Double-edged ageism

It is the hour of the pearl – the interval between day and night when time stops and examines itself.

                                                                                                        John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

I've written here more than once about my encounters with ageism. Anyone who's old enough (which I happily am) and vigilant to the assorted forms of anti-old bias in our culture can likely identify daily moments when you're reminded that your age matters, and not in a good way. So the other day, when I heard a young man, a college student, use the word "ageism," I thought at first that he was especially astute and was talking about my experience. But he wasn’t. He was talking about his. He was talking about our cultural bias against youth, especially adolescence. His comment reminded me that ageism cuts two ways, trims off both ends of our lifespan. We dismiss and diminish the lives both of youth and of old people. Only that prime-time period between about 25 and about 55 (or is it 45?) counts as actual Life. All the years before that are just preparation for the age of importance, just time spent in the wings, practicing your lines. All the years after that are just slowing down, letting go, telling tired stories, shuffling off stage.

His remark got me thinking about the connection between these two kids of ageism, the one I've written about before and the one I've ignored until now—in this blog, anyhow. I actually know both kinds of bias well—the bias against old age because I now encounter it regularly, and the one against youth because I taught about it for a few decades. (I also used to face it, though that’s so far in the dim past that I sort of dismiss it as unimportant now. Not uncommon, I think. More about that in a minute.) 

In my own "prime-time years," I was teaching at Metro, which, in my early days, was full of adult students. So my goal was to get these grown-up folks to recall their own adolescence and to balance the standard, largely negative cultural view of adolescents with a more benevolent perspective—one that recognizes what adolescents are up against and that holds a degree of empathy and a great deal of respect for kids. To get them to recall their own experience of this frightening, clunky process of trying to figure out how to do life—which is no small task, especially when you have to do it with virtually no guidelines about how to get from childhood to adulthood. 

One of my perennial rants in those days pointed to how ageist our society is in our view of teens. We joke about how much easier it would be to freeze-dry them for a decade. We roll our eyes and sneer at their overblown performances when they're with their peers. We sigh or moan when they arrive en masse at the restaurant or park or shopping mall where we're trying to have a "normal" day. We occasionally invite their participation in “our” world ... and then dismiss their ideas as naïve, disregard their questions, and trivialize their attempts to engage. I used to read my classes a piece written by an 18-year-old describing his sense of his place in the world. It said, roughly, "There is nothing I can do that couldn't be done just as well by a million other people—older people, younger people, smarter people, dumber people. There's nothing I can do that anyone cares about." That's a pretty empty place to be, a pretty invisible, ignored, diminished place. He was describing the experience of someone who has been devalued so much by others that he believes it.

So back to the college student I mentioned earlier: Once I got what he meant by “ageism,” I understood what he was talking about. I could imagine how wonderfully validating it must have felt when he attended a conference where he experienced none of this ageism. What really caught my attention, though, was that he was talking about Creating Change, the very conference where I recently encountered (and wrote here about) ageism of another sort—anti-old rather than anti-youth ageism.

That bit of irony got me thinking about how these two forms of ageism differ—or not. A few things came to mind.

Anti-young ageism	Anti-old ageism	... and my cranky comments
With time, they'll be tomorrow’s leaders	They did so much; we all stand on their shoulders	How about valuing who we are right now
There, there. You’ll understand when you're older	Here, honey. Let me do that for you.	Being patronized feels bad at any age
Minimum wage because you’re too young for a real job	Minimum wage because you’re too old for a real job	The rich get richer. Besides, everyone will say how “cute” we are in that little striped hat or bright blue vest.
Your opinions don’t count because you don’t have any experience	Your opinions don’t count because your experience is out of date	Now there's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
You're too old to act that way!	You're too old to act that way!	Obviously, there is a "right" age to act "that way" ... and it's not young or old.
How would you know? You've never been there.	How would you know? You were there so long ago.	Unless you're in the prime-time years, you don't know squat.
She's great—so much older than her years.	He's great—so much younger than his years	If you're young or old, age-appropriate behavior is not worthy of approval.
I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	I'm a better judge of what's best for you than you are.	No comment.
But you look so much older!	But you look so much younger!	Why would anyone say this unless being/looking older (if you're young) or younger (if you're old) would be an improvement over who you actually are.
Student discounts	Senior discounts	Nice financially, but they do not make up for the dismissal of our lives or pay off the debt of years.

I could keep going, but this is enough to point out the core of ageism that joins my experiences with this young man's. The message is pretty clear: There's a narrow span of favored years that count as genuine living. And unless you're in those privileged years, you'll be reminded regularly that you're not. Which means you are, in some fundamental way, inferior. For youth, the only way out is to grow up and join the golden people. For old folks, there is no path back to that noble status.

Now, the interesting thing about this particular form of bias is that we all—all of us, at least, who survive adolescence and live to old age—have been or will be in every single one of these groups. So it's a particularly complicated type of bias. Everyone who reaches adulthood knows on a personal level what it's like to be the target of anti-youth ageism. Yet virtually every one of us learned youth-ageism well enough that, consciously or not, we direct the same bias toward the youth who come along behind us. We may try to justify it by making them different from us, less worthy ("When I was a child, I would never have ..."). But our parents' generation said such things about us, too, and it's as ageist now as it was then. And then, even as we look back with disapproval at the younger people behind us, we also look forward with equal disapproval (or, perhaps worse, pity) at the generations ahead of us. Even though we all stood in the place of the teens, and stand—or will stand, perhaps sooner than we liked to admit—in the place of old people.

How do we do this? What sort of denial makes young and old people worthy of such misunderstanding and such poor treatment when they were and/or will be us? On one level, the answer seems simple. It's unintentional, non-conscious. And that's likely true, at least most of the time. So, now we get to make it conscious and work on changing it, right? But it's not as simple as that, it seems. We've all been so totally immersed in this generational script that we live it out without particularly thinking about it. We deny our experiences as youth because we have moved beyond that—in fact, we elevate our own worthiness by accepting the idea that the earlier years were useless, except as preparation. And from the position of the privileged years, it's easy to assume that old age is miserable because everything that seems to have value in the culture belongs to these middle, these glory years—physical beauty (by our cultural standards), productivity (ditto), a young but mature body and the freedom to use it as we see fit, economic resources (at least for some of us), and the knowledge that we are "it" in this culture. So we treat folks in the groups outside our magic circle as unworthy.

Of course, this is nonsense. Youth lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Their lives matter today, not just in the future. Constructing who they are and who they will be is not trivial work. Old people lead real, complex and interesting lives now. Whether or not they "contribute" in the narrow way we may typically evaluate contribution, they are full human beings: they love, fear, hope, give, need, share, long, sing, wonder, hurt.

Given that we all get to occupy all these positions—unless, that is, we slide off the people mover prematurely—it seems like it might prove enlightening for any of us to slip into the shoes of our young selves at 20 and our old selves at 80. From this personal perspective, we might be able to spot the many forms of ageism that we all practice every day—practices we would hate having aimed at us.

To be honest, I've never before given much thought to the connections between old-ageism and youth- ageism. But now that I have, I think I'll start my personal consciousness-raising process by regularly clarifying whose experience I'm talking about when I say "ageism." I've been using it as if it applied only to me. Doing that ignores the fact that ageism affects young people too. The man who was so delighted at the absence of anti-youth ageism at Creating Change deserves his joy over that as much as I would if I experienced an absence of old-ageism.

This also means that my earlier critiques of Creating Change as failing to address ageism need to be qualified. The conference hasn't done enough to address old-ageism. It has worked really hard—and apparently successfully—on youth-ageism. And the resultant expansiveness and energy of youth involvement is one of my favorite parts of Creating Change. I've said that before, but I missed what the delighted presence of youth said about ageism in this broader sense.

So, thanks to this man's unintended challenge, I leave this unexpected exploration of the meaning of ageism with a much enriched understanding. 

It's a nice example of the absurdity of dismissing the experience of anyone, any age.