, moving on.
Is that I had a friend who ran a, um, performing arts festival in the summer in Massachusetts and every year, and she had been, she's a very wise person and she had been for, for a long time.
I was really stuck. I started learning about longevity. I started interviewing older people. I realized, in a matter of months, if not weeks, that everything I thought I knew about aging was flat out wrong or way off base. Definitely not nuanced enough, but then I floundered for a couple of miserable years.
Again, it was clear also that ageism was at the heart of not only the reason why I didn't know both sides of the story, but why the world didn't. But I didn't know what form it would take or. You know how to, I mean, I remember thinking if you can't figure out how to make a living off something that will make, the millions and millions of older people your age feel better about getting old, you are an idiot.
But I didn't know what form. I really struggled, and this friend would come visit me and she would, I tried not to blab to at any everyone, but I did blab to her about it and she, her theater festival had a theme every year and she said, I've picked agent aging and I'd like you to do a mono. And so I gave a monologue, which, and I'm not a performer, I had never thought of myself as the public speaker, but that became the basis of my first talk in which I cited Anna, U U s C Annenberg study conducted with a r p that says, less anxiety about aging is associated with more knowledge about the process.
The more you know about aging, the less fear it hold. , right? Because our fears are so out of perspective and because it's so individual and so nuanced and frankly, so interesting. so that happened and then that sort of set me on a path to becoming whatever it is that I am today.
Yeah, I love that. And it makes so much sense. And of course, I, I responded the same way. I started this podcast and I was like, I'll get information, I'll hear people's stories so that I can understand this whole process better
that's how I do it. You know, I sort of charge in and do research. and one of the things I reflected on was, is it just me or is it universally pretty true that looking at the scary stuff makes it less scary? And I think it is. I always think of my childhood self jumping onto my bed from as far away as possible, so the monster couldn't grab my ankles.
And there are monster. , you will not catch me sugarcoating any of the aspects of aging that, that we are worried about running out of money, ending up along. But again, zoom out and think how those forces would be mitigated by social support systems and changes in our culture, blah, blah, blah. But you know, you are gonna die and some part of your body is gonna fall. and people you've known all your life are gonna die. Those are the only unchangeable negative aspects of aging, but they are real. They are true of all of us, and they are unwelcome, but looking under the bed makes them less fearsome. It's like talking about end of life. Everyone dreads this conversation and everyone feels better once they've opened that Pandora's box.
The scary. flies out and it's scary, but at least you've looked at it and you have a sense of what you're up against, and that is so much.
Okay. So you talk about how people in their twenties and their thirties have the hardest time with aging. We sort of covered this a little bit, but I think in your twenties and your thirties, you're still figuring out how your life will look different from your childhood, and that can be incredibly stressful.
That's a big transitional period.
Being young is hard.
Yeah. And of course that creates all this anxiety around aging. We, we are sort of planning for it and excited for it and also don't want it to come holding
it's hard to imagine being old when you're young, as impossible as a child. it was a line from that first talk that I, that I gave in Amherst. I said, I know my friends are saying, or strangers, you know, I hope I age as well as Ashton and. I hope that never happens to me.
Both those things in your head, you look at an older person or a wrinkled face and you're like, oh crap. Hope that never happens to me. Even though we know and hope at some level, it will happen to us
Yeah. Yeah. Oh man. It makes, it's confusing
But talking about it and realizing like other people are confused and that there are forces in society that want us to be afraid, fear is profitable. If you and I are competing about who's turning heads when we walk in the room, or who's doing aging better, it is preventing solidarity and preventing us from understanding What the forces are that, that want us to be pitted against each other. That's what all prejudice does.
Ugh. Yeah. It's so hard in your twenties and your thirties and scary. I think also for some reason, 40 is like this big number, this like big marker of like, we're supposed to be at a certain place at 40, like I think twenties and thirties is a little more socially acceptable to not have it all together.
And at 40 it's like,
I think thirty's a big one too for women. I mean, I got married at 29 and I think a big reason was I just thought I can't be, you know, if I'm not married by 30, I'm be over the hill. And I, the marriage did not last, it lasted 11 years. But you know, we both gave it our best shot. But I do think that cultural message was one reason I married when I did.
Those voices are not our friend.
Right. I think there's this big connection between the marketing of the anti-aging and those age groups that they're, it's marketed to. And especially like in your twenties and your thirties when you're, you're vulnerable. It's a hard period of time. Like what, what do you think about that connection between.
I think. We stay vulnerable, we become, different messages hit home harder as we get older. I think hopefully we acquire a clearer sense of ourselves and hopefully our value, but not if our value in our self-esteem is tied to, for example, the notion that we should continue to look like our younger selves.
Capitalism is a hugely destructive force here because no one makes money off satisfaction. I mean, here's an example. Not from the beauty industry, but the beauty industry is toxic in so many ways. Uh, there are the several hundred. Americans die every year from drug interactions taking more than one drug and how they, we don't study drug interactions even though they kill all these people who are disproportionately older.
Because older people do take more meds because chronic conditions, stuff that started when you were young starts to be symptomatic. You start to take pills for it. We don't study it because no one's gonna pay for it because it means people will buy less. right? It's the, there's no benefit to the pharmaceutical industry.
In fact, there's a downside, so no one's gonna pay for that research. You know, the beauty industry. it monetizes and commodifies our insecurities about our appearance. Sometimes I think that it's demoralizing to think that this would be the hardest ask, and I do think of it in largely gender terms, but it does apply to men too.
And of course it's not just heterosexist is to learn to look more generously at each other and ourselves. But the beauty industry wants, it's this endless mo of how you are failing to conform to some non-existent ideal and how you need to spend money and effort to try and conform to that. And of course, it is by definition classist because this stuff costs money and that makes it, by definition, racist because black and brown people have less money, broadly speaking because of racism and disabled people and so on.
It's, it's toxic for all of us.
Yeah.
So that's why it's so important for younger and older people to be in contact with each other. And I think especially especially women because we bear a bigger burden because of the intersection. We pay a higher price, I should say, because of the intersection of ageism and sexism and a, a quick plug for a, a free download.
On a site called Old School. The Old School Anti Ageism Clearinghouse, which is a site with, has contains hundreds of free resources to learn what ageism is and how to, what we can do about it. and everything is free except the books, including consciousness raising guides slash conversation guides to the, to what ageism is.
And we have a terrific one called Ageist sexist, who me? Which is about how these two biases inter intersect. So, invite some people over how often, you know, how often are you together with people who are more than 10 years younger or older than your. One of the most fundamental and radical acts we can do is to make friends of all ages.
Yes, I completely agree. My dad is like one of the most social. People that I know and he, like his best friend is my age. And it's so interesting because a lot of p his peers, I think look at him, think of him like he's weird
Wow.
But the man is living the, I mean, just he's having the most fun of anyone I've ever met of any age
You're lucky he's social because a gendered thing especially, and these this more I think is changing over time. My dad also was social and he was widowed, um, widowed, um, he was single for, for a decade after my mom died and he made a date every day. But my partner's father Bob says he never, he doesn't think his dad ever in his life picked up the phone and said, let's have.
To anyone that was totally farmed out to the wife and the most important component of a good old age, I would've said in said, heading into, it must be health. Nope. And then I would've said, well, it must be money. Nope. It is having a solid social network and a one really good way to ensure that because we do lose people we've known all our life is, this sounds very practical, but it's true.
Make younger friends, you know? No, I take enormous comfort that, you know, I will have a friend cohort, you know, if the odds prevail, some of whom will outlive me. That comforts.
Yes. Make younger friends and also for younger
Make older friends
make older friends . Right. Yeah, I don't mean to keep bringing up the reason I started this podcast, but one of the other reasons I started this podcast. Is because I don't understand why we don't have those relationships. Why aren't we, talking to people, why aren't we like younger people talking to older people about their lives and their experiences?
We all have things to share. We all have wisdom, in various,
older people have no corner on wisdom. I think the short answer is because we live in such an age segregated society. You know, we don't, we're not, and the consequence, the, one of the disastrous consequences of that is if most people you know are your age, then you tend to think, well, You know that, that the age is where the affinity lies.
You can't just grab an older or younger person and say, hi, let's be friends. But think of something you like to do and find a mixed age group to do it with, and you will then find that some of the younger people you can't stand and some of the older people you can't stand.
And what you have in common doesn't have to do with age. We overvalue age because we spend so much time. with people only our own age in another little habit to try and break. And again, we all have this habit, but of when you get into a meeting or a social situation, do you make a beeline for people your own age or a dinner, dinner table?
Do you sit next to the person? We do this, we do it out of habit, and we do it out of, what's the icky phrase in, in the workplace context, culture fit. Makes gagging face, um, culture fit is just shorting for people like me. You know, people who share my experience and it's easier to be with people that, you know, will share your cultural references or whatever, but it's not our friend unless we wanna be surrounded entirely by people who are like us.
And that's an impoverished life I think.
if you know me at all, you know, I like to talk about identity and purpose. If you read Ashton's book, you'll know that she believes another important component of aging is retaining purpose and autonomy, so, I wanted to know how we younger people or youngers, as Ashton likes to call us, can help current olders feel purposeful and how we can prepare ourselves for when we're older, which as Ashton likes to point out, is the ultimate goal.
as you're well aware, you know, by, starting this journey yourself, Molly, about how to think differently about aging. You are already living it and reaching out to other people. So it happens organically to some degree once you embark on this process.
I have a a thing in the book, a phrase in the book that I appropriated from a geriatrician named Joanne Lynn, who called herself an old person in training. And way back almost 15 years ago when I was completely flailing. But I, and I really didn't understand why the phrase would become important to me, but I sense that it would, ageism takes root in denial pretending that even though we all know we wake up a day older, this, this is never going to happen to me.
And when becoming an old person in training is simply acknowledging. That you're gonna get old if or you'll be dead, right? And making an imaginative leap or link to the older you, because all prejudice relies on othering, seeing the other sports team, other religion, other whatever, as different from an alien and therefore less worthy of your respect and all other good things.
The weird thing about ageism is that the other. Is your own older self, typically, just a footnote. Ageism is any judgment on the basis of of age. Young people do experience a lot of it too, but in our youth obsessed society, older people bear the brunt. So if you, the earlier in life, you can become an old person in training, which simply means.
Not getting sucked into the, you know, this hamster wheel of, it'll never happen to me if I put enough collagen in, if I have, what is it, the Botox that's supposed to prevent wrinkle formation or whatever and just acknowledge that. This will happen that the future older, you can be as far away on the horizon as you need her to be.
It's really hard, as I said already, it's hard to imagine getting old, so she can be a speck. You don't have to know what she's gonna be like. But that imaginative act prevents us from othering older people. And then you look at. older people around you instead of past us, right? And you'll see some of us doing things that are like icky, like insisting, you know, we're wise and we are, you know, deserve respect.
We don't deserve respect cuz we're old. We deserve respect cuz we're human. The same reason young people deserve respect. But you'll also see older people, living lives that seem interesting and like you might want to live. See what they do. so that we form these. Emotional, intellectual, tactical, practical connections.
Even if, I'm not saying you become friends with every old person you meet, but if you can say, oh in, instead of don't want to go there because can't face it. To someday a million years from now, I might be that old and I like the way she does X or remind me to try Y if this makes sense. So that is a way to form a connection.
Defang and demystify. Again, it's, it means looking at the scary thing because the minute we look at it, you know it, it becomes less scary.
Yes.
and, and indeed fascinating. I mean, I would not have thought I, I started on this road because I was scared of getting old and being, you know, confused with Ray.
And the more we know, the less scary it is and the more interesting it is. Aging is not something sad and icky old people do. It is how we move through life. We are aging from childhood on. And for a generalist like me, it's fascinating.
In her book, Ashton writes that we view aging through the lens of loss and that ageism is discriminating against the very thing we strive to be. Sit on that for a minute. She also talks about how fewer and fewer people actually get dementia or end up in a nursing home. So what are we all so afraid of besides, you know, the inevitable.
You might be afraid of something that, that I am not afraid of. The loss of physical capacity is inevitable. I was never athletic. So the fact that I can't, you know, run a mile in under X minutes doesn't bother me cuz I never tried to, to a runner. That is a grievous loss.
But I might mourn something that someone with a different set of interests and capacities doesn't even notice. Right. We each need to negotiate this stuff in our own way and in our own time. And it is not that the losses aren't real. I mean, I would say still that for me, the loss of cognitive capacity is probably the scariest.
It is for a lot of people. And it's, again, not Alzheimer's is a terrible disease, but it is not typical of aging. The odds of ending up in a nursing home, n nurse, not all senior living, but a nursing home requiring nursing care. The percentage of Americans over 65 in nursing homes is two and a half percent.
I could be in that percentage, but odds are. I'm not going to be, so not to pretend the scary stuff isn't real, but to educate yourself about the full picture. And I would say to twist your question a little bit, what is the most damaging aspect of ageism? Its effects on our health? There is more and more data all the time.
Most of it done, most of the research, but not all of it done by a wonderful. psychologist and epidemiologist at Yale named Becca Levy, who published a fantastic book that you can find in the old school clearinghouse. Search for Levy Old school.info. Her book is called Breaking the Age Code and it, she is a cautious, careful scientist.
Scientist do not say predictive things unless they have data up the wazo and the subtitle of her book is, Your beliefs about aging shape, how long and how well you will live. And one of her studies shows she frames it as people with more positive feelings towards aging are better off. I like to say people with more accurate. Attitudes of aging because I don't want it to make it se seem like I'm gray washing, right? Or people with fact rather than fear-based attitudes. We live longer. Her studies show seven and a half years longer. Um, we walk faster, we heal quicker. All the things. We are less likely to get Alzheimer's, even if we have the gene that predisposes us to the disease.
Wow. Wow. Yeah.
So think educating yourself about age and ageism is free, there's tons of free shit on old school. It takes that effort. It's not easy because unlearning when it comes to, especially when it comes to values, is hard. But you can greatly reduce your risk of getting dementia by learning about the older brain, by learning about aging, by learning.
Did you know that rates of dementia are decline? no one knows that it's searched. Go to the internet and say Rates of Alzheimer's,
That's not to say you still might get dementia, but it's much less likely than you likely think it is, and the fear itself makes us more vulnerable.
to exactly what we fear. That's the thing. Ageism harms our health. I didn't used to be able to say that because I too am very careful about citing the research accurately. And now I can say that there is abundant new data from a, um, a professor named Julie Ober Allen, I think at the University of Minnesota, who tracked, or she calls exposure to everyday ageism.
I don't love that phrase because it seems to normalize it. Um, we don't talk about everyday racism, but on the other hand, ageism is everywhere, in every magazine, in every TV show, in every magazine rack. And she tracked people's exposure to everyday ageism and its consequences, and I don't know these by heart, but on cognitive function, depression and basic chronic health indicators, heart, heart stuff, lung stuff.
And the more we are exposed to that without pushing back,
The be the worst it is for our overall health. Along all these indicators, and again, solid science.
Ashton has a blog on Tumblr called, yo Is This Ageist. So I figured since I had her here, I'd get some clarity on my own Ageism.
Sure. And that is why I started Yo, is this ageist, which was modeled with permission on the preexisting and wonderful, yo, is this racist? Because we're. awkward talking about race, and we're really ignorant talking about ageism. So this was a place where you could ask me a question about something you had seen or encountered, or perhaps said yourself, you know, what's my take?
So go for it.
Okay. The first question is, is it ageist to get Botox, wear makeup and dye your.
There are so many voices out there and telling women, and of course that advice could also apply to men. But let's face it, many, many more women subjecting themselves to these processes than there are men. Uh, that I am determined. Not to be one of them. Getting older is harder, hard. It's in an ageist, sexist, misogynist culture.
And we each need to navigate this stuff in our own way, at our own speed. And you know, I've heard many women say, look, if I, I have Botox, that is what makes it, or, you know, facelifts, whatever. That is what it takes for me to feel beautiful or powerful or okay about myself in the world. More power. But those processes are.
Are trying to rectify or cover up an essential aspect of our identity, which is our age. And as long as the goal is to quote unquote, stay young or retain your youthful looks it is I unattainable. It is based in dissatisfaction in the way we actually look and are, which is not healthy. Right, and it's expensive.
It's classist, right? so, these behaviors are not good for us because they are rooted in shame about something that shouldn't be shameful. It's like leaving early. Off your resume. As long as we do. There was just a big story last two weeks ago about I M D B, the movie database, big victory.
They're allowing actors to now take charge of their own data, yay. And remove their birthdate. And in the case of trans people, their birth names from the site. Okay, cool. People should be in charge of their data, But removing someone's birthdate from one website, any six year old with access to Wikipedia can find out when any celebrity was born or any human being.
And these behaviors, they are band-aids. They're asked, they're giving cover to people who choose to, in the case of, in the case of trans people to claim who they really are. But our actual chronological age is a fixed component of who we. It shouldn't be the source of shame or something we have to hide.
And when we hide these things for reasons that are completely understandable and no judgment, honest to God, but they reinforce age shame. and they give a pass to the discrimination that makes these behaviors necessary. So it is exciting to see more blowback about, like another example was this case of Lisa Lala
She's a Canadian news anchor and got fired I think because she let her hair go gray. And this time around there was a ton of blowback. She didn't get her job back. But each time there's pushback from the culture, it paves a bit of a path for more people to reject these horribly.
Sexist, misogynist, classist standards that do none of us any favors.
Yeah,
That was really long
it was a good one. It was so good though, . Thank you for that. Okay. Is it ageist? To celebrate when an older, older is a, term you coined in your, in your book, , which I love. So is it ageist to celebrate when an older accomplishes something big or new, like winning an award for the first time or finishing a raise, and I mean, celebrate in a way that points out both the accomplishment and the age it was accomplished at.
Yeah. That, that's a, a great question and a complicated one. We should all be celebrated trophies all round, you know, for from toddlers to centenarians, you do something that was hard for you to do, hazah, and, and that shouldn't have to do with how old we are, but it does irk me. When a lot of things irk me, you know, when I'm in a space, you know, physical space, whatever, and someone stands up and says, I'm 190 and everyone claps, and to my mind like, no, you don't get applause for just like taking a whole lot of breath.
Aging is just something we are all doing and I want a world in which age is. , it is not a good thing to be old or a bad thing to be old. It is not good to be young or a bad to be old, so no applause for just being really old. But you touch on something. I mean, it's, it's, it's always complicated and my answer might be different from your answer and someone else's when the.
Getting back to the few inevitable changes with age, some part of your body's gonna fall apart. Cognition is not necessarily impaired, but when older people can achieve remarkable feats of athleticism and stamina, that is truly remarkable for a really old person. . That is a case where you might use the word still, which is another ageist, but he's still running marathons at 90.
Well, that truly is remarkable for 90 year olds, but still driving, still having sex, still working. That's not okay because those are so to applaud an older person for doing the stuff we do lifelong is ageist because it hold. Oldness up it, it values it. It's why I don't use the words elder, which is a beautiful word.
Indigenous people use it. A lot of African American people use it. It's not my culture, so I don't use it. And the reason I like elders and youngers is they are value neutral. No one likes seniors. And seniors implies that younger people are junior or. So I don't want that in there either. We are all olders and youngers at the same time.
A four year old will assure you she is older than her little sister. We age in relation to others. So to applaud age for its own sake, I think is ageist because it attributes a value to age and I want it to be value.
Yeah, that's, thank you. That's a really good answer. And I, it's complicated
and I
And also there are a lot of older people who, like, you know, they get to the finish line or they made the, the cake or whatever the thing is, and they expect applause because they want to be validated in a way, because of, you know, their own feelings of self-worth or whatever.
And they'll be pissed if you don't collapse. So good luck with that
Yeah. Yeah. I'm feeling a little guilty about this. I don't. You to think that I tricked you into this, but I really am trying to, as I was reading your book, I kept thinking, is my podcast ageist? And so I'm trying to figure out is this ageist what I'm doing? And, and I,
do you think? Why do you think it might be?
why did I think that this podcast might be agist
I guess I couldn't be sure that focusing and celebrating accomplishments after a certain age, like we just talked about, wasn't also part of the problem. That maybe we should just be focusing on the accomplishment and if we're going that far, maybe even just the effort and not the age at all.
Certainly my intentions are good, but as with any ism, there's always room to explore how we might be contributing to the problem rather than the solution.
Like Ashton said, it's complicated.
By the way, I
Did not start writing until my forties and didn't discover this path until I was in my late fifties. We live in a culture where the the to oversimplify, but that views aging as decline. You just quoted a line from my book that we see aging through the lens of loss. So anyone who is working to correct that narrative is on the same team.
We are all working to create a more balanced, two-sided, nuanced view of getting older. So in that sense, Your work is important, and also you're asking really sophisticated, nuanced questions. You are not, you know, you're not asking people just to talk about what's great and easy about it, because it's never great and easy to start a business or reinvent yourself, but.
What makes it the, what makes the not being young part of it harder is ageism, not the age of the person, the culture in which they live. Right. And age is real. I mean, my friends are like, happy birthday. Ah, was that okay? You know, age is real. It's a component of our identity and we need to acknowledge it.
And we don't talk about this stuff enough. We put it under a rock because ick aged denial. So by. By provoking, by challenging the narrative as long as you aren't, you know, saying, pretending that the challenges aren't there, and as long as you are separating the both, the challenges a and the things that are easier for that person from age. right? Maybe they were always curious. Maybe they had a head for numbers, you know, maybe they had a rich uncle. Those are things that don't have to do with how old they happen to be, right? And be careful about how age enters into their story, but to interview older people who are enjoying their lives, that's really important.
Okay, great. thank you, . Thank you for that. And I, you know
I mean, I'm not some hope. That's just my
Right. No, and, and what I hear is that it, that what I'm doing is important, obviously I think it's important, um, and not Aris, but it's sort of the nuance of how I talk about it and our, what our conversations
sound like. That I have to be careful around, which
think, imagine if if the ism or the, the identifier were, were race or were gender. We need to talk about how those things play out in our culture in order to navigate them. Better.
Great. Thank you. Okay, just a couple more questions. Quick ones. So you wrote a series of books entitled, truly Tasteless Jokes,
Hi.
What is your opinion on telling old jokes and do you do it?
No, I don't, and I wouldn't tell any of those jokes anymore except a few of the more anodyne ones. But I did, at that time I didn't know all the things that I have learned now. I think, I mean, it's a constant refrain of people. You know, these, the, with greeting cards are sort of the most obvious placeholder for ageist culture and the way it's visually represented.
And some of those cards are funny, but, and then it, when, when I or someone else points out that they're basically. A form of self-loathing. The instant retort is you have no sense of humor because that's a, that's a goat. That's, and that's in any domain. People who feel it all encroached upon or like, lighten up.
What's wrong with you, you know? discrimination is not funny and self-loathing is not healthy. And I mean, I just saw today someone tagged me on Instagram of a post that Amy Schumer did, and I love Amy Schumer and I think she's funny as hell. And there's part of this little reel she did that is funny. But it's basically educating a bunch of old white people.
what Latinx means and that black people can be, you shouldn't say a black person is articulate and you shouldn't call an Asian person an Oriental. And you know, it's always complicated. I have no patience with older people who say, oh, I just can't keep up with all these word NA things, or what people wanna be called.
Try harder, try harder. or be quiet. You have the option, cannot educate yourself. I'm sorry that sounds snooty. You have the option to think whatever you want, but if you wanna participate in the discourse of the day, it is incumbent on you to track what is happening. But you know, Amy Schumer, her husband ha has autism.
She would never in a million years make fun of people with a disability or make fun of people for the color of our skin. And age is another thing about ourselves that we cannot change. And some of the attendant incapacity, which, what's, what's funny about impairment? right? It's different if the person is making the joke on themselves, and that's part of it too.
Well, I can call myself an old farter, you know, I da da da da. Okay? You can call yourself whatever you want, but think about where, what that manifests about your own attitudes to age and aging. And I mean, I, I'll use the word self-loathing again, it's a strong word, but that is at the heart of it and loathing what we look like and living in terrible fear of what lies ahead.
That is not healthy. It's not good for us individually, and it's not good for us collectively.
Yes.
And I have my moments, I mean, it's not like I wake outta bed and say, oh, I wrote this book and now like, nothing about getting older is scary. They're there. We all have our moments. I have arthritis.
Everything hurts in the morning. It sucks. I wish I didn't, but that's about ability. Lots of people my age don't have arthritis, so it's not, you know, it's not, it's related. , but it is not the same as aging. Each of us, each of our experiences and what's important to us is unique to us.
Yeah. Yes. Okay. Talk about your movement again and where and how people can get involved.
Oh, geez. It's not my movement. But I, I have to say it's, it's almost, it's uh, we're recording this almost at the end of 2022, and I see real. Progress around the number of mentions of ageism, the, the Lisa Lala story, the way people are starting to name and call out age bias. Oh, there, there's Alana Del Ray song on TikTok called Young and Beautiful, I believe, and people in their, apparently in their teens and twenties. But I don't know that for a fact, and that's ages of me to blame it on an age group without knowing the facts are posting videos of celebrities.
Snapshots of celebrities. With that song playing, will you Love? When I'm not young and beautiful anymore is the refrain with pictures of them wait for it in their thirties. Ew, totally over the hill. But that is getting a lot of calling out, even the hideousness in the early days of the pandemic boomer remover, that, that, in my opinion, it's hate speech and it got a lot of press.
But guess what? It disappeared. instantly because people didn't adopt it. There is pushback. The movement is growing. So I am very enthused. I also, if you go to old school, old school.info, you'll see a campaign section, which we didn't even have. I started the site with two colleagues and in 2018 and we didn't even have a campaign section, and now it's one of our fastest growing.
So the evidence is there. I will, I. Give you a link to put in the chat of sort of, things you can do to help in ageism. But the most important thing you can do is completely free. Um, and you don't have to ever go to old school, or my website is to look at your own attitudes towards age and aging.
And think about how you use the words old and young and just start to interrogate that because we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. And a favorite comment about my book, and I hear it a lot, is, uh, that. Uh, gee, I had no idea how biased I was. I had no idea how I was part of this.
No judgment. That is no fun, that realization, but I promise that we can't get anywhere without it, right? Without, you can't challenge bias unless you're aware of it. And the minute you see it in yourself, you start to see it in the culture around. . And that is the liberating part. So, there are a million ways to push back.
Not everyone is. God is gonna be an activist, thank God, because then the world would be intolerable. But educate yourself and then think about how you might speak out about it or call it out in the world around you in, in gentle ways. Um, so as to not give it a pass because, and we, you know, we know a lot now I think about how to deal with.
Racist behavior with microaggressions in the workplace that people of color and queer people face and age is different, of course, from each of those forms of oppression. But how to support the person you think has undergone something or how to speak out for yourself. We have the tools, you know, we're not reinventing this to add age.
to the list of criteria for diversity, you know, to the list of if everyone in the same is in the room is the same age. I don't know about you, but I, I notice now I've always noticed if it was all men, you know, and I surely notice if it's all white people and if it's all young people or all old people, what's, what's that about?
There's never a good reason.
Well, here we are again at the part when I ask my guest to reintroduce themselves without descriptors, like writer, mom, activist, et cetera. After all, we are not our successes, failures, or titles.
My name is Ashton Applewhite. I am 70 and I am. Deeply curious. And I hope kind because I think that is the great human virtue without, um, which all is lost. And I would say I'm also courageous. That'll do.
Yeah. That's great. And you were very kind to come here today and talk to me about all of this stuff and share your, share all of your knowledge and your vulnerabilities. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Molly. Keep up your good
Ashton is full of great information and continues to make me think about how I approach the idea of aging in an ageist world.
And how I'm contributing what areas I want to be better in, and most importantly, how thinking, talking and calling out ageism as I see it, is actually extremely empowering to me as a woman in my mid forties.
We've got a lot of work to do and like everything, the more we talk to each other about this stuff, the less alone and better. We all feel right. If this episode helps you at all, please share it with just two people you think might also benefit. The more we grow, the bigger guest we can get to help you feel better about your own change journey.
If you loved Ashton as much as I do. You'll find the link in the show notes to buy her book and sign up for her Wednesday afternoon, office hours Zoom meeting where anyone can come and talk to Ashton and a group of other very smart people about aging in our society.
You might even see me there. Thank you to David Ben Perrot for Sound Engineering. Dan Daven for the music, David Harper for the Artwork. I am This age is produced by Jellyfish Industries. I'm Molly Sider. Catch you next time.