Ep 02: Why Do We Tolerate Ageism?

Ageism affects all of us, yet it is one of the least discussed issues of our time. It's also expensive—one study found that ageism resulted in roughly 17 million cases of common health conditions, totaling $63 billion in one year.

In this episode of A Question of Care, Robert Espinoza is joined by Ashton Applewhite, author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and co-founder of the Old School Anti-Ageism Clearinghouse. They dive into the definition of ageism, how it manifests in our culture, and how to combat it.

Robert Espinoza: How did the wealthiest country in the world get to a point where it can't support the health and long-term care needs of more than 54 million older adults? Welcome to A Question of Care, a podcast that explores the many answers to this question through different viewpoints and topics. I'm your host, Robert Espinoza, a national expert and frequent speaker on aging, long-term care, and the workforce.

In this episode, we'll be exploring the topic of ageism. We'll learn what it is, how it manifests in our culture and under the law, and most importantly, discover how each of us can actively play a part in combating it. Here to guide us is none other than Ashton Applewhite, a well-known activist and author on the topic.

Ashton Applewhite: My name is Ashton Applewhite, believe it or not. I am an author and an anti-ageism activist out of Brooklyn, New York.

Robert Espinoza: Many of us are familiar with the terms "racism" and "sexism," as we see them day after day in headlines, news clips, and social media posts. But the word "ageism" is one that we don't hear or see as often, even though it's an issue that deserves equal importance. To help contextualize our conversation, Ashton defined what ageism means for us.

Ashton Applewhite: The dictionary definition is stereotyping and prejudice on the basis of age. The World Health Organization has a wonderful anti-ageism campaign. And just a little footnote I'd like to point out: it's not the "World Old People Organization." If there's one reason to wake up to ageism, it's because it's bad for our health. Take it from the World Health Organization. And they frame it as how we think, feel, and act about age and aging, our emotions, and how we act on them. We create structures and systems that reinforce inequity. So, it's a whole system of beliefs and practices.

Robert Espinoza: To open our conversation, I told Ashton about a time several years ago when I was meeting with various high-level professionals in the aging sector. The facilitator of this meeting asked us to introduce ourselves and, as part of our introductions, to state our ages. People were troubled by the question, and many refused to reveal their ages. I was stunned that these people were leading the discussion on aging in their professions, yet they were scared to share their own ages.

Ashton Applewhite: I wish I could say, "Oh, I'm shocked. I can't believe that happened." You know, when I started thinking about all this, which was about 15 years ago, one of the many things I was astonished by was the fact that older people often are the most ageist of all. Because we have had a lifetime of being barraged by messages about how awful it is to grow old and how tragic it is to encounter any impairment unless you stop and question those messages and look at where they come from. Most of us haven't done that, you know. That's the work I do, asking people to take that tough step. They become part of your identity. And people in aging services are no exception.

I can't tell you how many rooms I have been in full of people, you know, working in what I refer to as "ageland," not an official term. Many of them have more road behind them than ahead, obviously, and are talking about older people, their clients, their patients, their constituents, and even their friends and families as "them," not as "us." And all prejudice relies on othering, right? Seeing a group of people as other than ourselves in some way. Other sports teams, other skin color, other political whatever. The weird thing about ageism is that the "other" is us. It's our own future older selves. It's a form of self-loathing, and people are reluctant to do it because we live in an ageist world that worships youth.

Robert Espinoza: In your book, you talk about how ageism operates at various levels, similar to other forms of oppression. It operates at the individual level, at the interpersonal, institutional, and systemic or structural levels. Can you help us understand some examples of ageism at a few of these levels?

Ashton Applewhite: Well, you just gave a terrific example of internalized ageism, right? That is unexamined bias. And let me be very clear that we are all ageist. We are all, I think, racist as well. We all harbor bias. Kids, we come into the world free of bias, but kids start to adopt attitudes from the culture around them and the people around them very early, right? Attitudes towards race, gender, age, etc. So when someone doesn't want to say how old they are, that is a good indicator that they haven't done the work to see age as just another component of who they are.

In my ideal world, it would not be a negative. It wouldn't be a positive either. We don't deserve, you know, special privileges for being older or clapping for someone who's 103. We all deserve to be respected.

How it manifests in the world, you know, look around you. Ageism is a huge obstacle in the workplace. It's a gendered issue because women are penalized for, god forbid, getting some wrinkles and ceasing to look young in, you know, representation. You know, DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion]. There are a million wonderful conversations happening around diversity and inclusion. If you ask people, and I urge you to do this, "What are your criteria for diversity?" People come through the usual suspects, which are important, especially race, gender, sexual orientation, and perhaps ability. Age is not typically part of that conversation. So next time that happens, say, "What about age?" You know, just put it out there. If everyone in this room is the same, you know, age, how come? You know, there's seldom a good reason.

Robert Espinoza: What are some of the ways that ageism impacts our caregiving sector?

Ashton Applewhite: Well, that is a huge question. I don't want to equate aging and needing care. Most of the care provided to older people is provided for free by other older people, right? And, of course, younger people do a ton of caregiving, too. It's a problem to put a big magic marker around any circle.

There are only two inevitable bad things about aging: you're gonna lose people you've known all your life, and some part of your body will work less well. But we all need help lifelong, right? We all give and receive care practically from birth. Infants don't give a lot, but they give a lot and, you know, a sense of joy and purpose.

So, let's be wary of categories. Physical and cognitive decline are not inevitable, but we will need more help with things. I mean, I've had a shoulder replacement. I don't even try anymore to lift my suitcase into the rack. I can do it, you know, wibbly, but the people behind me in the airplane are at risk. And why should I, right, ask for help? So, when you live in a culture that valorizes "independence," and I put those quotes around it because no one is independent ever. But when you live in a society that celebrates this myth of independence and self-reliance, asking for help is a source of shame.

And if you live in a world that doesn't value its older members, it doesn't value the people who care for older people either, or younger people, right? There are tons of younger people. We don't have paid childcare here in the United States, which is disgusting, and P.S., another form of ageism. Kids don't vote. Kids don't spend money. So, they do not have a good lobby. I mean, I think that's crude.

Another reason that affects the landscape of care is that most care is done by women. There are beautiful exceptions, but it is part of a larger color where women's work is less well paid and less well valued, and within that sector, a tremendous amount of it is done by women of color. We saw this tragically highlighted during the COVID epidemic because so many caregivers were going from facility to facility because they had to work more than one job to pay their bills, were exposed, and died in far greater numbers.

Many of them are immigrants, some of whom are undocumented, so they are experiencing a fourth level of discrimination. So, all these patterns are at play in a heartless, for-profit, capitalist economy. Let's zoom out and look at the pressures squeezing healthcare, in general, to become profitable at the expense of not only the good people who need care but the good people who provide care who often wear both hats.

Robert Espinoza: I want to discuss the relationship between ageism and ableism. In your book, you write, "Americans' can-do ethic can be almost as problematic as the ageism script of learned helplessness. People with disabilities have a term for uplifting pictures of disabled people doing the things the rest of us might not expect them to be doing." They call it "inspiration porn." And the media loves these stories. How are ageism and ableism entwined, and how are they different?

Ashton Applewhite: The shortest answer is to think about the reasons we may be apprehensive about growing older. And let me be very clear that there are real and legitimate reasons. I am not one who says if you eat enough kale or have the right attitude, it's all gonna be great. Money helps. Attitude helps. But luck, privilege, you know, none of us is in control of all the things that affect how we age, which links back to this idea of independence, right? If you get all your ducks in a row, you can be the boss of everything. And you can't, right?

Most of what we fear about aging is how our minds and bodies might change over time. That's not actually about age. Plenty of younger people live with a disability or cognitive impairment as well. Plenty of older people escape severe disability, even incapacity of any kind, if they're lucky, you know, and if they're very healthy. That is not ageism. Now, as I just said, as we age, more things about our body function less well, so we are likely to encounter higher levels of impairment.

It's tricky because a lot of progressive people in Ageland push back very fiercely and legitimately and importantly against the equation, the depiction of older people, you know, on those road signs as hunched over or, you know, "I've fallen, and I can't get up." And those images are ageist and ableist. They are stereotypes, right? We have this image of, like, all these bad things are going to happen. One day, we're going to wake up old and not get out of bed. That's not how it happens. But there are overlaps between age and ability.

Most of the big disability advocates out there are younger, and they talk about "inspiration porn." They talk about "supercrips." That's their word. It's not a community with which I identify, although I'm learning to, depending on my circumstance. I'm happy to talk about that because I am almost completely deaf in one ear. And as mentioned, my shoulder ain't what it used to be. So supercrips are the people providing the inspiration porn.

There is a very powerful equivalent in Ageland, which is the proverbial octogenarian jumping out of airplanes or doing the limbo, performing some, you know, physical feat, which is fine. They inspire people, but they are outliers. And it's important to contextualize them like that.

I don't ever want to jump out of an airplane. You know, I can't do the limbo. I couldn't do the limbo when I was 20, right? So, it's really important to tell the more complicated, messy story of the messy middle and where most of us, by definition, will end up, but that's not a sexy headline. Most of us will muddle through okay, encountering difficulties and learning how to cope. And I'm already yawning by the time I get to the end of the sentence. You know, the story of the, you know, the 53-year-old struck down by early onset Alzheimer's or the 90-year-old who climbs Mount Everest. That's a story, but it is a misleading story. 

Robert Espinoza: Ashton, what are the most common misconceptions about older people? 

Ashton Applewhite: I mean, all prejudices rely on stereotypes, right? The assumption is that all members of a group are alike or share a whole bunch of traits. They're always wrong. But they are especially fact-free and erroneous when it comes to age because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become, right? Every newborn is unique, but every 15-year-old, you know, 15-year-olds have far more in common physically, developmentally, and socially than 45-year-olds who are way more alike than 77-year-olds and so on out, right? So, any generalization about older or younger people can never be true. But we age at different rates, physically, socially, cognitively. So, the older the person, the less their age reveals about them.

So, you know, it's one of the reasons I dislike the term "the elderly" so much. Elderly wouldn't be a bad word in a non-ageist world, but it does smack of frailty, so it reinforces that old equals frail thing. But my real problem with "the elderly" is the "the" in front of it because it implies that very old people belong to some homogenous group when nothing could be further from the truth. 

Robert Espinoza: One of the concepts I love in your book is that you draw the connection between ageism and capitalism. And these are big concepts. I want to focus on two areas. One is the role of ageism in the workplace and how it affects older adults, especially women. The other is in relation to the billions of dollars generated by the anti-aging industry, these skincare products, and even the phrase "anti-aging." Can you help us understand how capitalism creates and reinforces ageism?

Ashton Applewhite: Capitalism requires companies to grow, grow, and grow. And they do that by employing people and ultimately exploiting people, exploiting the planet. Prejudice is fantastic for capitalism. It requires it to grow because all prejudice pits people against each other. As long, for example, if women are arguing about who's a better mom—a stay-at-home mom or someone who works outside the home—they are not joining forces to close the gender wage gap so that women can choose whether or not to stay home. Ageism in the workplace: it's not just an old-person problem. It is why people may look askance at a younger person in a job.

I mean, I was in the hospital overnight for an emergency room visit, and I remember looking around and thinking, "Wow, all these doctors look about 12 and, you know, which was an ageist thought." Honestly, my next thought was, "No, you're old. I'm old. That's why they look so young relative to me," which is real. That is not a factual observation. They know what they're doing, as indeed they did, right? But, ageism in employment. Ageism is any judgment on the basis of age, including you're too young, you know, to know what you're doing around my bedside. And it enables employers to take advantage of workers at both ends of the spectrum by getting rid of older workers on the premise that they're too expensive. They may be paid more, but they bring additional value in terms of experience and additional knowledge, and they may wish to transition gradually out of the workplace, right?

Young people have a hard time getting started because people look at them and say, "What could you know at your age?' A lot. But it benefits capitalism because workers can't pit young against old, ambitious woman against ambitious woman B. It is a system that prioritizes profit over people. I know I'm the millionth person to say that, and I feel really, really sorry for all the good-hearted people trying to deliver care whose hands are tied by for-profit companies trying to pinch pennies.

Robert Espinoza: I want to shift to solutions and what it means to reimagine aging and to challenge ageism. In your book, you write that aging experts are "either invested in a deficit model of aging, in other words, helping the frail and needy age, or its misleading opposite, successful aging." You write, "I hope to set an example of radical aging." What does radical aging mean for you, and how can we incorporate it into our long-term care system?

Ashton Applewhite: Well, I wonder if I would say that today because it seems a little immodest. You know, my radical age may be different from someone else's, and I now have a clearer understanding of how many factors are at play that are out of our control in how we age. Although I hope to enlarge people's vision of what aging involves and the enormous possibilities. So, if that's radical, then I hope to be radical.

The deficit model of aging is the idea that aging equals decline. The successful aging model is the opposite, bringing up another way in which... the role of capitalism. No one makes money off satisfaction. If women looked in the mirror and said, it is starting to get a little saggy here, which I did just the other day in the back of an Uber. I'm not going to spend any money buying, you know, creams or plastic surgeries to "fix that," right? So the problematizing of wrinkles and the appearance of aging, and the pathologizing of age-related physical changes in your body, some of which may indeed involve a disease process, right? I'm not saying you should never take hormones or never do. I'm not a physician. But look hard at who is selling what.     

Great quote from a scholar named Amos Wilson: If you want to understand any problem in America, don't look at who suffers from it–look at who profits from it. The successful model and, giant air quotes, hope you can hear the wind going around the mic, around "successful," because how could you fail at aging, right? If you wake up in the morning, you are aging successfully. Congratulations. We don't fail at childhood. We don't fail at midlife, but right away, you have a goal.

And then you're looking around and seeing: how are the other people doing? And to age successfully in this model. You may not need to jump out of airplanes, but which, P. S., costs a lot of money, as do all those skin creams, right? So, a lot of these "remedies" for these "problems" involved spending money. You age successfully if you are a woman by appearing to not age. And you age successfully as a man by moving like your younger self. A woman has to look like her younger self, and a man has to move like it. That's highly gendered, of course, and there's crossover, thank god, and more crossover all the time.

You know, I'm 70. I started the book when I was 55, the project. And when I turned 70, that's a big number. And I am starting to think about how much time I have left. And how I want to spend it.

I hope to do what I can to forestall disability to stay as active as I can. I have a lot of privilege. I can afford a good doctor. I have a stable housing situation. I have a partner who is, knock on wood, in good health. But, you know, everything could change tomorrow. So, I tell people it is impossible to read my book without feeling better about the years ahead. Partly, that's just because we know most of us think it will all be awful. Just look around you at the older people instead of past us or instead of with fear.

If you're afraid, think about what you're afraid of, right? Look at these fears because once you look at fear, it automatically becomes less fearsome once it has a shape. Once it's tangible and doesn't embody all our darkest imaginings. Right? And when we do that, we open the door to a more nuanced and accurate version of what might lie ahead for us and safeguard our health.

The World Health Organization launched a global campaign to combat ageism in 2021 because they acknowledge that the biggest barrier to living not just longer lives, which await us all, but healthier, spending more of those lives healthier, is ageism. Not clean water, not going to the gym. Ageism, between our ears and in the world around us. Learning all this has made me a more active participant in my aging, less afraid, and more open to learning from how people around me are doing it, which is everybody. Behaviors that I think are great that I want to emulate. Behaviors that I think are not great that I want to avoid, right? Open, you know, come out of your foxhole and look around, 

Robert Espinoza: I spoke with Ashton in April of this year, about a month before the Society for Human Resource Management released a study showing that nearly one in three U.S. workers report feeling unfairly treated because of their age at some point in their careers. And among these workers, 72 percent said it made them feel like quitting their jobs.

Ageism is shaping the political discourse, as well. The widespread use of terms like "gerontocracy" to describe how certain politicians are "too old to be in office," as if age alone dictates the kinds of attributes that are needed for these roles, like relationship-building skills, emotional maturity, policy knowledge, critical thinking capacity, and ethical standards, to name a few. While it's true that cognitive decline comes with aging, that decline does not correspond with any specific age, nor can we assume to know someone's true cognitive skills or their physical and mental health profiles simply by the number of years they have been on this planet. Any doctor will confirm this point.

What I appreciate about the ageism discourse is that it begs us to consider how every single one of us has internalized problematic messages about aging and how we can inadvertently spread them throughout our daily lives, workplaces, and society. All these ideas profoundly harm older people, yet, ironically, that describes most of us, now or not too far in the future.

The next time an ageist idea crosses our minds or comes out of our mouths, we should ask ourselves, "Where did I learn that concept? And will that notion make it easier for me to age with dignity?"

Thank you to my guest, Ashton Applewhite, and to you, our listeners. If you enjoyed this episode of A Question of Care, please share it on your social channels and stay tuned for future episodes. This podcast was produced by me, Robert Espinoza, in partnership with Modry Media. Please make sure to rate and review the podcast wherever you're listening.

This transcript has been lightly edited from the original episodes to improve readability and accessibility—while preserving the guest's authentic voice and conversational style.