We’re all aging. Every day! The only alternative to aging is death. Yet once we enter early adulthood, “aging” is something Americans are supposed to avoid. There are anti-aging skin products, nutrition supplements, and more – all part of a multi-billion-dollar industry that preys on the fear of getting old.
Words matter. Phrases like “vibrant aging” and “healthy aging” signal that being older is just fine, and it’s worth putting in the work to make this stage of life the best it can be. “Anti-aging” says that being old is bad, and you should fight against . . . well, who you are.
“In my Health and Aging class at Yale, students start the semester with relatively little awareness of ageism; three months later, they can’t pick up a newspaper, look at social media, or talk to others without noticing the negative age stereotypes lurking everywhere in their lives,” writes Professor Becca Levy in Breaking the Age Code: How Your Beliefs About Aging Determine How Long and Well You Live.
Negative attitudes toward getting or being old in America are rampant. Whether it’s snide “over the hill” remarks, tech people talking about products that are “so simple even your grandma could use them,”or the absence of older people in ads for products aimed at the general population, ageism is so pervasive that most people don’t even notice it, let alone call it out.
Dr. Levy’s research found that negative views of aging aren’t just emotionally harmful, though, but affect physical health as well.
In one study, “participants with the most-positive views of aging were living, on average, seven and a half years longer than those with the most-negative views,” she wrote. “Age beliefs stole or added almost eight years to their lives, conferring an even better survival advantage than low cholesterol or low blood pressure (both of which added an extra four years of life) or low body mass index (one extra year) or avoiding smoking (three extra years).”
She has also found that people “primed” with positive views of aging performed measurably better on memory tasks and walking speed than those randomly assigned for priming with negative aging stereotypes.
What’s unusual about bias against the elderly is that everyone starts off in the privileged group – young. That can make it easy to agree with cultural stereotypes about older people early in life. And once those beliefs are internalized and reinforced, they can be hard to get rid of. But it’s possible. Step one is awareness.
“It’s time for us to grow up, let go of our desperate need to stay young, and embrace that we age and get old,” writes Tracey Gendron in Ageism Unmaked: Exploring Age Bias and How to End It. “Once you begin to recognize ageism in all its forms, you will be able to make conscious choices on how you want to experience aging. You have the power and the ability to create your version of elderhood.”
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