Why I’m Not Ray, or How I Came to Write a Manifesto Against Ageism

I began writing about aging because I was afraid of getting old.

Ashton Applewhite
Pandemic Diaries

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I’m not Ray — Stage 1

I started out at what I call I’m not Ray — Stage . For ten years I’ve worked with a guy named Ray. If Ray were fatter and wore red, he could play Santa Claus. He’s proud of being a crank and he’s always muttering about his aches and pains and he’s planning to retire to Florida, and when I found out he and I were the same age, I panicked. I thought, “What if everyone finds out! They’ll think I’m old too.”

That wasn’t just condescending and mean-spirited of me, it was idiotic. My coworkers, Ray included, aren’t stupid. They haven’t had any trouble telling the two of us apart so far, and difficulties are unlikely to crop up. Why, then, was I so flipped out about landing with my coworker on the same side of some hypothetical old/young divide?

I wish I could report that I found the answers in one blinding epiphany. Instead, it’s been a gradual awakening over the past eight years. There have been many glum days at the keyboard, and some sleepless nights dictating brilliant insights into my phone, most of which were a lot less brilliant in the morning light. I had the good fortune to be mentored by Dr. Robert Butler, coiner of the term “ageism,” before his death in 2014. I attended seminars for journalists who cover the “age beat,” inhaled countless books and articles, and started thinking out loud in blog form. I dove into a world that had shaped my unconscious beliefs with one overarching message: it sucks to be old.

I’m Not Ray — Stage 2

I soon realized that my fears about aging were largely baseless. Study after study shows people to be happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. The vast majority of Americans over 65 live independently. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss. The older people get, the less afraid they are of dying. Things started looking so much rosier that I graduated to what I came to call I’m Not Ray — Stage 2: trumpet the fact that Ray and I are the same age, because see how much younger I look! I slid happily to the other end of the spectrum and spent several years chasing the idea that enough spinach, Sudoku, and positive thinking could “put old on hold.”

This approach goes by all kinds of peppy names, like Successful Aging and Productive Aging, and it moves a lot of product aimed at keeping us “ageless.” It sounds comforting and it feels empowering. But a question tugged at my sleeve. Had I merely swapped my don’t-want-to-think-about-it foxhole for a hamster wheel to keep uncomfortable reckonings at bay — and Ray at a distance? Replaced dread with denial, in effect?

Hitting sixty felt fine. I knew the years were bestowing more than they took away. I knew it from my own experience, and my research continued to confirm that I was no exception and that the years ahead had even more to offer. But I had yet to internalize that knowledge, to embed it into my sense of self and my place in the world. I had to acknowledge and start letting go of the prejudices that had been drummed into me since childhood by the media and popular culture. Wrinkles are ugly. Old people are incompetent. It’s sad to be old. Absorbing these fallacies had been effortless. Banishing them is unsettling, and infinitely harder. Present tense because I’m still at it, as I’m reminded on a regular basis.

What was the hardest prejudice to let go of? A prejudice against myself — my own future, older self — as lesser than my younger one. That’s the linchpin of age denial. Whatever form it takes — from a cutesy “Just say I’m over (fill in the number)” to faces frozen by needle and knife — denial creates an artificial, destructive, and unsustainable divide between who we are and who we will become. Concealing or disavowing our age gives the number power over us that it doesn’t deserve. Accepting our age, on the other hand, paves the way to acknowledging it as an accomplishment to be claimed with pride.

I am not saying that aging is easy. We’re all worried about some aspect of getting old, whether it’s running out of money or getting sick or ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. But it never dawns on most of us that the experience of reaching old age — or middle age, or even just aging past youth — can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. And Western consumer culture makes getting older a lot harder than it has to be.

I’m Not Ray — Stage 3

I had to make my way to I’m Not Ray — Stage 3: I’m not Ray. Ray’s going to be happy as a clam in Florida; it’s the old age he wants. I’m making my way to the old age I want, and it won’t look like his. I’m not planning to retire anytime soon, nor am I going to take up pole dancing or marathon running, and I feel just fine about it. All aging is “successful” — not just the sporty version — otherwise you’re dead.

A bunch of pieces fell into place with that realization, but an underlying question remained: Why had my vision of late life been so out of sync with the lived reality? Why had I bought into an unexamined narrative for all these years instead of taking comfort and guidance in the evidence around me? The answer, which grew into an itch that I had to scratch and ultimately a book that I had to write, is ageism: feeling or behaving differently toward a person or a group on the basis of how old we think they are. Ageism isn’t a household word, or a sexy one, but neither was “sexism” until the women’s movement turned it into a howl for equal rights.

As with all “isms,” stereotyping lies at the heart of ageism: the assumption that all members of a group are the same. It’s why people think everyone in a retirement home is the same age — “old” — even though residents can range from those in their fifties to centenarians. (Can you imagine thinking the same way about a group of twenty- to sixty-year-olds?) In fact, the older we get, the more different from one another we become.

It’s not about how we look.

Like racism and sexism, ageism is a socially constructed idea that has changed over time and that serves a social and economic purpose. These “isms” aren’t about how we look. They’re about what people in power want our appearance to mean.

Ageism occurs when those people use their power to oppress or exploit or silence or simply ignore people who are much younger or significantly older.

Now I see ageism everywhere. When old pals cringe at public mention of how long they’ve known each other instead of savoring their shared history. When men and women feel compelled to lie about their age on online dating sites. When people bridle at being kindly offered a seat on the bus. On billboards and television, in hospitals and hotels, over dinner and on the subway. (“At age eighty, who doesn’t need a facelift?” a poster announcing a subway station renovation asks brightly.) In the incessant barrage of messages from every quarter that consigns the no-longer-young to the margins of society. In our mindless absorption of those messages and numb collusion in our own disenfranchisement.

I’ve learned that most of what I thought I knew about the aging process was wrong. That staying in the dark serves powerful commercial and political interests that don’t serve mine. And that seeing clearly is healthier and happier. Yet, despite the twentieth century’s unprecedented longevity boom, age bias has yet to bleep onto the cultural radar — it’s the last socially sanctioned prejudice. Why isn’t age a criterion for diversity? Racist and sexist comments no longer get a pass, but who even blinks when older people are described as incompetent, or “out of it”, or even repulsive?

Suppose we saw these hurtful stereotypes for what they are? Suppose we stepped off the treadmill of age denial and began to see how ageism segregates and diminishes our prospects. Caught our breath, then started challenging the discriminatory structures and erroneous beliefs that attempt to shape our aging. Until then, like racism and sexism, ageism will pit us against each other; it will rob society of an immense accrual of knowledge and experience; and it will poison our futures by framing longer, healthier lives as problems instead of the remarkable achievements and opportunities they represent.

It’s time to swap age shame for age pride.

In the twentieth century, the civil rights and women’s movements woke mainstream America up to entrenched systems of racism and sexism around us. More recently, activists have made astonishing progress against ableism and homophobia and transphobia. It is high time to mobilize against discrimination on the basis of age. If marriage equality is here to stay, why not age equality? If gay pride has gone mainstream, and millions of Americans now proudly identify as disabled, why not age pride? The only reason that idea sounds outlandish is because this is the first time you’ve encountered it. It won’t be the last. Longevity is here to stay. Everyone — not just “aging boomers” and “aging celebrities” — wakes up a day older. Dismantling ageism will benefit us all.

This is an excerpt from the introduction to Ashton Applewhite’s new book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. You can read about it here, and order it here.

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