{"id":1485,"date":"2014-03-17T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2014-03-17T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/2017\/09\/why-ageism-matters\/"},"modified":"2018-05-02T08:59:20","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T12:59:20","slug":"why-ageism-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2014\/03\/why-ageism-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Ageism Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

First posted on <\/em>Ashton Applewhite\u2019s website<\/a><\/em> in 2010, this is an excerpt from a talk she gives called \u201cThis Chair Rocks: How Ageism Warps Our View of Long Life.\u201d We think it\u2019s a great way to introduce an articulate, passionate writer whose work will appear from time to time at the Silver Century Foundation.<\/em><\/p>\n

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In 2007 I started interviewing people over 80 who were in the workforce. At the same time, I was reading and writing about longevity. To my surprise, the more I learned, the greater the discrepancy that emerged between my grim notion of late life and the lived reality. I knew I was onto something. <\/p>\n

What were some of my misconceptions?<\/p>\n

The grimmest was that I\u2019d end my days drooling under a bad Van Gogh print in some ghastly, institutional hallway<\/strong>. In fact, the percentage of Americans over 65 in nursing homes is 4 percent, down from 5 percent over the last decade. <\/p>\n

I imagined I\u2019d be sick and helpless. <\/strong>But the vast majority of older Americans enjoy independent lives. People get chronic illnesses, but they live with them. <\/p>\n

Another preconception was that dementia lurked<\/strong>. One in eight Americans over 65 has Alzheimer\u2019s. It\u2019s a terrifying prospect. But the real epidemic is anxiety<\/em> about memory loss. <\/p>\n

Remember the 4 percent of people over 65 living in nursing homes? Of the 96 percent who are still in the community, the vast majority continue to function effectively and live independently. About 20 percent of people in their 90s seem to escape cognitive decline altogether and continue to perform as well as middle-aged people.<\/p>\n

I also assumed that old people were depressed<\/strong>. Because, duh, they were old, and they were going to die soon. It turns out that older people enjoy better mental health<\/em> than the young or middle-aged. In fact, study after study, in the United States and around the world, shows that people are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. <\/p>\n

Weirdly, counterintuitively, exhilaratingly, the more I learned about old age, the less terror it held. <\/strong>This applies across the board: AARP and the University of Southern California did a study in 2009 that established that \u201cless knowledge about aging is associated with greater anxiety about the aging process.\u201d <\/p>\n

The vast majority of respondents in the study were aware that older Americans can learn, are either working or want to work, and feel healthy. But most of them also thought of older people generally as \u201csenile,\u201d \u201cpretty much alike\u201d and having \u201cno capacity for sex.\u201d No wonder they\u2019re nervous! <\/p>\n

We see old age only through the lens of loss. From the outside, what people lose as they age is more obvious than what they gain. The losses are real and wrenching. But from the inside,<\/em> the experience is different. People adjust. Life remains very much worth living. <\/p>\n

So why do so many people assume that everyone in a retirement home is the same age? (Old.) Or that older people are \u201cpretty much alike?\u201d Because of ageism: discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of a person\u2019s age. It\u2019s why I started a Q&A blog called Yo, Is This Ageist?<\/em>  Go ahead, ask me.<\/em> <\/p>\n