CHAPTER ONE WHERE AGEIS M COMES FROM AND WHAT IT DOES When geriatrician Robert Butler coined the term "ageism" in 1969not long after "sexism" made its debut-he defined it as a combina- tion of prejudicial attitudes toward older people, old age, and aging itself; discriminatory practices against olders; and institutional prac tices and policies that perpetuate stereotypes about them. The term was quickly adopted by the media and added to the Oxford English Dictionary. Almost half a century later, it's barely made inroads into public consciousness, not to mention provoked outcry. entire messages about aging cast a shadow across the life of every American, stunting our prospects, economy, and civic How life. This is oppression: being controlled or treated unjustly. in a most Americans have yet to put their concerns about aging Negative ever, social or political context. When I ask people if they know what age to other "isms," ism is, most reflect for a moment, compare the word and they and realize what it must mean. The concept rings true, social oppression nod. But it's still a new idea to most. And unless is called out, we don't see it as oppression. Perpetuating it doesn't deliberate discrimination. This lesser require conscious prejudice or will be. life is "just the way it is," and the way it probably always IT WASN'T ALWAYS LIKE THIS In most the few people who prehistoric and agrarian societies, lived to old age were esteemed as Religion gave older men power. teachers and custodians of culture. History was a living thing passed tradition took a serious hit with generations. This oral when books became alternative the invention of the printing press, remained relatively of knowledge. As long as old age down across repositories THIS 14 CHAIR ROCKS rare, though, olders retained social standing as possessors fvalu. able skills and information. The young United States was a gerontocracy, which served the older men into positions citizens had to age who held the the roi. reins; younger of authority, The nincteenth and twentieth centuries usheredd in in a reversal Modernity brought massive transitions that reduced the visibility of of society, diminished their older members opportunit and eroded their authority. Rapid social change made learning aboutand th Dast seem less relevant. Aging turned from a natural proceue.into a social problem to be "solved" by programs like Social Securitvaand "retirement villages. The nursing home, a "shotgun maria. of the poorhouse and the hospital" in geriatrician Bill Thomas's memorable phrase, came into being and created a growth indo try. The historians Thomas R. Cole and David Hackett her have documented how, at the start of the nineteenth century, the idea of aging as part of the human condition, with its inevitable lim. its, increasingly gave way to a conception of old age as a biomedical Droblem to which there might be a scientific solution. What was lost was a sense of the life span, with each stage having value and meaning. Propelled by postwar leisure and prosperity, the explosion ofcon sumer culture, and research into a stage of life newly dubbed "ado- lescence" youth culture emerged as a distinct twentieth-century phenomenon. As this "cult of youth" grew, gerontophobia--fear of aging and dislike, even hatred, ofold people-gained traction. Those of us who grew up in the 196os and '7os were warned not to trust anyone over thirty, perhaps the first overt exhortation to take sides across a ever less generational divide. The decades beyond thirty appeared enviable. "Will you still need me, will you still feed when I'm sixty-four?" crooned the Beatles. me, GROWING OLD HAS he older Americans is rooted not only in historic and eco status of nOmic BECOME SHAMEFUL circumstances but also in deeply human fears about ue in- WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 15 herent vulnerabilities of old age: the loss of mobility, visibility, and autonomy. Not all of these transitions befall us all, and only two unwelcome ones are inevitable: We'l lose people we've known all our lives, and some part of our bodies will fall apart. These changes are natural. But we live in a culture that has yet to develop the lan guage and tools to help us deal with them. That's partly because these changes make us feel vulnerable, partly because longer lives are such a new phenomenon, and partly because of ageism, both internalized and in the culture at large. As a result, all too often these transitions are characterized by shame and loss of self-esteem. Internalized, these fears and anxieties pave the way for a host of unhealthy behaviors that include denial, overcompensation, and worse: actual contempt, which legitimizes stigma and discrimination. Two characteristics of marginalized populations are selfloathing and passivity-what my daughter tactfully dubbed the "yuck/pity factor" that the prospect of growing old invokes in so many. As a friend who bought a house from a wheelchair user observed, "Damn, it's nice to have wide doorways, and a toilet positioned this way-they should just do it for everyone." That's the premise of uni versal design-that products designed for older people and people with disabilities work great for everyone else too. Age-friendly products improve the built environment and make it more accessible, but stigma keeps them off the market. Realtors advise removing on the market, as ramps and grip bars before putting a house bonus or aging into it as a necessity. Alas, thanks to internalized ageism, they've got a point. though no buyer could see accessibility as a Stigma trumps even the bottom line. There's a fast-growing "sil ver market," especially for products that promote "age-independence technology" yet advertisers continue to pay a premium to target eighteen-to-thirty-five-year-olds. Despite the significant purchasing power of older buyers, retailers are uneasy about stocking products for them and companies are leery of investing. Unless they're R 16 THIS CHAIR ROCKS selling health aids, brands don't want be associated wit with the no longer-young set either. Just as telling is the resistance sumers themselves to buying products that might nce of older Con oh poo eyesight or balance. Instead we blame ourselves for a vast range ofcircum mstances or over which we have no control. of our making and Difficulties us into "problem people." When abels are hard to read or handrturn missing or containers hard to open, we fault ourselves f being prepared. Watching anolder nerson struggling to heave herselt out of a low chair, we assume her leg muscles are weak or her balance is shot, instead ofconsiderin more limber or dexterous or better the inadequacies of seating so deep or low to the ground. Ifwe ee a teenager perched on a kindergarterner's chair, we don't bemoan the fact that his legs got so huge. Kiddie chairs aren't designed for teen. agers any more than armchairs are designed tor ninety-year-olds. As we age, we blame ourselves for a vast range of circumstances not The issue is not competence, or incompetence, but it's hardo keep sight of that in ageist an of our making and over which we world. These obstacles are less have no control. of a problem than the under lying policies and prejudices that reduce access and independence. We blame our own aging instead of the ageism that renders these natural transitions shame ful and these barriers acceptable. Discrimination-not aging-is the barrier to full participation in the world around us. AGEISM MAKES US DREAD OUR FUTURES It doesn't make much sense to discriminate against a group that spire to join. Or to rail about olders sucking up "entitlements which they carned-when both the need and One our the antagonis vill way in turn. Ageism isa prejudice against our own furtu SEIves, as Todd Nelson and many other age scholars have observc andhas the dubious distinction of being the only "ism" relateu to a VESal COndition. It takes root in denial of the fact that we re go oing WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 1 to get old. That we are aging. Its hallmark is the irrational insistence that older people are Other, not Us-not even future us-and we go to great lengths to distance ourselves from that future state. "My mom is ninety, but she's not old," someone insisted to me not long ago, as though it were contagious. We exaggerate difference and overlook what we have in common, as with older people who spurn senior centers "full of old people in wheelchairs" lest they be tar nished by association. In childhood we're maddened when grown-ups don't treat us with respect-that's ageism too-but unable to imagine that our speech will someday quaver, skin crease, gait falter. Over time it gets harder to sustain that illusion, and a punitive psychological bind tightens its grip. Unless we come to terms with the transition, we hate what we are becoming. Historian David Hackett Fischer is blisteringly clear about the implications of this damaging divide, "destructive most of all to those who adopt it-for in the end it is always directed inward upon the mind it occupies." That's the nature of prejudice always ignorant, usually hostile. It begins as a distaste for others, and in the case of age (as opposed to race or sex), it turns into distaste for oneself. This self-hatred takes many forms. It's manifest in the wide spread effort to "pass" for younger, the way people of color have passed for white and gay people for straight; behavior spurred both by the desire to protect ourselves from discrimination and by inter- nalized disgust. It underlies disparaging comments like, "I know that this isn't true of anyone else in the room, but I'm not getting any younger" and "You don't have to say when I graduated," both of which I've heard verbatim from people on the front lines of ag ing policy. Youd think they'd be a little more selfaware, but many are invested in deficit models of aging. They're experts in the impo tant task of caring for the frailest and neediest-thae's how they get funded and promoted-and they have yet to reconcile that view of old age with what lies ahead for themselves. At the other end of the spectrum, many experts are proponents of the successful aging THIS CHAIR ROCKS 18 model, which holds that healthy behaviors and "can-do". can hold aging at bay. That's still denial, a high-end versionthatt tends po to overlook the very important role of socioeconomic class and tential disability in shaping how "successfully" we age. We're so busy feeling young that we stay blind to the ageisrm in and around us and never learn to defend ourselves against it, Olda people tend to identify with younger ones as strongly as youngers themselves do. Other groups that experience prejudice, like gays or people with autism, develop buffers that can reinforce group iden. tity, and even pride, at belonging to what sociologists call an out group. Olders are apparently the only group whose attitudes about old age are as disparaging as those held by the in-group, the young2 Talk about not wanting to belong to any club that would have you as a member! Which would be funnier, and a lot less ironic, if it weren't the club that everyone is counting on getting into. AGEISM LEGITIMIZES ABUSE, AND ACTUALLY SHORTENS LIVES they apply stereotypes so insidious? Because others, there's no need to defend ourselves against them. They're Steoften unconsciously, absorbed into our ways of thinking. Why when are to easily, reotyping obstructs empathy, cutting people off from the experi ence of others-even if, as is the case with ageism, those "others are our own future selves. "Ageism allows the younger generations thus they subtly to see older people as different than themselves; Robert Butler cease to identify with their elders as human beings," wrote in Why Survive? Being Old in America, which won him a color, When we see people as other than us-other less of a other nationality, other religion-their welfare seems of elder abuse human right. That's why at least five out of six cases Pulitzer Prize." go unreported. take many forms: neglect or abandonmen, or conine physical abuse (including the inappropriate use of drugs emotional abuse such as intimidation or humiliation; sexua Elder abuse ment); can WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM abuse; 19 healthcare fraud; and financial exploitation. Because of age elder abuse is less familiar to emergency room staff and law ism, enforcement offticers than other forms of domestic violence, and the ublic is less equipped to recognize it. "If nobody knows that I'm be ing abused or I never hear about elder abuse and I think I'm the otuly one it's happening to, I'm embarrassed and ashamed so I just keep my mouthshut, explains Mary Anne Corasaniti, ex-director of New York State's Onondaga County elder abuse program. It's why corme people rationalize exploiting olders with the repugnant excuse that the person is too old to notice. Condescension alone actually shortens lives. What profession- als call "elderspeak"-the belittling "sweeties" and "dearies" that Deople use to address older people-does more than rankle. It reinforces stereotypes of incapacity and incompetence, which leads to poorer health, including shorter life spans. People with positive per ceptions of aging actually live longer-a whopping seven and a half years longer, on average-in part because they're motivated to take better care of themselves.' Dementia confers no immunity. Nursing horne residents with severe Alzheimer's have been shown to react aggressively to infantilizing language. Overaccommodation also harms-behavior like using simpler words and sentences or speak ing louder and more slowly than we would to a younger person, in- stead of first ascertaining that the person is in fact confused or hard of hearing. Targets of this demeaning behavior appear to "instantly age' speaking, moving, and thinking less capably. Internalized stereotypes also interfere with the value that people place on their own lives. Take the sad story of Bob Bergeron, a therapist in New York whose suicide at forty-seven took his friends by surprise. Described as "relentlessly cheery" Bergeron had friends and family, financial security, and no history of depression. Extraor dinarily beautiful as a young man, he was writing a sel-help guide Called The Right Side of Forty: The Complete Guide to Happiness for Gay Men at Midlife and Beyond. In Bergeron's suicide note, next to an LW pointing to the title page of his manuscript, he wrote, "It's a 20 THIs CHAIR ROCKS bad information." writing life and alone on New lie based on He was new to the ar's Eve; not a good ruggle- of the combir on Belonging to a subculture that fetishizes youthful beauty and did no favors con ventional sexual prowess ther. him Bergeron greater tragedy, though, was to inhabit a world so bereft of alt ernative narratives that dread overtook him. That's why we need me rich, complex stories that shrug off the mantle of decline and d there's no "right" or "wrong" side to forty-or any other age. In now another study, people were exposed to negative or positive ste. reotypes of old age. then asked to request or reject life-prolonging medical treatment in a hypothetical situation. As expected, the neo. eg atively primed subjects were more likely to opt out. We see these values in the cultural controAmerican culture barrages the old versy around assisted suicide, and disabled with the message that their lives are not worthwhile, nor worth paying for. where the indignation index drops sharply when the population in question consists of the very old or severely disabled. Conversations need to factor into a cultural climate that barrages the old and disabled with the message that their lives are not worthwhile, nor worth paying for. that goes back at least as far as the Victorian-era novelist Anthony Trollope. Pub: Euthanizing older people has a history in fiction lished in 1882, his novel The Fixed Period proposed mandatory euthanasia at age sixty-eight, ostensibly to relieve suffering. In satirist Christopher Buckley's novel Boomsday, Millennials rise up The movement's prophetic leader urges folks to stop paying taxes that subsidize retirement, and create financial incentives for Boomers to commit suicide. The description ofa seminar hosted by New York University in June 2013 called "Love and Let Die: An All Day Consideration of Ballooning Longevity, the Quality of Lite, atnd the Coming Generational Smash-up" posited that "We may well be approaching a situation in which we as a society will have to choose between living in a world where an eighty-five-year-old is routiney WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM 21 ranted five hip operations, or one in which we can still afford, say. gran primary school." If someone botched my first four hip operations, Id like a crack at a fifth. thank you very much. It's not as though funding crack at a fifth school for primary comes out of the same bucket as funding for ioint replacements (and universal healthcare and decent public education would render the example meaningless). It's not a ques educ but of how they're distributed. People at both ends of the age spectrum are least likely to be economically productive in and therefore the most likely to be discriminated a capitalist system, tion of resources 20ainst. For all the "family values" rhetoric coming out of Capitol Hill, programs for kids are underfunded because kids don't vote and because the kids whose parents have political influence need those programs less. As with other "isms, ageism pits the disenfranchised against each other in order to maintain the power of the ruling dass. "Kids vs. canes" is a false dichotomy that gerontologists have de bunked countless times, but it makes great headlines. As it is, older people are lacking from the landscape, and pro-aging voices are rare. If ageism continues to go unchallenged, a dystopian future where they are missing entirely begins to seem conceivable. Given the remarkable set of achievements that longevity represents, that would be an ironic and tragic outcome. LONGER LIVES ARE A BASIC INDICATOR OF HUMAN PROGRESS Growing old isn't new. What's new is how many of us now routinely do so. The first leap in life span occurred some thirty thousand years ag0, during the Paleolithic era, when people started living past age of thirty. That's when modern humans began flourishing, making art, using symbols, and thriving, despite the bitter cold of tne last lce Age. Why? Because thirty is old enough to be a grand- parent, which conveys evolutionary advantages. Older people are Tepositories of knowledge, skilled in avoiding danger and storing THIs 22 d CHAIR ROCKS nowing who's related to these complex skills. whom, and at passing alo \ong The next big shift occurred:some 150 years ago, propelled by the extraordinary scientihc and technological advances that began with the Industrial Revolution. As more children survived to ad dult hood. women began having fewer of them. (Somewhat counterin. tuitively, the main determinant of population aging is dronnin fertility rates, not rising lite expectancy.) The proportion of older people increased, and the life span in the developed world has since doubled. In the twentieth century, in the U.S. alone, the American life span increased by a staggering thirty years. This largely reflects the fact that more Americans too, gaining on living longer, grandparents' era. surviving to adulthood, but we're average ten biological years since our are In effect, thanks largely to clean water and antibi. from the young to the old. an ageing population and not otics, we've redistributed death "Tt is, frankly, insane to look at re- CenGuardian columnist Zoe Williams about the U.S. of the world Bureau's 2008 report on the unprecedented aging of public health, of coeven have a joice" writes sus concept population. "Why do we to extend life, wherever we operation, of sharing knowledge, if not 2012 Age Boom semifind it?"A blue-chip roster of speakers at the as to the longevity revolution nar for journalists in New York referred in the world, more "the most important phenomenon of our time oppor than the bomb, the Pill, or the Internet," as "an extraordinary the and as "potentially tunity to solve almost all of our problems," Describing "a biggest achievement in the history of the species." Unhuman history," Linda Fried, Dean of Columbia new stage of only School of Public Health, referred to "the Mailman versity's ot mil natural resource that's actually increasing: the social capital lions more healthy, well-educated adults." A growing body ofknow Rand different schools of thought-including the from edge very Corporation, University of Chicago, Queen's University Belfast, Harvard and Yale Universities-now along with the longevity it brings, are acknowledges that important economic and healtn, ers WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM 23 generate wealth by affecting healthcare costs, labor-force paricipation rates (given the appropriate incentives), worker productiv. ity, and the financing of pension systems shat VET THERE'S MORE HAND-WRINGING THAN BACK-PATTING GOING ON A little less worried about the tug of time on your own time to relax! Journalist Paul Kleyman's prospects? It's witty coinage-"global both the scale wrinkling"-evokes of this massive demographic chift and the free-floating anxiety that accompanies it. Global na wrinkling is typically portrayed as a social problem, even a disaster Anxious times feed what Fried called "a deficit ac cOunting of what it means to be an aging society" When times are in the making. tough, we look tor scapegoats. We project our personal worries about getting older onto the demographic phenomenon of population ag- ing. And indeed, unless we prepare wisely for this demographic shift, we could turn feat into fiasco. In October 2010, demographer Philip Longman warned of a gray tsunami' sweeping the planet."l0 The phrase summons a frankly terrifying vision of a giant wave of old people looming on the horizon, poised to drain the public coffers, swamp the healthcare system, and suck the wealth of future generations out to sea. Jour nalists jumped on it, and "gray tsunami" has since become widely adopted shorthand for the socioeconomic threat posed by an aging population. Is the progressive aging of society really equivalent to the instantaneous devastation of cities?" asks University of Toronto Assistant Professor Andrea Charise. As she notes, this language dvides society into two opposing groups, the "needy old" and everyone else, and "traffics in the politics of panic"l'so successfully that all other narratives are effectively pushed aside, It's not the first politically charged use of this kind of language. In the late nine eenth century, the infux of Asian immigrants was referred to as ne "yellow peril" A "rising tide" has been used to describe a whole 24 THIS CHAIR ROCKS host of diseases deemed threatening to society, from tulberesl. and syphilis in the nineteenth century to HIVJAIDS in the.culosis twenti eth century and Alzheimer's disease in the twenty-first. Talk of plague and poverty justifhes prejudice against old. people, legitimizes their abandonment, and fans the flames of i tergenerational conflict. It also obscures the fact that what wa facing is no tsunami. It's a demographic wave that scientists hau been tracking for decades, and it's washing over a floodplain not crashing without warning on a detenseless shore. Since the wave has been on the horizon since the 1950s, why is society so ill. prepared? Why not conceive of it as a "silver reservoir," as social gerontologist Jeannette Leardi proposes? The "tsunami" could fil that reservoir. Part of our ambivalence about aging is just human. Nobody wants to die young, but concerns about scaling up the financial and physical support that long lives require are widespread and legitimate. Things are changing so fast that we're carving out entirely new biological and social turf. Roles for this new cohort of older people have yet to evolve. The institutions around us were created when lives were shorter. For example, the notion that education is for the young, employment for people in middle age, and leisure for the old is clearly obsolete, but we have yet to revise these structures in substantial ways, or invent new ones. Science has leapfrogged culture, and society hasn't had time to catch up. Humans are noto- riously slow to reframe perception and behavior Sociologists call this "structural lag." It happens when elements of a social system change at different rates and get out of sync. Small wonder that so many of our attitudes toward old age are irrational or downright contradictory. Americans over fitty con trol approximately 70 percent of the country's disposable income, yet burden, as the head lines insist, and also the gift that a thousand cloying affirmations we are ignored by marketers. rightly declare it to be? How can age be a WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 25 GLOBALIZATION IS FUELING THE DEVALUATiON OF OLDER PEOPLE erating in the global economy means competing intensely for any ind of economic edge. The difference between success and failure hinges on slim and fast-moving margins. As the quest for wealth people who inhabit that globe and power has gone global, the trends are are hose colliding. According to the "gray tsunami" narrative, an aging population rapidly growing older. makes it impossible to compete in the global economy. A young labor force, on the other hand, attracts global businesses and inves- tors. Call it "global age arbitrage,"" a term coined by business re Dorter TedC. Fishman, author of The Shock of Gray, a preview of the global effects of the longevity boom. (Arbitrage means buying an asset cheaply and promptly selling it elsewhere at a profit.) Global competition tor "economic youth" is driving political and the inand institutional ambivalence about the longevity boom, old-the most exploitable labor terests of the very young and very about how force, and therefore least valuable-are linked. Writing Thomas B. the government defines poverty, journalism professor life are beEdsall observed that "both the beginning and the end of coming increasingly subject to market decisions, cost-benefit analy. ses, and bottom-line considerations that had not been so glaringly explicit in the past."13 Olders are perceived as a drag on the econ- is structured, and the struc omy because of the way the economy the vast new ture has yet to be revised in order to take advantage of untapped resource we represent. and the The language is cold-blooded, the trajectory is evident, our of culprit is clear. As Fishman put it, "The high costs keeping has caused the United ging population healthy and out of poverty States and other rich democracies to lose their economic and politi- cal footing,"14 In other words, according to this school of thought, because of the accumulation imperialism is in decline not western O TOxic debt that threatened the global banking system, or the eftects 26 THIs CHAIR ROCKS of climate change. or the stagnation ot real wages, or high youth unemployment rates, or crumbling public infrastructures or a workforce left behind by automation and the information econor or economy because the middle class is under siege and wealth is being Con centrated in ever fewer hands. The problem is too many old peoplel This is hogwash. In The Imaginary Time Bomb, British econo mist Phil Mullan exposes the reactionary analyses of people like Fishman and makes a persuasive case that the modern world's growing preoccupation with aging has little or nothing to do with demography. Instead, it is used to justity further reductions in the role of government in the economy and the curbing of the welfare state. "Often what is presented as a population problem is better un- derstood as a moral or ideological problem which assumes a demo graphic form," writes sociologist Frank Furedi in the preface5 This justification for austerity "lies in the socially constructed notion that federal spending on the elderly and the poor is the cause of the problems of the US economy," writes Mullan.16 Blaming ag ing for the problems that afflict the U.S. economy-the way Fish man, Longman, and so many alarmist demographers do-obscures their origins in global capitalism. THESE ARE SOME OF THE MYTHS USED TO ADVANCE THIS ANTI-OLDERS AGENDA: Society will be swamped by all these old people! Consider the oft:repeated statistic that as of 2015 there were more Americans over sixty than under fifteen. Yes, there are a ton more old people in the boat, but there are also a lot fewer kids. Will we be drowned in a glut of olders, or starved by a dearth of youngers Another way to look at it is that by 2020 there'll be one older adult for every child-far better for the children's welfare than the inverse, when birth rates and infant mortality were high. It's helpful to keep in mind that the projections that have people so worked up are largely the result of a specific historical phe WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 27 enon: the cohort eftect of the postwar generation growing old-the proverbial bulge in the python. Tellingly, relatively few U.S. population graphs extend past midcentury, by which time the pro popula portion of people over sixty-fhve will be in decline. Even countries that are rapidly aging can produce "youth bulges," Longman points out, describing them as looming disasters "with all the attendant social consequences, from more violence to economic dislocation."17 Can't win for losing. An older population will bog everyone else down in caring for the sick and the frail The longevity boom does indeed call for massive investment into the biology of aging and related medical issues. New and often expensive medical treatments make it possible to prevent or treat many more conditions than fifty years ago. The caregiver crisis is real and growing more acute. But the assumption that older people are inevitable money pits for health dollars is incorrect. Medical expenses are highest in the period just before we die, but that's true whether we die at eighteen or eighty, and evidence suggests that how long were sick affects spending more than how old we are.s The post war generation is the healthiest one in history. One study of twenty two wealthy countries (including the U.S.) actually found population aging negatively correlated with health expenditures." Rather it was people with debilitating illnesses or injuries-regardless of age-who used the most resources. According to the World Health Organization, aging has far less influence on healthcare expen ditures than several other factors. For example, between 1940 and 1990, when the U.S. population aged most rapidly, aging appears to have contributed only around 2 percent to the increase in health expenditures. Technology-related changes were responsi Die for between 38 and 65 percent of that growth. disabled eople aren't just living longer; they're healthier and are tor fewer years oftheir lives than older people of decades ago. Accord ing to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the THIS CHAIR ROCKS 28 going toward nursing and etirespending healthcare share of U.S. 2 0 0 0 and been flat since 2006 2 has declined ment homes The since Foundation Study of Aging in America co onMacArthur ten-year people reach sixty-five, their added years don't hae have cluded that costs, although this may change as the on Medicare a major impact disease increases,22 Peonla with Alzheimer s living of people number the end of life than peonle less to care for at once eople eighty actually over in their sixties cost and seventies, possibly Chronic conditions common. tions becone less from older Americans keep their most Absolutely a aggressive interven pile up, but they don's functioning in the world, helnina their neighbors, and enjoying Olders are because lives. drag on the economy. not. People fifty and up fuel the significant, fast overlooked "longevity economy." According growing, and often population amounted to S5.6 trilAARP, spending by the fifty-plus circueffects of this direct spending as it lion in 2o15. Factor in the the contribution to GDP amounted lates through the economy and supported more than 89.4 to S7.6 trillion. Overall, this spending thefifty in percent of all U.S. jobs." By 2032 million to 2015-61 economic drive more than half of U.S. plus age-group is projected to industries that include apparel, activity, as their spending fuels is jobs entertainment.24 The trend healthcare, education, leisure, and writes in global. As Joseph Coughlin, director of the MIT AgeLab, worlds "It's no exaggeration to say that the The Longevity Economy, most advanced economies will soon revolve around the needs, wants, and whims of grandparents."25 The U.S. also has more older workers than ever before. By stay o ing employed longer, generating tax revenue, and continuing earn and to spend, olders are fueling economic growth tar longe than previous generations did. As they age and transition out ot tne workforce, people will need more help with tasks like home malt tenance, driving, and downsizing, all of which generate jobs. Oidc people also drive investment in a multitude of new products andse WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 29 siges, especially technologically innovative ones. And while "entre S preneur" might conjure up an image of a kid in that proverbial garage. twice as many successful American entrepreneurs are over ace fifty as in their early twenties.26 Labor statistics capture only part of the economic contribution of older Americans, whose unpaid volunteer work in 2015 was valued at S75 billion. As Baby Boomers transition out of the workforce, this figure will rise.27 .One generation benefits at the expense of another. For starters, the common-and intuitively attractive-perception that distinct "generations" share and represent a set of experiences and characteristics has no scientific basis. The variation within members of a given group-people born between 1980 and 2000, for example-is greater than the variation between generations (as is also the case with people of a given race or ethnicity). Most studies that claim to demonstrate generational differences show something else instead, as with the ageist trope that Millennials in the work place are spoiled and dissatisfied. The same was true of GenXers and Baby Boomers at that age; as we get older we tend to move into jobs that suit us better. It's an age effect, not a generational eftect." The tension between generations is indeed worth studying, has been mostly as a red herring and a symptom of how aging had the Teiramed as a problem. The postwar generation in the U.S. Dut g0Od fortune to come of age in an era prosperity. It's understandable for of unheralded peace younger people and to resernt that good fortune, and to feel as though the Boomers have pulled up tne drawbridge after themselves. But pitting groups against eacn a in this case, vice versa-1S divide 1Onored tactic used by the wealthy and powerful to of a wO might otherwise unite against them in pursuit oner-old against time young or, those tairer OTId for all. It's like setting groups of low-wage workers against n e women in other, or the interests of stay-at-home moms against for all, paid workforce. The underlying issue is a living wage requires collective action. When issues are and instead framed THIs CHAIR 30 as ROCKS for "them" zero-sum-more see that the public good is at Because conflict means less for "us"-it's stake and the issue affects hardaw to evervone media perpetuate the myth that sells papers, the is inevitable, and people readily buv intergenerational competition build than bridges. But they're a are easier to Barricades it. into this kind of thinking is short. at a minimum and useful, less lot about school taxes. Don't older people complain when as sighted, their oxygen tank to be able to read the delivering the want guy they workforce is better for everyone: an educated instructions? Having and society as a whole. individuals, families, communities, each other also obscures the key against the generations Pitting discriminate by age. The wealthfact that income inequality does not of all ages, just like the ninety-nine. consists of people iest 1 percent wealth leading economists have been arguing years, growing between them) underlies disparity within different age cohorts (not Much of the inter the shrinking prospects of ordinary Americans. generational angst centers on the loaded term "old-age dependency to those ratio," which compares the number of people over sixty-five for As aged fifteen to sixty-four, typically framed as the ratio of "depen Over dents" to those of "working age." With the number of people tne Sixty-thve growing and the number in the workforce shrinking, Gen reasoning is that outnumbered youngers-often referred to as Kers, Millennials, and Generation Z-will be left to shoulder enor mous burdens. In fact, the proportion of older workers has been l ing pretty steadily for over one hundred years. As Mullan observed about the United Kingdom, "The number of working people su porting' each pensioner has fallen from fourteen to one in 1900 four to one in 1990, and n recent years, hardly anybody noticed."" many scholars have criticized this dependen ratio because of its crudeness as a measure and because O tant anti-olders ideology.30 It's based on the assumption that p become economic The reality deadweight is far more their own resources as soon as they hit sixty-five, bla vhen nuanced. Older Americans draw heavily in retirement, and many never become wa on WHERE AGEISM cOMES FROM 31 dependent on govermment support. Many people require benefits well before age sixty-five, and a growing proportion remain emnployed long after it. Fortunately the World Bank has developed a long-overdue alternative formula, called the adult dependency ratio, which takes these trends into account. Instead of comparing the ratio of older to younger workers, it cormpares the ratio of inactive adults to adults who remain economically productive. This ratio stays more or less constant until it eventually declines, and depicts a far more reassur ing economic forecast.31 Economic dependence is hardly a one-way proposition. More resources have always tilowed from older generations to younger ones than the reverse. Older people provide as much or more care than they receive, and people over seventy-five spend more time looking atter someone, usually a partner, than young people do,32 In 2012 the Pew Research Center reported that one out of every ten children in the U.S. lived with a grandparent, most often in the grandpar ent's house under the grandparent's care.5 Many programs that benefit olders benefit youngers, too, like Social Security and Medi Care payments that keep olders self-sufficient while their kids are busy raising their kids. In an era of stagnant wages and rising uitions, more and more olders are helping grandchildren pay tor college. ramilies are multigenerational, after all. When fundamental PrODIems with the housing and job markets go unaddressed, every ne suffers: the jobless "boomerang generation" of Millennials living wAtn their parents; their parents-the "sandwich" generation-who e doing the lion's share of wage-earning and caregiving for both ounger and older family members; and, in a longer-lived world, even C b sandwich" generation ofadults who look after grandchildren, their own offspring, and tend to their own nonagenarian rela- tive Aithough much ofthis assistance goes unpaid, it has economiC value, and it allows others to do paid work. That's why the MacArthur Foundation paf Facts dnpaper Fictions about an Aging America concluded THIS C H A I R ROCKS 32 that there's no intergenerational conflict over over evidence of "significant to be true."4 appears the oppoSite In fact, quite old-age entitlements. is that Another false dichotomy ones. When from younger rowest sense, over older workers as m o r e seldom olders compete stayed the same jobs away in the jobs Center study nar acros of employ. tound that rates for younger and correlated.5 In other words. actually positively on tor the Research the last forty years are this is true are scarce, different 2012 Pew generations. A ment rates people but jobs older workers take job, the employment rate and number in for younger people. A 2015 study also improved worked of hours older work employment rates among that higher found also the UK workers had m o r e money to as older ers benefited youngers, spend, thus creating jobs to prevent more jobs.3° The challenge is to create enough relations beand envy from affecting historian the words of create a world, in resentment tween generations-to "in which the David Hackett Fischer, tween age and organized into youth a deep eternal differences be- recognized and respected of social inequality."37 without being are system .Social Security bankrupted! Medicare exhausted! federal proof sixty-five will strain the age A large population currently financial obligations, future government's grams, and the is Social Security, which nota over underfunded, are indeed significant. small be fixed with relatively at low cost, well-managed bly earnings. cutoff point for taxing as raising the such adjustments, today can average, have grown faster than to (Because high-end earnings as compared taxed, are of earnings tor tnc only about 83.5 percent to blame boom the is longevity Nor 90 percent in 1983.)*5 sys* in the way the lies failure The in. healthcare is mess American Medicale program, as an acute care to people with organized. Designed deliver care management to people w" needs to be overhauled to America, in other words rsal disabilities and chronic illness-an aging tem is Compare have free univeta the U.S. to Canada, whose citizens WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM 33 fhcare. In 2012 the Canadian Institute for Health Information ICIHI) reviewed thirty-thve years of healthcare costs with a focus on the effect of an aging population. Contrary to the conventional be- liefthat an aging population will overrun hospitals and drain health- rare budgets, the CIHI reported that elderly related care actually ca added less than 1 percent to public-sector health spending each year, despite the fact that olders are proportionately higher users of hospi tal and physician services, home care, and prescription drugs." In other words, spending on seniors is not growing faster than spending on the population at large. A lifetime of governmental assistance has reduced the vulnerability of older Canadians to illness and dis- ability in old age. Their American counterparts, on the other hand, still evince the lifelong effects of a system that leaves the poor in the lurch, whether old or young-the people who need healthcare the most, so that they don't get sick and stay sick. Note: lifelong. The cumulative ef fects of poverty, stress, and harsh work environments manifest over time in illnesses that are often attributed to aging but actually reflect persistent disadvantage. As they mount, the personal and financial Consequences reflect the growing cost of gross social inequality. .We can't afford We can longevity. if we want to. A blue-chip panel of experts convened in 2015 Dy the Leadership Council of Aging Organizations concurred that we can provide for the healthcare and retirement income security needs of older e Americans by using existing resources more efticiently.Its Tight move economically as well as ethically. Over the last century, :auOnal GDPs around the world, along with life spans, have rapidly ncreased.1 Health and longevity generate wealth. penaing money on older people is often portrayed as a cost. It nvestment, not just for ethical reasons and not only because Eryone will benefit down the line. Better health systems would t ess and keep people healthier, enabling them to work longer 34 THIS CHAIR ROCKS the economy. and contribute more to the women who system would allow long-term care currently perform the bul A sustainable of this unpaid labor to stay in Spending money on older the worktorce, enable people people is often portrayed as with significant disabilities to a cost. It is an investment. continue to live the way they would like to, and encourage risk-sharing and bonding across communities. Supporting engage ment for olders in the arts and education improves cognition, bol sters social ties, and benefits the quality of life of everyone involved. Older people do indeed receive a disproportionate amount of gov. ernment and welfare spending: more healthcare, more personal social services, and of course, by definition, all retirement benefits. Is this really outrageous, or even surprising? Isn't this what the sys tem was designed for--to provide for those who can't provide for themselves anymore? Between one-fifth and two-thirds of today's older Americans haven't saved enough for retirement.2 As author Susan Jacoby observed in Never Say Die, "a decent life for the old old cannot, in most cases, be financed by individuals."43 Providing them with a modicum of financial security into their eighties and nineties will require A big GDP is government support. less significant important than political will and planning. Resources are long-term not spends almost as much on its inherently scarce; the United States military as all the other nations of the world combined." This a "scarcity" is the result of policy decisions in society whose oldest-and youngest-citizens are demeaned and disregarded. L1fe spans are our most basic measure of crack at reaching well-being. For the best ninety, become a Yet more wealthy advisable, the to md decamp Anguilla, Asian-American forty-two other Austria, Australia, or any in countries that ranked global life above the United expectancy in 20175 of expectancy Stae the lowest al 89.40; the U.S. is in (Monaco tops ps the list with with a life a a shocking 5o.60.) forty-third place at 8o; Chada has thar WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM hamefully, aorest poo in a historic reversal, the life 35 expectancy of the Americans is ialling. studies describe a society in which so status is destiny. In 2016, economists at the cioeconomic Brookings Lnstitution found that for men born in 1920, there was a six-year dif. Eerence in life expectancy between the top 1o percent of earners and she bottonm 1o percent. For men born in 1950, that difference had mo than doubled to fourteen years. For women, the gap grew to thirteen years from 4-7 years."e In regions with higher income and education levels, life spans rose. Thus, even as the gap in life expec tancy narrows between men and women and between blacks and whites, it widens between the haves and the have-nots. THE PERFECT STORM: WHEN AGE, CLASS, AND ENVIRONMENTAL CATASTROPHE COLLIDE in late life, almost everyone finds out what it's like to be excluded from mainstream discourse and possibility. As writer Walter Mosley "When you become old, you become black... anybody that's putit, poor, who gets really old, anybody who suffers some kind of trau- matic physical ailment, they realize whatit is to be pushed aside bya sOciety that's moving ahead only with what they believe is good the experience that black people have had in America forever. If if good; if you're paraplegic, you're not good: you're black, you're not good."47 natural hese lines are never more clearly drawn than during die in when poor people, people of color, and older people sasters, you're old, you're not claimed 729 1995 heat wave heart of the city, Most of the victims were olders living in the vES. windows and unto open doors and afraid urban by decay, ed to die than were more likely asproportionate numbers. Chicago's afford air-conditioning, Blacks who tend to live in Who were more likely to die than Latinos, ES, less isolation. populated neighborhoods and face Hurricane who died when one thousand people E to densely the nearly Katrina almost halt the Gulf Coast in August 2005, those Enty-fhve or older, and m o r e than half of were were black. New 36 7Ht5 CHAIRROCKS Orieans is both a poor city and a segregated one. Hardest hit were immobile and impoverished. The deaths of many more older residents can be attributed to the stress of being evacuated and Is the ing their homes. Aimost half of those who died when SupeTstorm Sandy blew int the mid-Atiantic coast in October 2012 were over sixty-fve. As wit Katrina. most died on the day of the storm. and most drowned alone Some were homebound: others chose to stay put. Those in instinz. tions also suffered. Evacuating more than forty nursing homes and aduit hornes in low-lying areas for Tropical Storm Irene a year earlier had cost millions of dollars. As Sandy approached, officials recom mended against evacuztion. The hurricane severely fiooded at leas twenty-nine facilities in Queens and Brooklyn. Over four thousand ursing home residents and fifteen mundred adult home residents sat in the cold and dark for at least three days before being trans ported through debris-filled floodwaters to crowded. ill-equipped shelters and homes as far away as Albany. Many low-income olders were trapped for days without power in housing projects as well, let behind in every sense by an ageist world. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE AN AGING SOcIETY? At one end of the spectrum is "shortgevity." a term coined by Dr. Robert Butler to describe countries where people don't live long and healthily enough to be productive. The United States is not anong them-far from it-but both temperament and circum stance stand between many Americans and old age, not to menton a good old age. Not everyone ages well, because of who they are (de pressed, reckless, extremely selfinvolved) or what they are (poor arnd frail, isolated, African American, Native American, female), many don't live long enough to grow old. For those of us with access to healthcare and education, how ever, for the first time in human history four living generations will become commonplace. We're going to have more time to figure out what we want to do with ourlives, more time to lish WHERE AGEISM COMES FROM ehare and we love. To what we know, wind down with those "longevity dividend," we need to reflexive hand-wringing. challenge the ageist assump. take advantage the and more time to 37 of this quit ac that underlie it, and think realistically and imaginatively tions contracts an equitable future the kinds of intergenerational task all ages would do well to engage in together. will require-a older people of their ability to contribute places a true ahout Stripping who are supposed to mate, breed, estabburden on young adults, start saving for retirement by age thirty-five or lish careers, and affects everyone. The mutually SO--another example of how ageism alternative is to see age as an asset. Exploit the "expeadvantageous rience dividend" that this Acknowledge that but contribute to society, and that their new cohort embodies. olders are not mere burdens conventional economic value as human beings is independent of Institute As Marina Gorbis, executive director of the productivity. for the Future, puts it, "Productivity is for machines." resources That cultural shift is within our grasp. Allocating unthinkable, but it to whiteness or maleness now seems according arenas still went unquestioned until not long ago (and in many until the does). Slavery was fundamental to the American economy was abolitionist movement turned it into a crisis. Brutal segregation movea reality for black South Africans until the anti-apartheid ment rose up against it. Not until the women's movement emerged did women challenge their second-class status. All these struggles Ameri- nearly a century for tainted by racCIsm on Women to win the right to vote, a struggle of slavery contine part of white suffragettes, and the ugly legacy c Ongoing, and none are easy. It took ues to blight the lives of African Americans. It'll take time to develop meanings ture that acknowledges and reflects on the emergingit, as longevity, but the conversation is beginning. Let's flip rstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity, m one about growing old to one about living long." Laura sugeests, CHAPTER TWO OUR AGES, OURSELVES: IDR TITY When I started this project, "How old do you feel feel?" did a loaded question. didn't seem lilike tendency to knock ck a fem few years best and harmless atoff The widespread vOur age seemed optimistic at a t hfty five 1 felt fully engaged, at the height of my intellectu reluctant to trade my bikini for a one-piece with a little d felt "young" By theskirt, same token, feeling "old" was invariably a complaint, meaning otherwise trim my sails. In other words, I or unattractive, maybe a little blue or slow off the mar feeling ill What I had yet to pin down was the way language reinforces the the idea that feeling good = feeling "young" and feeling bad = feline "old." Why the quotation marks? Because none of these eeling states of mind are intrinsically linked to what age we happen to be. If E break an ankle, we feel debilitated. Get a promotion, we're filled wih confidence. Lose someone we love, depressed. Make a new friend energized. These feelings, just like these events, can crop up at any point in our lives. Our obsession with youth blinds us to thatfac Young" and "old" are useful words with specific meanings. The first means having lived for a short time," the second "having liwed for a long time" or "no longer young" (although I prefer "olaer u the second words don't mean attractive/ug trendy/out of touch or foolish/wise; they're not a binary. Steepet The age denial, we don't notice that such equations are a -0 question is not how old we feel, but how we feel about meaning). The about just not being young anymore. Old age is so stigmatized that we go to great leng al sor b y m e d i c a l soct Ourselves from it. How to Age, an excellent primer by ob Ologist Anne Karpf, tells of a sixty-one-year-old wott Served that when she enters a room and sees nothing u l6 DENTITY 39 honestly forgets, for one awtul moment, that she's one of them. ('m Not Ray-Stage One!) "This is like people who say, I don't feel ald" Karpf comments, "as though there were some special feel- she ing that age brings, instead of just being themselves but older." We don't wake up one morning hijacked by Oldness. As the years pass we remain ourselves, just older. Of course we can't know what the future holds, but when aging past youth seems dread ful, clinging to youth seems the only option. The more time The more time goes by, the more damage clinging to youth does to our sense in in of self and our place the world world. the goes by, the more damage that strategy does to our sense of self and our place in the world. THE EMERGENCE OF YOUTH CREEP Until the second half of the nineteenth century, explains Patricia Cohen in In Our Prime: The Invention of Middle Age, "Age was not an essential ingredient of one's identity."2 Milestones like mar- sufficed for a population divided into of the original ten-year cohorts, and life was a lot shorter. Players in 1860, could ascend fromn game of Life, created by Milton Bradley Old Age." "infancy" to a square in the far corner marked "50-Happy riage, offspring, and illness and narrower categories beBy 1900, as life spans increased for exact dates of came statistically useful, the census began asking identifier for a birth, and "How old are you?" became prime to knock a few years Americans of all ages. The widespread tendency social not long afterward, as the up cropped probably your age is based shifted. Clearly part of the creep number of the meaning used to finish school, on measurable social change. Young people twenties; now it often take their early in kids have and get married, In 1978, Webster's Dictionary decades to pass those adult milestones. and sixty." Merriam-Webster "between forty as defined middle age to life from about forty-five of "the period as ine noW pegs it off about sixty-four." THIS CHAIR ROCKS 40 Only 1.700 a older few of the sixty-year-old Americans classified a respondents themselves conducted forty-six years never too later not but old to feel young," the younger they a 1963 Pew Research only admit that you're syndrome"-refusing to Center over forty, ly that "you're get, get "thirty-nine a masculine the way-peaks at around weakness, not a feminine one, by Comedian Jack Benny entirely disappears. times. brated his thirty-ninth birthday forty-one sttudl. older people e The feel-relatively speaking."" of persisted in confirmed showed that "the stud. barely halic old, and of whom small percentage eighty-year-olds, A ofthe themselves as young." describing as to fifty but famously cele. never IT'S NOT JUST A NUMBER How tempting it is to emulate Benny, to lie or fudge or just omit that pesky number, at least for as long as we can get away with it. Hav. ing come of age during the youth-glorifying sixties, couldn't my gen eration claim a little extra indulgence? Certainly most of us can identify with financier Bernard Baruch, who lived to ninety-five and declared old age to be "always fifteen years older than I am." It's true that mnost thirty-year-olds can't imagine being eighty, but their parents don't make it any easier when they pretend they can't either. Age is indeed "only a number," as long as that number reflects how many times we've circled the sun. Like many of the octogenarians I interviewed, retired psycho therapist Bill Krakauer registered "a little bit of a shock" every time he looked in the mirror, saying "I feel like a young guy." I know the feeling, but it's less unnerving now that I know it's close to univer sal. When he launched a new career as an actor, Krakauer tola nis agent, "T be eighty in a few months." She drew in her breath ana hissed, "Don't tell anybody. Don't tell anybody!" She didnt wan people assuming he was too old for a part and he didn't want peopie treating him with kid gloves, so they happily colluded. My mother painted over I'd her bathroom mirror, not a recommend. Writer and television commentator tactu Anay iey DENTITY took a dows, more oblique approach. he'd wonder, "Who is that 41 potting his reflection in store winstooped old man over there" Sohe onDed looking in Windows. Rooney was a staple on Sixty downyears, stepping for thirty -from television, not from Minutes writing minety-two. Denial works, at least until the bill comes due. random bunch of seventy-year-olds and it"'1l be hard to i e u e they share a birth year. Since we age at very different rates, it makes a certain sense to reject identifying with our Line up a chronological age That's one reason so many octogenarians maintain, truthfuly. that they still feel fifty, torty, or even thirty inside. The other reason is internalized ageism, which is why the disavowal of chronological age is so problematic. It gives the number more power than it deserves, contributes to ageist assumptions about what age signi fes and ageist stereotypes about what age looks like, and distances us from our cohorts. INTERNALIZED STEREOTYPES BECcOME SELF-FLFILLING PROPHECIES Nobody's children ageist, but it starts young. Research suggests that childdevelop negative stereotypes about old age in early born hood, around the same time that attitudes about race and gender into one ot kid I knew I was never going to turn to racing those grown-ups who incomprehensibly preferred sitting exile and scabby knees would around, and that my bruised shins and heels. I was a conne permanently from the land of stockings begin to form. As a spicuously late bloomer, noughts which is I have yet to heels, and my get the hang of one reason fifties. We age slowly, to its grim por: aging until I was in my much attention we don't pay didn't turn to we don't and when we're young abound, stereotypes dyal. Negative is hard work, an critically-which to examine them any Teason other disincentive. become fixed, form beliefs and opinions commitments" Onexamined, these cognitive "premature would psychologists call when it What *d-sets that reconsider to we're unlikely even 42 work THIs CHAIR ROCKS to our own benefit and even when it affects fects actual actual be example, social scientists primed a group of college stu with negative age stereotypes by having hem students For havior. unscramble senincluded words like forgetful, Florida, and bingo bingo. After ward, the students were observed to the walking tences that more slowly than elevator meas asurably control group." Steps slowed simply becauise use a subliminal script said it was time to tot ter. My nights on the dance floor now end in a hot bath with ice packs on both knees. (Looks ridiculous, feels great.) Td been packs that this was just the price of admission at my age. Id lostassuming sight of the fact that my back was feeling fine, or that the jumping around might have taken a toll on my younger as words, that tasks or circumstance-a companions well. In other concrete floor, hours bent a desk, for cooking forty-might be as much or more to over blame. When I mentioned this to Keith VonEmmeler, a then-twenty-sixyear-old aerialist, his brow furrowed. "I was sore after a hours of training the other couple of and said to night, myself, Damn, I'm too young to be this sore' But when I think about it, that's what not a I get for stretching or training for over a week." Unless we confront these of impairment and insignificance, they build up overexpectations the decades, making older adults themselves the worst ageists of all. We rule or relationships preemptively because theyout activities or outfits might not be "ageappropriate," especially any with tinge of sexuality-a double ta boo. Over time, as age-related stereotypes grow more tend to act as a though they were accurate, relevant, people creating self-fulfilling prophecies." We blame every ache on age and incipient dementia, losing sight of the fact every memory lapse that the other doesn't hurt and that kids, too, knee stuff all the time. forget Yale on psychologist age scholar Becca Levy calls this behavior "stereotype embodiment kind of In a series theory." of experi. ments, she flashed a series words of or and ated with aware aging on a of them. The screen, too positively briefly for experiments the negatively associ. subjects to become demonstrated that older people DENTITY exposed 1sn and more 43 positive messages about late life showed better recall onfidence in their abilities than those the exposed to negaphysiology. It's Borne out by research on memory loss in general," psy the Cessltural effect of cultu: expectations on recall and tive ones. The decline has nothing to do with chological. ful. It's the same reasom Afteen-year-old perfor mance is power. girls excel on incountries where they don't face strong gender bias.science tests Cal it "stereotype threat, a term coined by social psychologist Steele describe apprehension about being seen through he lens of a negative stereotype or the fear of behaving in a wav Claide to inadvertently conirms the stereotype. Call it subconscious elfhandicapping. Whatever name it goes by, the phenomenon sndercuts performance and well-being until the underlying asthat sumptions are exposed and invalidated. WHETHER PATHETIC OR HEROIC, STEREOTYPES OPPRESS We're all familiar with depictions of old women as lovable grannies or evil witches, and old men reduced to silent graybeards or hapless fools. All are caricatures. Whether they set too high a standard or too low, stereotypes are a way to avoid dealing with viduals, and to keep them at a distance. people as indi When we internalize stereotypes of olders as useless and debili- ated, it's understandable that we experience aging as trauma-the Detrayal of the body and the dissolution of our place in the world a10ng with it. This is a fundamental challenge to a healthy sense ot dithough the apprehension is typically accepted at tace value about York Times blogger Judith Warner's plaint moves into the spot w e d off stage as another generation light and hogs all the fun. "I now see the passage ofttime more as a 10mer New kind ofebell curve," she wrote. "Years of ascension, soaring anticipa tion, followed by a plateau-which is not so bad, really-and then, no way to Sugarcoat this: a rather precipitous decline." Only forty- four yeas 01a, Warner bid so discovery, long forever to "excitement, 44 intensity." Feigning transgression, she added, "Yo are posed to think this, much less say it!" Has Warner never not psup. met SOme som one over fifty who's embraced a cause, fallen in ve, but she has, day? Of course ageist stereotypes push thoseseized the examples to the back of the line and lead us to question . abilities. When I interviewed positive our Own park ranger Betty Soskin, she was w as an outreach specialist and interpreter at Rosie the Riveter King Na tional Historical Park in Richmond, CA. Her long history in the invaluable asset, not least because, as she Dut t,it "T'm at an age wherel know how all the stories turned out." Soskin described "hitting the age wall" twice a during training session at the Grand Canyon. One task involved blending in with tourists to observe concessionaires in national "A parks. saleswoman asked me, 'Are you here with Elderhostel?' and all of a sudden I became an old lady" Soskin recounted. "I was doing my job as a student, but I suddenly felt like someone who had wandered away from her tour and was lost. And I group suddenly began to walk more slowly. A physical and psychological change came over me as a result of that simple question." area made her an On the way home, she and a ate fried rattlesnake at Cowboy Club, then pulled up companion in their convertible at the vortex, a famous rock formation in Sedona believed to channel energy How, and started up the gravelly sandstone incline. Soskin was bling along in her blue scram until she jeans to happened overhear "this conversation among a group of elders about how one of them had gotten paralyzed with fear and gotten stuck and 'oh, how awful!' And I stopped in my tracks. Because all of a sudden I with my friend identified not who was headed the up incline and who was twenty years younger than I, but with the elders standing all vulnerable nearby." We're to being to some shaped the others. It requires our acquiescence, as degree by expectations of Soskin was acutely aware. "I gave them that power" she noted, "because I could on go incline with no up that the problem." DENTITY 45 Exceptionally active, Soskin could scramble her way out of that mind-set, but America's "can-do" ethic can be almost as problematic as the ageist script of learned helplessness. People with disa term for have abilities uplifting pictures of disabled people doing to be doing, like skiing name for the protagonists: "su- things the rest of us might not expect them or kissing: "inspiration porn." Also a percrips." Enter the "supergeezer." At eighty, Japanese climber Yuichiro Miura made it to the top of Mount Everest. At eighty-five, fashion designer Gloria Vanderbilt published a steamily explicit erotic novel. Former President George H. W. Bush celebrated his ninetieth birthday by jumping out of a plane. That smattering of octogenarian CEOs, nonagenarian per formers, and centenarian diploma-earners are standard-bearers, all. The media loves 'em. But placing them on pedestals distracts from the social and economic factors that shrink the worlds of most older and disabled people. It also reflects a culture that vener ates actors, musicians, and athletes in ways that reinforce ageist, rac ist, and sexist stereotypes. Celebrity culture is ground zero. "Pop: come for the sexism, stay for the ageism," wrote music critic Sasha Frere-Jones about Britney child "has Spears, noting that the thirty-two-year-old former long faced the specter of becoming old in pop years." (Are pop years star like dog years?) Athletes fare little better. Reluctant to acknowledge a hero's physical decline, fans collude in the pretense that who retired slow, like Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter, uncommon natural grace, are simply in prolonged slumps. progression into h e notion a personal at stars who forty with Denial turns a failure. that the postwar generation will rock and roll its way olders just want to be Many through old age is another ageist myth. like with they things time doing and spend able to pay their bills have bigger plans than them, people they love. Others, myselfamong of aging, as would be abun no average way cver. There's no norm, dantly clear if age denial-aka "agelessness"-weren't fundamen- scripts. The struggles of a l to the supergeezer and celebrity daily lite 46 46 THIS CHAIR ROCKS can take just as much courage, and life writ smal be just as f all be just as full of meaning. We could use more examples in the media, many m y more, of olders living ordinary lives, neither drooling nor course that's not what sells papers or garners click-throughs, so it will be . eup to us to hold up the vast and varied middle ground as equally valid examples of how to age. dazzling. OfCo AGE CONFERS CONTENTMENT Which group is happier, a bunch of thirty-five-year-olds or a bunch of eighty-five-year-olds? The thirty-five-year-olds, right? That's what both groups answer. But ask each to assess its own well-being and the older people come out ahead-in study after study, from Australia to Zimbabwe. Data from a University of Warwick study on two million people from eighty nations show an extraordinarily con sistent pattern: whether rich or poor, single or married, childfree or fertile, people were most miserable in middle age and childhood and at the ends of their lives.1 happiest in People in their eighties and nineties readily admit that life is dif ficult and more growing so, but they also the things that make keep it worthwhile in firmly view. The source of this conscious ment appears to be internal, deeply human, and inherent content to grow ing old. Aging itself confers very effective most of us. the shift is based in coping mechanisms upon Perhaps brain chemistry, or we just get better at maybe appreciating what we have. Whatever its basis, we hit the as homestretch, most of us make enjoy the present as never peace with our pasts and before. WE EACH AGE DIFFERENTLY MENTALLY, PHYSICALLY, AND SoCIALLY Human able variability makes chronological age an increasingly unrelibenchmark of pretty much anything about person: what she listening to, or feel about ternet of Things. Categories make life simpler, andthongs or the Inare inevitable, but "should" look like, or be sorting by capacity a and generalizations more inclination makes DENTITY sense. There are even more ways of ther are of getting from thirty to age!" ompliment, and for your offends: it It relies on implies that Aging does indeed have hallmarks, tactfully identified way. 47 getting from sixty to ninety than sixty. That's why "You look great internalized ageism to work as a people "your age" look a certain by Pew Center researchers as Chronological age is forgetfulness, bladder control an increasingly unreliable problems, decreased sexual ac benchmark of pretty much tivity, being retired, and having anything about a person. grandchildren and gray hair. inevitable if we live long enough. But which ones, when, and how we deal with them, vary enormously. Some are THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS "AGE-APPROPRIATE" Aging is, obviously, a process. The older we grow, the more com- plexly layered identity becomes, the fatter the file in which our knowledge and memories are stored, in which, in turn, our sense ofselfresides. In Lynne Segal's philosophical take in her book Out of Time: The Pleasures and the Perils of Aging, what really matters are the narratives we create, "the stories we tell ourselves of how to "be our age as we age."12 The central task, in other words, is to figure out what's us-appropriate at any point, not necessarily what biology predicts or an ageist culture ordains. There's no such thing as age- appropriate. feel the same. Acutely aware of how much has changed, we also inside." The hat's why so many people maintain, "I'm still a kid an ageist culture divide Eenng is genuine, but it reflects the way us into young and no-longer-young. We ict: a "true" and more experience pleasing self, obscured by sags Cs, struggling to remain visible not a as con- and wrin- and relevant. This way of thinking is a trap. Age is real, but it is this fixed characteristic like eye color or skin color o tYpically, sex. Age is an observation used to place ourselves 48 THIS CHAIR RoCKS relative to others. Ask an eight-year-old where the childrenn are, and invariably scan the room for younger kids. Ageeiis both fixed and fluid, as is the way we experience it. At the time of of this she will writing, I'm sixty-six. How I feel about it at a given moment den. ends whether my knees hurt, who else is on the bus, and inf finite other variables. Different mental and physical states coexist. "We on are, at every moment, younger and older," writes Wendy in her book Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures Lustbader of Growina Older.13 Referring to "the radical ambiguities of old age," Segal calls this disorientation "temporal vertigo." As we age, she writes, "we also retain, in one manifestatiorn or another, traces of all the selves we have been.. no age." Swedish . rendering us psychically, in one sense, all ages and sociologist Lars Tornstam, who's been studying the ag ing process for three decades, many older people who continue to mature socially and psychologically, a process that he calls gerotranscendence. He describes the first "sign of as 'a feeling of beirng a child, a young person, angerotranscendence adult, middle age and old-all at once!"l4 What abundance! There's much that I don't remember but much that I do, from skinned knees and learning to and kiss and type conjugate and calm a baby and how to walk on ice just last winter. (Center of gravity on the front leg, like a pen guin.) Unless we fall into the tiny minority hijacked by severe, late stage dementia, all those selves will remain sees available the end. Like everything else about old age, people ence these transitions in countless unique to us until undoubtedly experi- ways, some inhabiting an increasingly distilled sense of selt and others exploring multiplic ity of identities. Toward the end of the television series The Big ( - spoiler alert!-after Laura Linney's hospice, she hangs young-and-healthy a character has moved photographs of all the to reei a dents around their necks one night to reiind the dining room staff of the places in the world the dying once occupied. The dance he. pe tween all the selves we've inhabited across the years never stops. IDENTITY 49 Oteat thing about getting older," according to writer Madeleine don't that "is lose all the other you L'Engle, ages you've been" This is not "agelessness." Oftering neutral ground, an end run he n d al1 these messy ambiguities, "agelessness" sounds e doesn't it? On a tube of eye cream, so seduc "agelessness" promises to erase the trace of time. In pop culture it describes people who "stay uong" into their fifties and sixties. In gerontology, it suggests that a vouthful spirit can remain unaltered within an aging body. None of these scenarios is possible, and they'Te all ageist. As sociologist Molly Andrews has argued, "the current tendency toward 'agelessness is itselfa form of ageism, depriving the old of one of their most hard earned resources: their age."15 Rather this is "agefulness": an accretion of all the things we've done and been, not catalogued or curated but stored random access within our bones and brains, that makes us who we are. Hag, spinster, crone? Old fogey, old fart, old goat? Little old lady, dirty old man, sweet old thing? Geezer, biddy, codger, coot? Those stereotypes are ours to reject or subvert on the way to more compelling and accu toward aspirational identities. At the moment l'm leaning me last year when I banged hag, something a driver actually called the pedestrian on the trunk of his car after he bombed through Maybe it was my crosswalk. Hag, outside of Shakespeare-realy? rate funny fake-fur cat hat that undid him. all the time. When this say People TWish I were young again." back move their game pieces actually Pressed, however, few would could close, urnless they anywhere or tO The beginning of the board, well. back in time as consciousness cartiansport their present-day eighteen-year-old love my thanks, I'd selt-conscious uolescence again? No, I'm less because now more g E Dack, but I dance however we've prioritize better. Whatever dV1gated loving and letting s, from we are the They and invaluable. sum make go, our trajectories, children whether of or or houses learned what we and experiences of those rich and deep agefulness, is That us us. 50 THIS CHAIR ROCKS PUSH BACK! REJECT THE BOGUS OLD/YOUNG BINARY When the 2011 Fall Fashion issue of New York magazine landed in it had maillbox, a chic young woman on its cover. Yawn. my it "When time to cast the cover, we decided... to embrace a more ex pansive view of beauty," an editor's note explained. "We came up with four cover subjects: an woman; a came eighty-one-year-old nineteen year-old man who can pass quite convincingly as a woman; a mother and daughter...; and an old-fashioned yet newfangled muse." Turned out that my copy featured the nineteen-year-old, and I stopped yawning. It was Serbo-Croatian teenager Andrej Peji who modeled both women's and men's clothing and hit the big time when French Vogue dressed him in a skirt. Saying, "T've left my gender open to artistic interpretation"l6 at the time, the model has since transitioned to womanhood. Those in the genderqueer vanguard like Peji bravely reject bio- logical and cultural constraints. In response, the culture is shifting. Gender used to be viewed as a rigid binary, male or female, but we now understand that it's far more fluid. If gender can be con ceived of this way, why on earth not age, which is inherently, obviously, a continuum? Especially in view of the fact that in late life, as hormones change, gender roles begin to merge. Many women become more assertive and men more emotionally attuned. Age is relative: We're always younger than some and older than others. Even nonagenarians quick to point out that Mrs. So-and-So down the hall is older than they are. If we can shake off the far more rigid shackles of a more not embrace gender, why fluid, friendlv are and, frankly, far more rational view of age? Any compartmentalization is problematic. Take "middle age" to which so many cling like flotation cushions, although who knowe where the middle lies anymore? According to Patricia Cohen, middle age was invented around the turn of the twentieth century, when the DENTITY 51 1tof the population began living decades rine vears. Capitalism, vanity, and fear of past their childmortality all swiftly ombined to pathologize this grim development and commercial. remedies. Sound tamiliar? The point, of course, is that the same applies to the way late life is typically viewed. ige the punishing old/young actually-consigns two-thirds of us tobinary--old/no-longer-young, second-class status, meekly the to exile side of the velvet self-enforced wrong rope. The exile starts This a younger. Describing a New York magazine feature on internet celebrity, the New York University Local blog wrote, "It makes us foel some toxic combination of alienation, self-righteousness, nostalgia, and a smattering of annoyance. Do we feel OLD??.. . Is the only salvation the silent grave?"l The bloggers were college ever students-still on the "right" side of that rope, but already oppressed by ageist norms. The birthday card rack sets the bar at twenty-nine. I hate to admit it, but one reason I got married at 29.9 was because I didn't want to be single at thirty. The marriage turned out very differently than I thought it would, as did turning forty, fifty, and sixty, and I bet the birthdays ahead will pack their share of surprises. CLAIM YOUR AGEAND QUESTION ITS SIGNIFICANCE Few people frankly acknowledge that they're fine with their age: they're more likely to offer it up with a resigned shrug or a selt aeprecating anecdote. Well-meaning readers regularly offer a tip to a journalist colleague who covers the "age beat" and dubbed herselt the Aging Reporter: Surely she'd made this regrettable association DY mistake? Surely she'd fare better with a cheerier title attribute that generally means identifying an to a welcommembership offers and otherwise be hidden, would 5 LOmmunity. Identifying yourself as old, on the other hand, ob Coming ves out critic Elaine Showalter, "is to admit something everyone n d is thus somehow more shaming, carrying more e supposed to deny being old; it is seen as an of a can stigma. insulting, or at 52 THIS CHAIR ROCKS least unwelcome, self-description, unless jocular: and well-paddeda with euphemisms." Even well-padded, it deprecat Euphemi is Nyad vears voung!" when the marathon swimmer succeecded. sixty demean, like the sportscaster who crowed, "Diana attempt to swim from Cuba to Florida. Better to at her ffih remember r Nyad's own words, spoken through parched and swollen lips: lips:"Youre never too old to chase your dream." ever The alternative is age acceptance: acknowledging the plishment of having come this far-however far that hanracco be-and making peace with t. From acceptance to declaration gTea great leap. It's not "age outing" if we out ourselves, and when we s the cultural noose we rob the number of that power over us. Lots : people, for example, recall claiming their first senior discount d horrors, being offered one!-with real dismay. If there's no -0r, sham the discount becomes just that: a price break free of ambivalence. not to mention mortification. What's the best answer to "How old are you?" Tell the truth, then ask why it matters. Ask what shifted in the questioner's mind once they had a number. Ask why they think they needed to know. The information feels foundational, but it isn't. We ask partly out of sheer habit, carried over from childhood, when a month was an eternity and each year marked developmental changes and new treedoms. "The kids drive me crazy asking how old I am," old Detroit schoolteacher Penny Kyle. "I but I age, know on the job it can cause you a said eighty-year don't mind telling my problem, so l always say I'm a hundred and four." Ha! What's the best answer to "How old are you?" Tell the truth. Then ask what difference the number makes. able, and arguably talks answers the impertinent. We also ask how old because age funct people are are because age functions as a Convenient shorthand, a way to contextualize accompl and calibrate expectations. Contextualize accomplishmes lazy, though, and utterly unrel" A woman who attendea tended one of m question by retorting, "How w much do you weigh much doyou IDENTITY 53 Ceientist Silvia Curado refuses to give her age, not because she wants people to take her for younger but because she refuses to be nigeonholed in a way that she finds "reductive and usually faulty" Her consciousness makes it a political act. Social worker Natalia Granger has another radical suggestion: Follow the example of gender-nonconforming people, who reject roles and stereotypes based on the sex they were assigned at birth. When asked for your age, identify as age-nonconforming. Author and environmental activist Colin Beavan announced on Facebook that he was "coming out as age queer. I am not comfort able with the roles and stereotypes associated with the age of the body I was born into," he wrote. "My body's age is not my age. From now on, I will be identifying as thirty-seven." I love the culture hack but want to modify it, because identifying as thirty-seven (still "young") is a form of denial. Colin is in his fifties. I'm eleven years older than he is. I'm good with that, and he's getting there; aftera back-and-forth, he decided to stop identifying with a specific age. I want to be age queer by rejecting not my age but the fixed mean- ings that people assign to it-the roles and stereotypes that Colin, too, declines to abide by. I claim my age at the same time that I chal lenge its primacy and its value as a signifier. REJECT AGE AS A FIRST-ORDER IDENTIFIER (THINK OF IT AS A THOUGHT EXPERIMENT) The habit of wanting to know a person's age is hard to break. It's the first question that springs to mind when a friend says they're dating sormeone new, although I no longer ask it. Take the journalIstic convention of including ages in newspaper stories. Two stories in the week, about a forty-two-year-old nursing student running for homecoming queen and another about a ninety-one same one year-old mayor swindling River Falls, Alabama, out of $201,000, got me thinking about it. Dolores Barclay, a veteran Associated Press reporter, fielded my question. tis just another essential fact to include about the subjects we 54 ROCKS THIS CHAIR cover. It's part of the 'who' in reporting. Barclay responded 1s. "Age example, if we e write certain stories as is often relevant to 'older person' who takes her first sky about a 'senior citizen' or does the story have more impact if the subject is seventy or she's well. For dive ninety-nine? Or if we're profiling the accomplishments of a musi. cian who has had an illustrious and amazing career, don't uwe want to know how old he is? What it he's only twenty-four, but read. ing the story we might think he's sixty?" Okay, what if? The week before ld happened to attend the daz. zling U.S. debut of South Korean classical guitarist Kyuhee Park at Carnegie Hall. She could have been thirteen or twenty-three years old, and I was itching to know. It turned out that she was twenty seven, which made the experience no less rapturous. It did make me wish that l'd spent less time being distracted by the itch. The media focus relentlessly on the age of celebrities, especially women like Madonna who decline to "age gracefully." "I find whenever someone writes anything about me, my age is right after my name, Madonna said. "It's almost like they're saying, 'Here she is, but remember she's this age, so she's not that relevant anymore. Or Let's punish her by reminding her and everyone else. When you put someone's age down, you're limiting them."20 Or protecting them, which is little better. The first attitude desexualizes, and the second incapacitates. Why shouldn't River Falls Mayor Mary Ella Hixon, whose ten-year sentence was commuted to five probation, do some time for stealing $201,000 from her town? Although his client was clearly compos mentis, an attorney tor the defense maintained that she "was being taken advantage ot. "Had it not been a on on ninety-one-year-old woman, my head to make district sure she went to prison," the I would have stood Covington County attorney told the Associated Press. Apparently citizens in the know had been reluctant to blow the whistle, he said, "for fear of be- ng ostracized or because it was a proverbial little old lady." The ony non-ageist position in the story is the acknowledgment that IDENTITY won ald was 55 powerful enough to silence her critics. A homecoming queen, on the other hand? Now that'sforty-two-year news! Obviously the subject's age belongs in obituaries and profiles of prodigies, but its reflexive inclusion in other kinds of stories is nothing but a bad habit. Race is no longer an obligatory part of the who of a story unless it's a story about race relations-just the opfor the in child same reason. Because it's fact, sexist to foreground marital status, Ms. has supplanted Miss or Mrs. as an woman's Dosite, a identifier. Why should age be different? There are plenty of ways to clue readers in the rare event that it's actually relevant to the story. A little confusion could rattle lot of assumptions about what people are capable of at a given stage of life, or what they have in common across age divides, which would be all to the good. a Another thought experiment: Suppose date of birth was omit ted from medical records? Inconceivable, right? OK, maybe buried on page 3. But wouldn't it be great if physicians had to assess and prescribe based on each person's physical and mental condition, free of bias about which symptoms were likely to crop up at a given stage of life, and which were "worth treating"? It's why geriatrician Mark Lachs named his book Treat Me, Not My Age. TAKE A PAGE FROM THE DISABILITY RIGHTS PLAYBOOK: THINK PERSON FIRST To avoid reducing people to labels or medical diagnoses, disability etiquette prescribes "people first" language: talking about people with mental illness (instead of mentally il); people who have autism Or epilepsy (not autistic or epileptic); wheelchair users (instead of wheelchair-bound or confined to; and so on. The disability is a char acteristic of the person; it does not define them. When I initially heard "person first" language, it seemed cumDersome and slightly silly. The term "ableism" has been in use for at least thirty years to describe discrimination against people with isabilities, but it seemed an annoying invention by the Politically ROCKS THIS CHAIR 56 A friend who works in the field Drought me Correct Thought Police. wouldn't reter to 'my canceroe s mother, around by saying tartly, "You in mind that cancer would you?" It's worth keeping and treated like a stigmatized until quite recently heavens. secret. Mores change, thank now er s deeply shameful family So here's yet another thought experiment: How about learni: from the disability rights movement and attempting to nceive ourselves and those around us as "people with age" instead of as X O Y-year-olds? Age becomes just another attribute, like being a a. 0od speller or Filipino or a Cubs tan. People could "have years" just as people with dementia "have trouble thinking" and others a knack for putting people at ease or a tin ear. needn't set Age apart, nor be from other apart identifiers. Person first, as Bill Krakauer discovered when he started taking acting classes. "So here are these bunch of kids and they see an old guy, right? After a while it quiets down. It takes a few weeks, but everybody forgets. I stop looking at them like young and people, they stop looking at me like an old and we're all just guy set people." TAKE HEART: THERE'S NO "RIGHT" PATTH "Aren't we all supposed to H.R. Moody in his aspire toward 'Active Aging?" asks ethicist Human Values in Aging suggests. Perhaps doing less frees us newsletter.22 Perhaps not, what matters up to accomplish more of most to us. Perhaps the trick lies in figuring out what matters most-a tall order in view of the fact he that most in selfreliance and Americans economic productivity. Americans value doing over conventional exception. Reminded that I'm being, and Im no rounding the third turn on the track, my impulse is to get cracking on that tures where bucket list. "No wonder culis devalued being and doing over-valued with such regard old age contempt and dread!" Anne How to Age.23 The whole point about Karpf observes in her book become more aging "well," she says, is to liberated from social expectations and rioritize Eeis what Tight for us: tidal breezes for Ray, midtown fumes tor me. self-worth is intimately bound up IDENTITY 57 It can be hard to resist the "successful" or "productive" model of aging, since it provides an optimistic counterpoint to the standard narrative of decline. Gerontologists like the terminology because t's upbeat. Conservatives like it because it legitimizes reducing gov ernment support by placing the burden of how we age on the indi vidual. The positive language is seductive, as is its premise, because we really, really want to think we can keep doing the things we love forever. We often can--versions of them, that is. Motivation is important, as is keeping mentally and physically active, making a living, helping others, having goals, all those good things. But the goalposts shift. We'd do well to keep in mind that many of those activities are predominantly available to the lucky and reasonably well-off, and to decouple self-worth from long-standing measures of earning power or physical prowess. Much is not under our control, and many supports require policy-level implementation. Sanitized or romanticized exemplars of "successful aging"those silver-maned couples waltzing on the foredeck of a cruise ship-set an unreasonable standard and suggest that less "successful' agers are responsible for their circumstances. Why does NPR's Ina Jaffe dislike the term "successful aging" so heartily? "It means there's one more opportunity for me to fail."24 As age scholar Margaret Cruikshank has observed, the model overlooks the very important role class plays in determining who gets to age in the first place, not to mention how "successfully" "No amount of individual effort or sturdy selfreliance can gain for working-class people or people of color the advantages enjoyed by the white middle class, especially by men," she writes in her book Learning to Be Old23 Everyone can make sensible choices, but barriers like heavy caregiving responsibilities, inadequate healthcare, and rieighborhoods with few resources make t more difficult. Blaming the poor for "bad choices"-and poverty SET on weakness-makes aging another arena in which we succeed Or tail based on terms that are far from neutral with to be ours, and have little to do POWer or personal virtue or whether our software skills are up Many choices are unlikely ROCKS 58 THIS CHAIR are likely to talko.us losses and the peasures the Both todate. make in middle age is thinkit mistake we take by sur king that prise. "The at fiftu good way continuing to be Aaybe it's aging ho. olders w many Instead he olders who not," says Tornstam.2 continue t in that may ways psychologically, and mature socially surprise or include less fear ofdeath this the we were means sees s. dismay. Hallmarks of ease. deeper relationships death and dis. process with fewer people, coupled with an in creased desire for solitude, and diminished commitment to i old habits, routines, and principles. The assumption that older peonie become "set in their ways" is an ageist cliché. ives can indeed he. come constrained by disability or living on a fixed income or Com. forming to an institutional schedule. But the ultimate creatures of habit are children, and odds are that people who find comfort in rou tine were always like that. IfI had a nickel for every story I've been sent about olders doing the limbo or DJing or skipping rope, Id be rich. I don't post them because they get plenty of press without my help, and because it reinforces the notion that the older people who deserve admiration are those who can look and behave like younger ones. These over achievers are outliers. They're terrific and they're inspirational, but it's also okay to sit on the porch. If a mom's wanderlust fades or an uncle quits his bowling league, we're likely to wring our hands and blame illness or depression. In fact such transitions may reflect greater self-esteem, more spontaneity, or a need for time to reflect on larger questions-what Tornstam describes in his theory of gero transcendence as "a shift in meta perspective, from a materialistc to a more cosmic and transcendent one, normally accompanied by an increase in life satisfaction." More Dasis 1Or the growing body of evidence that emotional well-being inCreases with age. and rational view of the world BECOME ow dl AN OLD then to dnd the PERSON IN TRAINING bridge the personal and the political? To integrate the aspirational? In 20o8 I heard geriatrician Joanne Lynn IDENTITY 59 describe herself as an old person in training, and I've been one ever since. I know I'm not young. I don't see myself as old. I know a lot of Deople feel the same way. They're in the grips of a cruel paradox: They aspire to grow old yet dread the prospect. They spend a lot of energy sustaining the illusion that the old are somehow not us. Becoming an old Person in Training bridges the us/them divide, and loosens the grip of that exhausting illusion. Becoming an Old Person in Training acknowledges the inevitability of oldness while relegating it to the future, albeit at an ever smaller remove. It swaps purpose and intent for dread and denial. It connects us empathically with our future selves. As Simone de Beauvoir put it, rather more grandly: "Ifwe do not know who we are going to be, we cannot know who we are: Let us recognize ourselve in this old man or in that old woman. It must be done if we are to take upon ourselves the entirety of our human state." In a world in- creasingly segregated by race and class as well as by age, reaching over those divisions to acknowledge the one path we all will travel is a radical act. Becoming an Old Person in Training means ditching preconcep- tions, looking at and listening carefully to the olders around us, and re-envisioning our place among them. It means looking at older people instead of past them, remembering they were once our age, seeing resilience alongside infirmity, allowing for sensuality, enlarg ing our notion of beauty, and acknowledging that an apartment or a room or even just a bed can be home to an internal world as rich as ours and very possibly richer. It means thoughtful peeks through tne periscope of an open mind at the terrain we will some day in habit. Thinking way ahead doesn't come naturally: AS a species, numans evolved to choose present gratification over future well. Deing. That's why becoming an Old Person in Training takes magination. In her book A Long Bright Future, Stantford psycholo8St Laura Carstensen describes the importance of generating re IC, humane visions of our future selves-what we'll want to be ROCKS THIS CHAIR 60 60 on the e tasks and and doing and be capable of-and embarking hanges and sacrifices that will get us there. "If we can't picture re ourselves teaching. laughing, loving, and contributing to society whae en we're...
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