81. Pro-Aging: Why the Best is Yet to Come with Ashton Applewhite.

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Welcome back to We Can Do Hard Things.

Once again, we are delighted and baffled that you keep returning to listen to us talk.

It's just, it's just a huge surprise and great joy of our life.

And another

huge joy of our life

is aging.

We at We Can Do Hard Things are pro-aging.

We are excited about aging.

We are for it.

As we discussed on the last podcast, the alternative to aging is death.

And also, also,

there's just so much power and beauty to be found in aging itself.

Aging equals best case scenario.

Okay?

So

today we are going to celebrate aging because we would like to continue doing it.

Okay.

And so what I want to start with is this very cool thing, which is that a lot of people ask us about the paintings behind us

as we sit on this couch speaking to you on this podcast.

If you want to see the paintings, you can go to our Instagram and check them out.

They're absolutely beautiful.

And so, what I want to tell you about these paintings

is that

the woman who painted them, her name is Mary Ann Flynn Faus.

And she painted them when she was 80 years old.

She is now 86 years old.

She is unflippin' believable.

She says of her work, this was her quote when she was 80,

I'm a fan of doing something new.

Mentally, I'm still very modern.

So the art that inspires us each day in our office and you, as those of you who watch the podcast on our Instagram feed,

is made by an 80-year-old badass.

So great.

And so the theme of this podcast is one thing that I read in our guest today's book,

What 88-year-old folk artist Marcia Muth said.

You are never too old and it is never too late.

I feel that.

Yes.

It's good.

So to discuss all of this beautiful, this beautiful situation we have, which is getting older, which is for the lucky ones, we have today

Ashton Applewhite, who is the author of This Chair Rocks, a manifesto against ageism.

Ashton Applewhite is a leading spokesperson for the emerging movement to raise awareness of ageism and to dismantle it.

A co-founder of the old school anti-ageism clearinghouse, she has been recognized by the New York Times, the New Yorker, National Public Radio, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism.

Ashton blogs at This Chair Rocks is the voice of Yo, is this ageist?

And has spoken on the TED main stage and at the United Nations.

Welcome, Ashton.

Yay!

Thank you.

Great to be here.

Ashton, on this podcast, we believe that often the thing that screws us up the most is the picture in our head of how things are supposed to be.

And it seems that in addition to individual and structural ageism, discrimination, it's the picture in our head of what aging is that seems to be screwing a lot of us up.

And so we are thrilled that you are here to tell us that that picture of aging in our head is wrong.

So can you share with us, what do we get wrong?

What are some of the predominant myths and stereotypes about aging that are just simply not true?

I'm happy to.

I wouldn't say that anyone's attitude is wrong because, of course, there's no binaries and it depends on what your fears are and what your circumstances are, of course.

I would say, well, the most annoying stereotype about aging is the mother of all stereotypes, which means grouping, thinking of a group as the same.

All members of a group are the same.

We grow more different from each other as we age.

Every newborn is unique.

Every 17-year-old is different, but they are way more alike developmentally, socially, cognitively than 37-year-olds who are way more alike than 67-year-olds, and so on out.

All stereotypes are wrong and misinformed, but the idea that old people are alike is particularly misinformed.

I would say

another really common misconception is that older people are incompetent.

that we are not interested in new things, that we are not creative, as you pointed out about the artist who made those beautiful paintings.

My guess is she was creative at four, she was creative at 40, and she's going to be creative at 90.

We don't like turn into some weird thing.

We just become more sort of distilled versions of ourselves.

It's why I chose as the epigraph to my book, a quote by the wonderful writer Anne Lamotte, which is that we contain all the ages we have ever been.

And so I would say, back to your question, we have, because we are bombarded, all of us, we all have these ideas inside us, no judgment, but we are bombarded by negative messages about age and aging from childhood on, starting with children's books and Disney movies.

And if we don't stop to question them, they become part of our identity.

And there are real losses.

They're genuine things to worry about.

I'm not a Pollyanna, but we only hear.

the negative side of the story.

So I would say that it's important to acknowledge the things that we gain and the ways that aging enriches our lives in addition to some of the fears and the losses, which likewise are different for each of us.

And in your book, you talk about, you know, we all think we're going to end up in a nursing home, but what are the numbers for that?

Thank you for asking me that question.

I love that.

When I gave my TED talk

four years ago, four years ago, I think, the percentage of Americans over 65 in nursing homes, not all senior residences, I mean, I would have pegged it starting out at 20 or 30 percent, was 4 percent.

Since then, it has dropped to 2.5 percent.

Wow, it continues to decline, right?

It's not that our fears aren't real, it's that they are so out of proportion to the reality, and that's a perfect example.

And dementia, right?

We all think we're going to lose our cognitive abilities.

Uh-oh, you stammered there.

That's a very bad sign.

That's what happens.

We think, oh, crap, I can't find my keys, then I'm not going to know my dog you know, by Tuesday.

It's not the case.

10% of the population ends up with Alzheimer's.

That's according to the Alzheimer's Association.

It's a terrible disease.

That's a big number.

But most of them are in their late 80s and 90s, right?

Age is the biggest risk factor.

What we don't talk about, though, is that 20% of the population escapes cognitive decline entirely.

We all know some of those really sharp 90-year-olds, right?

And that most of us will lose some processing speed, some of, you know, the name of the movie you saw with what's her name, but that is as bad as it gets.

For the vast, vast, vast majority of us, you can't find your keys.

Go find them in the morning.

If you can't remember what keys are for,

you know, or some, that's a problem.

But guess what?

Kids forget things too

all the time.

And really interestingly, our attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function.

And my favorite study, and this is blue chip science done by Becca Levy at Yale University, shows that people with

it's often framed as positive attitudes towards aging, which I don't like because it sounds like happy think.

Let's ignore the scary shit.

People with fact rather than fear-based attitudes towards aging are less likely to get Alzheimer's, even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease.

Whoa.

That blew my mind.

I just want everyone, let us stop and just really take that in.

Ageism is not just wrong because you're treating older people in a discriminatory way.

You are actually, by adopting these negative views of aging, you are

literally hurting yourself.

You are hastening bad outcomes for yourself by thinking badly about aging.

You are making yourself more vulnerable to what you fear.

Ageism absolutely harms our health, in addition to harming our sense of self,

our sense of ourselves as competent, as attractive, as employable, as

socially and economically valuable, and on and on and on.

And ageism is any judgment on the basis of age, including you're too young.

And younger people encounter a lot of it, although less than older people, because we live in such a youth-obsessed society.

So, truly, it casts a shadow across our entire lives.

Yeah.

And it's almost like the ageism of older people, I think, contributes to the ageism of younger people because when people dismiss older people, we get pissed off.

And then we want to just put down the younger people.

It's like, it's like an ageism, I'm rubber your glue situation.

Right.

It's like, okay, boomers versus OMG millennials.

Right.

And we're just not pulling it out.

Yeah.

In my rainbow pony unicorn universe,

we would not use generational labels at all.

They have no scientific basis.

The whole concept of generational warfare was invented by right-wing think tanks in the 1970s.

I write about all this on my blog, which is free, searchable by topic.

So you can look up the research or a lot of it's in my book.

Was everything terrible created by right-wing think in the age.

Also, in fairness, journalists love generational labels and marketers love generational labels, but they have no scientific basis.

They obviously foster stereotyping as though everyone born between your X and your Y shares the same set of characteristics when class by far and gender and race and geography have much, much, much more of an effect on shaping our trajectories through life.

But it's irresistible, like clickbait, like six annoying things, you know, millennials do.

And it's really hard not to click on it.

And then you're right away in an us versus them mindset that is really counterproductive and divisive and destructive and bad.

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I want to go back to the ideas that we have that are not right.

Because if we want to change those ideas for many reasons to free ourselves from

and to free others from these stereotypes, it's important to actually change our ideas in our head.

So I think a lot of us think

as we get older, we will become less happy because of all of these other.

factors.

So can you talk to us as another wrong idea we have in our head about the U curve of happiness?

You bet.

I mean, I didn't know any of this 15 years ago when I started out researching.

And one of the things I encountered really early on was something that's called the U-curve of happiness, U-bend, if you're British,

which shows that people are happiest in the beginnings and the ends of their lives.

And I cannot tell you how skeptical I was.

I thought they must have cornered two 80-year-olds and given them a cookie and said, how are you doing?

Then I thought, well, it must be true if you're healthy or if you're wealthy.

And this data shows obtains across race, across class, everywhere in the world.

And it is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain, the healthy brain, because we get better at not sweating the small stuff and having a longer view.

It relates, they did a, the Stanford Longevity Center did a study.

They started it right before the pandemic, coincidentally.

So they had the, you know, the parameters in place.

And they learned that older people, despite being more isolated and obviously at greater risk of dying from COVID, were more resilient simply because they had lived through more stuff and it was easier to imagine getting through it.

Wow.

So interesting.

I was looking at that study too, because

I saw it referenced in some of your work.

And it was interesting the way they described it as, you know, we talk about happiness kind of a shorthand, but the researchers were using the word savoring, like almost able to,

not that there's just happy joy all the time, but this

ability to kind of savor the moments.

And it's as if

we would think the closer we get theoretically to death, although, you know, it could be tomorrow for any of us, but the closer we get that we would be more afraid of death.

But actually, that is the opposite as well, right?

It's kind of counterintuitive.

I mean, I love the way you put this because I remember thinking heading into this, like, it's all going to suck.

And one of the things that's going to be the most awful, I had this mental image of the

shadow of the grim reaper, you know, stretching across the sad iron bedstead in which the old person cowered.

And

the

anxiety about dying grows less as we get older.

Older people don't want to die.

They especially don't want to die in pain, but they don't think about it a lot.

And as you figured out, I think are intuited, it relates to that business of living in the present.

Kids live in the present because they don't have the experience or cognitive

ability to do anything else.

Older people live in the present as a conscious choice, right?

We are more careful about how we spend our time, who we want to spend it with, and are just better at living in the moment.

Just not, you don't have to be a Buddhist or a billionaire.

It's a, again, it's just a function of the way it happens for most of us.

There are exceptions.

My mother-in-law used to say, she just frankly didn't believe me.

You know, and I would say to her husband, how's it going?

He said, I'm happy.

And she was not so happy.

She was not so good at living in the moment.

There are always exceptions, but this is how it pans out for the vast majority of people on earth.

It's comforting.

It's so comforting.

Getting older is complicated.

I was thinking about the title of your podcast, We Can Do Hard Things, and how it sort of bumped into one of my least favorite sayings, which is old age isn't for sissies.

Well,

we need to be misogynistic, homophobic, and ageist all in one sentence.

You know, we all get older unless we die, as you pointed out.

Although

that phrase, like old age beats the alternative.

I used to think that and then I wait, thought, wait, oh, what that really means is the only thing worse than being old is being dead.

Right?

Fair point.

Fair point.

But we all get older, right?

It's not, it is, it is a hard thing, but it is a universal thing.

And the ways in which we adapt are available to most of us.

There are things that help, but they're not necessarily the obvious thing.

For example, the most important component of aging well is not health, which is what I would surely have guessed.

And then I thought, well, money, obviously.

It's having a solid social network.

Oh my God, it just keeps coming back to this for God's sakes.

Where women have an advantage, and that doesn't have to do with how wealthy you are, right?

Or even how healthy you are.

It's how you are in the world, which is, of course, the subject of your podcast.

Oh, so talk to me about that because that hit us when we were discussing your work.

That the two predictors of how you will deal with aging are how you feel about aging

and your social network,

not your genes, not your whatever.

So talk to us about that.

Who are these magical people?

What type of social network do they have that makes them age

whatever?

What do you even say?

Well, better?

How do you age good?

I say well.

Or, yeah, you know, I try and, you know, fudge that one because one person's old age is different.

You know, if you're an athlete,

I'm looking at you, Abby.

Right.

You know, the loss of physical function is of or a specific kind.

You know, you may still have great sex, but not be able to run fast or whatever it happens to be.

Phew, she nailed us.

She nailed us.

For couch potatoes like me, you know, the fact that I can't kick a soccer ball anymore is not a loss.

But for someone else, it is.

Again, so it's totally individual.

And the kind of, you know, I feel like you know the answer to your question better than I do because it is really genuinely unique to each of us.

Some people want to be around kids.

Other people don't want to.

Some people want to be out in nature.

Other people don't care.

We may not be able to do all the things we used to do in the same way that we did them when we were young, but we can do versions of them if they're important to us.

It's almost like the way that I feel about what you just said is all of us have our specific personal identities, what makes us us.

Like, for instance, you speak to like my athleticism.

It's interesting because I feel like the things that make us us, as we get older, if those things go away, then who are, who are we inside, right?

So this last year, I've been dedicating myself to learn how to physically

work out that is in a way that is less suffering so that I don't, and I'm not holding on to the identity of suffering as a form of my own personal sense of who I am, because I do think that as I get older and I start losing some of these capacities, whether it's being able to run, I mean, I traveled so many miles on my legs, right?

Like having replacements and all of the things, like I have to actually prepare myself for whatever kind of future in terms of the life that I've lived and also the person that I think that I am and the identities that I carry with me.

So it's, it's really interesting.

I think for athletes and dancers, and there are probably other categories that don't occur to me, the task is the hardest.

There are only two inevitable bad things about getting older.

People you've known all your life are going to die and some part of your body is going to fall apart.

So for people whose identity is bound up in physical accomplishment, that is a really tough task.

For people like me who sit and type all the time, that's less of a task.

I might be more invested in not having wrinkles, right?

Or some other component.

There's no component of our identity that aging doesn't potentially affect, but aging is living, right?

It's how we move through life.

But I salute you for being proactive and seeing that there will be advantages to training in a different way and relating to your body in a different way.

The losses are real, but there are also gains in what you learn about your body, how your body works.

And

those will pay off for the rest of your life.

Ashton, you mentioned just now

that the things that are inevitable are those two things will change.

And then also, that we will lose people.

People will die who we love.

That we've known all our life.

We've known all our life.

So make younger friends.

Yes.

For real.

And that also speaks to something you mentioned about pointing fingers at boomers and millennials.

If we have more younger friends, we remember how hard it is to be young.

Oh, yes.

It's easy to forget that, especially in a culture that bombards you with messages that because you're getting old, you're becoming, you know, hideous and useless, right?

And I think especially for women, where we have the double whammy of ageism and sexism that's so linked to being punished if we appear to visibly age, with younger women around older women like me, like us, who really enjoy being the age we are and find power and confidence in it, they'd be less afraid.

of getting older and wake up earlier to how much of our youth we squander on worrying about it.

Wow.

I love that idea that if we hang out with people, because

we segregate ourselves unbelievably, especially in this.

It's a gerryage-segregated society.

It's not, don't, you know, we all do.

Yeah, it's like we are committed to only hanging out with people who know as little as we do.

Right.

And that's it.

Like nobody younger, nobody older.

But if we did, we would see each other.

I always wonder if that's why I might have some more joy about getting older because so many people write to me about their lives that I read letters from 20 and 30 year olds constantly.

So I'm remembering every day how freaking hard it is.

It is.

And how I wouldn't go back there for anything.

One of the reasons it's hard is because of this culturally induced sort of brainwashing about how awful it's going to be.

Right.

Which has no basis.

Do you know any cultures who are doing it right?

Because we were talking about intergenerational living and how that is such a uncommon thing in American culture.

But in fact, that

helps people in many ways.

Yeah, I mean,

contact with people of different ages, it's pretty hard.

It's pretty hard to hang on to any kind of stereotype if you're mixing it up with people who embody that stereotype, who guess what, are all different from each other.

And some are jerks and some are great, you know, older people.

I mean, there are lots of older people that don't seem to have learned a thing along the way.

I bet you've learned, you know, almost as much from the 20-somethings you deal with as the older side.

I don't think wisdom and aging are coupled.

But as far as doing it right, it's less a question of cultures.

There are cultures that...

especially everyone looks sort of wistfully eastward when they ask me that question as though it was you know all great um in countries where they were or i should say cultures where there is confucianism ancestor worship and there those are or um indigenous cultures all around the world in the us US as well where older people are held up and even revered.

I will say though that

the world I want to live in doesn't hold older people as more valuable or less valuable.

Cultures like the early United States was a gerontocracy.

Older people had all the power, older white men, shocker.

And

this was a world in which it was not great to be young you had to wait for your for your older brothers to die off if you wanted to inherit that anything you know so i want a world of age equity where neither older nor younger people have inherent better more value than the other and we can support people across the lifespan living in mixed age communities is absolutely a wonderful thing we see it more more than in different specific cultures.

We see it in communities, smaller villages, places where the older people aren't, you know, shunted away or hidden, and people remain in community.

So in order to do that, we'd have to get rid of ageism.

And I want to talk about what it really is.

You've said, like racism and sexism, ageism is not about how we look.

It's about what people in power want our appearance to mean.

Oof.

Can you just talk to us about that?

Kind of an oof-worthy

idea.

All prejudice operates to pit people against each other, every form, whether it's sort of the Marx's example of factory workers from different countries.

If they're fighting, then factory owners can continue to exploit them.

Same with older workers and younger workers, you know, arguing about who's better.

Then employers can, you know, fire the old people who have higher salaries and hire younger people who then PS typically, you know, quit.

And so there's much higher turnover, which then old people say, oh, those disloyal millennials, well, guess what?

When we were that age, we did the same thing.

It has nothing to do with when you were born.

It has to do with the age you are.

But that's an example of really unhelpful generational finger pointing.

So all prejudice, the gender wage gap persists because it's profitable.

Hello, capitalism.

And as long as women are arguing about who's a better mom, if you're in the paid workforce or you stay home, we're not joining forces to close the gender wage gap so women can choose whether or not to stay home.

And old versus young is just another contrived divide to keep us squabbling and divided so that we don't join forces against the status quo.

Amen.

And so it's political.

Everything you just said, it's political, but it's also and it's also completely rooted in capitalism because

aging contentedly does not sell, right?

Unless it's like a pillow company or something.

You can't make money off satisfaction.

No, that's right.

They have to keep us on this hamster wheel of being scared to death of aging.

So we will buy their shit that will help us somehow not age.

That's why they're making you buy.

Yes.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Anti-aging, right?

I read that it's

by 2030, it's going to be a $400 billion industry worldwide.

And it's basically rooted in self-loathing.

We all have those moments.

I mean, I look in the mirror and I, sometimes it is like, what the hell happened?

But then I think about what did happen.

It is a real challenge to question that narrative in a society where every magazine, every billboard reinforces this incredibly artificial, expensive, elitist,

white, thin, blonde.

standard of so-called beauty.

And, you know, and pushing back against it is the work of a lifetime.

Yeah.

And it can only be engaged in with others.

But when you start to see the messages and where they come from, and then step back again in referencing your really good question to what purpose they serve, right?

To make us spend money, to make us divide it, to make us walk in the room and think, you know, well, she's had work done, or I wonder how old she is, all that stuff, which we all do.

No judgment, but it's not healthy.

It doesn't serve our own interests collectively or individually.

If you think about it for the purpose of this discussion, which is, and I'm always aware because the minute we start talking about women's appearance, we are reinforcing the idea that it's more important than it should be.

But in this context, if you think if the goal, a lot of women talk about becoming invisible, you know, if the goal is to be perceived as sexually attractive, look at your friends who are sexually active.

They're not the thinnest.

They're not the prettiest.

They're not the youngest.

They're some of the women who listen to this podcast to what you say about doing the work on yourself to understand and reach for what is genuinely good for you, right?

And to beat back this idea of a norm.

So what we learn from all those things, like what we learn from raising awareness of our own internalized racism or homophobia, those processes are all analogous.

If you're doing work on any of those fronts, they will help

you think more holistically and realistically about getting older too.

It's just like that moment of self-hatred and then questioning it.

I have that all the time.

And that's what any prejudice is or ism is, right?

It's like the moment of like fear or dislike or you are different than me

or I don't like you.

It's that's your conditioning.

Fear of other or self is never our truest self.

That's our conditioning.

So learned, yeah.

Instead of going with that that knee-jerk reaction, it's questioning it.

And with ageism, it's often in ourselves.

Like I was looking in a mirror the other day and was just noticing that my neck was looking a little bit different and then was thinking about the Nora Efron, like, I feel bad about my neck book, which made me remember Nora Efron and made me very happy.

But it's just that.

It was that moment of like, oh, wait.

Who taught me that my neck's not supposed to look like this?

And then who, who,

who benefits if i believe that that's right exactly there's a great quote by amos wilson i believe his name is um he's a professor um and he says if you want to understand any problem in america don't look at who suffers from it look at who profits from it yes there we go yeah wherever there is suffering there is profit right up the river that's exactly always true The hardest part is to look at your own attitudes, in this case, towards age and aging, because no one wants to acknowledge that they're biased it's uncomfortable we're all biased but the cool thing is and this is what consciousness raising did for women in the 70s is that once you come together and share your experiences you realize like oh it's not me it's not that my tits are too small or my husband is a particularly jerky or my boss is particularly awful these are widely shared social and political experiences that we can come together and do something about

and that is is really liberating because then you start to see the forces, you see it in the culture.

And so it's getting past that initial moment of looking at your own brainwashing and collusion.

I know that's a complicated idea and I don't want to blame people for their own, you know, hardships, but we do have to look at that to get started.

And then you're off and running.

Then you're off and running that sister's love language you just said.

That's the whole point of this podcast, by the way, Ashton, is just the idea that when women tell their stories to each other, they start to learn that everything is political and everything is capitalism.

And they start to learn, oh, it's not me, it's them.

We could have named the podcast that.

It's not you, it's them.

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Also, it feels like one of the last forms of discrimination where we

unabashedly engage in self-policing and policing of others.

You know, we can check ourselves now when we're policing people's gender.

We've become an awareness, but we still consume these lists of what not to wear over 30 or what level of sexiness or boldness is allowed from people who are 40 and 50 and 60 around us.

I will catch myself putting on a shirt if it's too high.

And I'm like, I'm 42.

42 year olds wear this shirt?

Like, what is that?

We're doing the work

of the system on ourselves by even asking that question.

That's a crazy ass question to ask.

There's no shirt 42 year olds wear.

That's right.

There's no such thing as age appropriate except for children.

Period.

And speaking of children, I had this wild situation.

which I'm so interested what you think about this because it was, it just came to me yesterday.

I was in the park with my daughter my then five-year-old daughter and she walked up to a mom in the park and she says hi I'm Alice I'm five this is Amanda she's 42 and she said what's your name and how old are you

and the lady clearly did not want anything to do with this question and so we got through this awkward moment and we were walking away from the park and it was really upsetting to me because it felt like

it felt like what a mom was supposed to do in that situation was tell their daughter it's not polite to ask people's age.

But I couldn't do it because it was, it felt like introducing a poison to her that, that was not in her mind.

That the idea that there is shame

around having lived more years and therefore we don't ask people how old they are.

Yeah.

Why do you think it was at the top of her mind?

I think she just, I think it's how she identifies herself.

She, she's trying to be friendly.

It's what she knows to say about herself.

I think it's now because I'm five.

Adults don't know how to talk to kids.

I was, I was an elementary school teacher, and adults don't know what the hell to say to children.

It's like little aliens have walked up to them.

Adults lose their mind and they only know two things.

They know how old are you and what do you want to be when you grow up?

Yes, right, right.

That's

the same idea.

I mean, I have a friend who says if you're going to ask a kid how old they are, that's fine, but you should say how old you are too, which I really like that idea, right just put it out there as a neutral identifier i mean all this stuff is is it's so interesting and so unexamined you know so the more we talk about it the more and i guarantee the deeper you go the more interesting it is how do you answer the question how old are you is not so simple because i think it's important to say how old we are great workaround is to say i was born in 1952 which confuses the person who asked the question if they can't do math like me and it so it short circuits the fixed meanings that we all attach to a number the minute we have it.

And it puts the

proper thing forward, which is, oh, she's been around for a while.

She must have seen stuff and done stuff.

Oh, that's so cool.

I'm just going around now.

I've been born in 1980.

Plus, you can remember it.

I am.

On the other hand, we also want to push back and say, well, why do you want to know?

You know, I'll tell you.

This is not exactly cocktail party, you know, casual chit-chat, but I'm happy to tell you if you tell me what changes in your mind when you have the number, or if you'll think about why you want to know.

It's a little like asking, like, you know, white people typically saying, Oh, where are you from?

Which is not a question we, you know, typically ask of a white person, right?

So, I want a world in which age is both out there and yet reduced in value because it says so little about a person.

In fact, it says a lot less about what you have in common, what you're interested in than we think it does.

Because all that, you know, generational labeling, and the older the person is, the less it reveals about them.

That starts with ageism of all of us saying to your daughter over and over again, how old are you?

Because all she's doing is parroting back to the culture, what the culture has taught her is important about human beings.

Because

she really is more

childhood is different because

we've changed so much in every year and because what is appropriate for an eight-year-old is not appropriate for a four-year-old.

What's appropriate for a 38-year-old is appropriate for a 34-year-old.

So child, it's a little problematic to extrapolate from childhood out, but I encourage you to do so from any stage in adulthood to another stage in adulthood because the frames of reference stop.

They're just, they're obsolete.

They box us in.

They're irrelevant.

Like those dumb marketing checklists that say what, you know, products, I think Stitch Fix had something that like had these incredibly small age categories, what, you know, 24 to 26 year olds were wearing and 26.

And then at Stitch Fix, I believe, I'm not sure it was Stitch Fix, it was age 40 and up.

Marketing checklists routinely end at 65, as though everyone over 65 does the same stuff.

It's like

in fact, diversity increases.

Yeah.

They might as well have said 40 or even more irrelevant.

Yeah.

But I just want to circle back to what you said, sister.

The thing about Alice, I just think is so important because

those questions we ask children, I think, are relevatory of both those questions of the ageism in our country.

Because we say to children, how old are you?

And what are you going to be when you grow up?

We tell them by those questions that what matters is your age and also what you're going to be between the time you're 25 and 50.

Your identity, all we care about is what you're going to be when you grow up, is your career, right?

And we tell kids that's all that matters about them.

It's so freaking weird.

And then we don't even know what we want to be in five years, but we want, we ask these little five-year-olds, the important thing about you is your career.

Tell me, five-year-old, what your career is going to be.

And believe me, at 50 or at 65, or in my case, I'm about to turn 70.

I had never, never did know what I was going to be when I grew up.

But, you know, the idea of things ending or, you know, there being any fixed transition attached to a chronological age

becomes increasingly less valid and accurate over time.

I would think that I was just going to interrupt you.

And I want to actually clarify.

That's why I just stopped you and grabbed your hand.

I know, but I want to clarify if what I was about to do is Aegis, because I think that we do this a lot.

I think that you said you're coming up on 70 and I was like, oh my gosh, over here, because to me, you don't look 70.

I think what I was just doing was so fucking ageist.

I apologize.

And also like,

how, why do we do that?

Why is that so important to me?

Why was it important to me to let you know how young you look?

So

here we are back to women's appearances, but let's talk about it.

Absolutely.

You certainly don't owe me an apology, but on the other hand, I have worked hard to learn not to accept that as a compliment, because if I do accept it, it's at the expense of everyone else who's also 70 and looks 70.

We all look the age we are, just in different ways, but they aren't lucky enough to look as whatever you see that you like as I do, right?

So it's an incredibly, you know, common thing to do.

It is the one thing I've, the one good snappy answer I've come up with is when someone says you don't look your age, so you don't look your age either, you know?

Yeah.

Thank you for let that sit.

Why the reason it comes across as a compliment and why it is well-meaning on your part, which of course does not let you off the hook, as you already know,

is because we live in a society that worships youth.

Worships youth.

It's like when somebody says you're so thin.

Are you supposed to say thank you?

If I say thank you, that means I'm accepting that thinness is a goal or that we're worshiping thinness.

And also

there's a whole thing there where if somebody says you look younger than your age and is shocked by it, it might be somebody who spends a lot of their wild and precious life on this earth desperately trying to anti-age.

Do we want to make that valorous?

Same with thinness.

Like when people say, you're so thin, what I want to, what I do sometimes say now is, oh yeah, I have a raging eating disorder.

That ends the conversation real fast.

I have a friend who's about to give birth and she is, you know, she's, she's, her whole body looks slender except for the giant belly.

And when people say she looks great, by which they mean she looks thin, she says, well, throwing up for the first six months really, really helped.

Because she has really bad morning sickness forever.

I like those responses because they kind of like bring a disequilibrium about like, oh yeah, that must be interesting.

Here's the price that some of us pay for the cultural's obsession with that.

There's a lot of analogies between the body acceptance movement and the pro-aging movement.

Can you talk about women and invisibility?

Because this is another thing that I am feeling really excited about, which people usually talk about as a negative.

Can you talk to us about women feeling like in our culture we become invisible?

Yeah, I mean, I'll squirm a little bit on that one because

it is,

I think, related for most of us.

You know, in well, I was going to say heteronormative terms, but my daughter happens to be a lesbian.

And I remember saying to her long ago, Tell me it's better.

Tell me, lesbians are not so judgy about appearances and are more generous and forgiving to other women.

And she said, get over it, Ma.

We all want to be with the cute girl at the bar.

Oh.

Okay.

But

the reason I'm uncomfortable talking about it, for one thing, is that I never was va-va-va-vumi.

I never was invested in my appearance that way in turning heads when I entered the room.

If I ever did, I was too clueless to notice it.

So I didn't experience that as a loss, which makes me anomalous and therefore less qualified to comment on other people's experience.

And also, it's complicated because I do think there's a complicated notion of complicity, which I already touched on.

I don't ever want to say you're responsible for your problems, right?

But we are only

invisible in terms of our self-worth and our identity if we accept that idea on the terms of other people.

And those are the terms of patriarchy, misogyny, and capitalism.

But it is very painful for a lot of women.

But part of making it less painful and even a source of power is working, doing the work to divorce our sense of attractiveness and power.

Think again about who's getting laid

from these typical standard, evil, normative patterns of what the culture wants us to value in terms of our appearance in particular.

And tell us again who's getting laid.

I want to just reiterate that.

Not the thinnest, not the youngest, not the prettiest, but the people who know their lovers are lucky.

Oh,

shit.

That's so good.

Oh, I love that.

Sissy, you were going to jump in.

What did you want to say?

I always thought the invisibility thing is so interesting because the idea of invisibility is predicated on the male gaze.

Pretty.

Right.

Like if we're, if we're thinking, except for most people at the bar.

That's true.

That's true.

That is how I think of it almost all the time.

I agree.

But I don't think invisibility

visual.

I'm talking about invisibility as a wider thing in terms of middle-aged and over older women being invisible at a table, at a

meeting.

So am I.

I'm talking about the same thing, but that's on, that suggests there's only one group in power to give the attention and the gaze and

the power.

Whereas, I mean, older people are the largest group in America.

If we knew our value in ourselves and looked at each other and pointed the gaze, both in the power and the attention and the value,

who the hell is invisible now?

Like we wouldn't be worrying about being seen.

We wouldn't be worried about seeing.

Invisible to who.

Invisible to who?

Yes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

One of the biggest fears.

a value of my life, which was super challenged by your work,

is my independence.

And so I think a big fear of getting older is this idea of losing my independence and being dependent on others.

And so it was really

interesting to read

about the myth of independence.

And then it occurred to me as I was reading that, I was thinking about assisted living homes and how that is such a fear for me.

And then I was thinking, assisted living sounds amazing.

All of my life has been assisted living homes.

That's right.

i've been assisted this whole time i'm stealing that please do

i love that it's like um a great quote one of my favorite quotes in the book by a dutch gerontologist named jan barrs autonomy requires collaborators

We are interdependent from childhood on.

When you, you need a lot of assistance when you're in diapers, when you are caring for people who are in diapers, whether they're two or 102, you need assistance.

And I'm really glad you pointed it out because I do think that is the most important chapter of the book is this, there's this whole myth, and it's fostered by, of course, capitalism, that you are aging successfully, air quotes around that, if you are running up the stairs, driving at night, doing, in essence, not aging.

right, which costs money and involves luck, you know, sushi, leisure, gyms, all those things cost money.

No one is independent ever.

And when we stigmatize it, we make it more fearful.

And I want to make a sort of wonky distinction here between ageism, which is prejudice and discrimination on the basis of age, and ableism.

which is prejudice and discrimination on the basis of physical or cognitive function.

A lot of what we think of as ageism is the kind of fear each of us has alluded to in this conversation, fear of losing some kind of physical or cognitive function leading to needing more help from people on terms that we have less control over than we used to, right?

That's actually ableism, right?

People and people live with beautiful, meaningful lives with disability from birth onward.

It's different to age into disability versus being born with it and so on.

But if we acknowledge and think more about the overlap and join forces, I mean, some of these people in disability justice who are almost all young, queer women of color, they are badass and they celebrate interdependence.

So think

what we could learn from them about adapting to

impairment and about solidarity and about feeling, you know, refusing to feel shame and instead feeling pride.

I read a great quote, living with disability is a creative act.

How gorgeous is that?

Right.

So instead of going, you know, as it is now, ooh, don't want to think about being old, don't want to think about being disabled and really don't want to think about how they come together, think of the power in acknowledging not only where they're different, but where they overlap, what we can learn from that and how we can join forces and reduce stigma.

I love that.

It's so important to me.

It's so important.

Like

I have such a fear of dying, but like this is, it feels like this is the proactive research-based information that I need to kind of curb some of those like death.

and aging, because I think that's also part of death.

It's the aging process, you know, they're so linked.

Let me say one thing on that, because people

use

that line of thought, which I'm not saying you were doing, Abby, to rationalize ageism, say it's natural or it's okay because we're going to die and it's about fear of dying.

Old people are reminders of mortality.

Of course, there's an element of truth in that.

But I think the conflation.

of the two is a function of ageism.

Don't want to think about getting older.

Don't want to think about dying.

Yes.

We are aging from the minute we're born.

It's not something annoying that old people do.

And dying,

dying is a discrete biological event at the end of all that living.

People may look at me and think I'm agent, but they don't look at me and think I'm dying.

But it's really important to talk about getting older because it paves the way to talking about dying, which is really, really, really important.

And I love talking.

I actually love talking about dying too.

Excellent.

Can we just,

but I'm not.

I do.

I do.

Can we we ask you one question before we jump into these cues that we have from the pod squad for you?

You do talk about it is an inevitability that we will lose people we've known for a long time.

Do you see

an approach to that,

that inevitable loss of other people

that brings power and peace to aging people as opposed to panic and

resistance?

Is there an approach that you've seen to loot to loss that leads to

more peacefulness?

I suspect, I hope this doesn't sound like a cop-out, but I think it's individual.

I think it depends on

how your community, you know, one serious

drawback of like white middle-class culture, which is mine, is this shortage of ritual and shared experience.

I mean, look at Day of the Dead in Mexico.

I would love to have one day a year where I could go back and party on my mom's grave and feel connected to her, which I'm sure would be

just a cultural appropriation of the worst sort or whatever.

But we have a paucity of ritual.

It's not all ageism.

These long lives are new.

So we need to invent.

rituals and transitions.

In Japan, they celebrate your 60th birthday.

It's viewed as this time, this really, really happy transition into the stage of your life when you are freed of a lot of obligations that held you down before and can go explore all sorts of new things.

But I do think acknowledging that we are aging paves the way to acknowledging that we are mortal.

And for sure, the best way to have as much control as possible over the circumstances in which we die is to talk about it with those potential collaborators and to make it a recurrent conversation.

Because what we want at one point in life is probably going to change as we get get older.

And it's so interesting.

You said the celebration at 60 in Japan.

I just want to kind of end with that.

It's amazing that we fear this time of life,

which

everything could get fucking awesome.

Like all of the things that we worry so much about, all the caretaking, all of the keeping up appearances, all of the striving and all of that stuff that stresses us out.

It's like, and for women, it's like at the moment that we reach the height of our confidence, our contentment, our wealth usually,

that's when society decides we're worthless.

But we are at the height.

We should be reclaiming that completely.

And we should be, we should be just like

so excited for that time to come.

That's right.

I am.

I'm, you know, significantly older than you, which is both a real number, but also utterly individual because I'm growing older in a way that's different.

You know, we all have a lot of just looking, you know, looking at us all.

We're all healthy, it looks like we're all white.

We all have a certain amount of privilege and those, those confer obvious benefits to us.

I am happier in my work than I've ever been.

I don't love having really bad arthritis, such that they have to put like giant pieces of metal in me now to keep me going.

But on the other hand, that can happen.

And thank you, Medicare.

I can afford it.

Who would have thought that I would hit my professional stride in my 60s?

It's awesome.

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All right, let's hear from some of these pod squatters.

Let's hear from Leah.

Hi, ladies.

This is Leah.

I am in a stage of life that I have termed pediatric and geriatric care.

And I feel like I am caught in the in-between of trying to work on myself and become a better human of who I am, but at the same time, care for both young children as well as aging parents.

And there's this holding space for planning ahead for the excitement of learning and schooling for my kids, but also the planning ahead for the long-term care and housing and end-of-life stages that come with aging.

And I am struggling to be present in both at the same time.

And I would love to hear your thoughts, ideas, suggestions on how to be present and yet plan

in both stages of life while being caught in the middle.

Thank you ladies love you all

i would say cut yourself some slacks

big time

remember that you bend of happiness you are at the trough

life

is

long

you know and right now you are juggling sites i mean i remember you know when i first had my first kid if i could like do the laundry and and i couldn't you know, do the laundry, period.

Maybe another day I'd like put lipstick on.

That was it.

Good for you.

Pat yourself on the damn back because it really, truly gets easier.

And I will now get political and point out that if we live in a society that provided financial support and paid for caregiving and paid caregivers, whether they're for your children or to help, you know, for anyone, a living wage, you know, and, oh, I know single-payer health care that's affordable.

The stresses on you and your family would be much, much smaller.

So work when you come up for air and it's going to be a while and try and, you know, cut yourself some slack to work towards that kind of social and political change.

Let us never forget we are at the trough.

Okay, we are troughing and that's the best freaking,

it's the best we can do right now in the trough.

Good for you, Leah.

Good for you for being alive and writing sentences and for

a podcast.

Justin Trumps, good for you.

Wow.

Leah, crushing it.

Let's hear from Jeannie.

Hi, my name's Jeannie.

Well,

I just dropped off my baby this last weekend, and

it's the worstest.

ever.

And maybe you could talk about why life seemed dimmer, and I feel like my my life is over, which is so dumb because I know it's not.

And I know that there's a lot I'm also looking forward to, but

maybe you could still talk about why

this represents like aging

and leaving behind a part of your life that was so precious and

putting your one of your favorite beings in a place where

she doesn't know anybody and there's

boys and other scaries out there and she's all alone.

And how are you supposed to be okay with that?

I love you all and I really would appreciate an answer to those questions.

Thanks.

Jeannie.

I love Jeannie.

Oh, she would really appreciate an answer.

I should tell her it's going to be okay.

Well, I would say that you, I hope the baby in question is a college-aged child, not an actual baby.

If it's a baby, Jeannie, go get your baby.

It's not time.

What you're going through is really hard.

You know, it just is.

And sit in the grief.

It will pass.

I was so sad at the thought of my daughter leaving home that my partner said I was pre-nostalgic.

When we dropped her off at college, I was a wreck.

He said, pull yourself together completely, legitimately.

When the plane took off and the roar of the engines, I like let out this, I still remember this like gut-wrenching sob.

Finally, I get home.

The moment I have dreaded for years arrives.

I walk past her empty bedroom and I swear to God, popped into my head.

Oh, now I have a guest room.

Yes.

That was it.

I was over

because I had done all my morning beforehand.

You know, you are doing it probably a better way or a more logical way.

It will pass.

She will come home.

The fact that you were able to let her go means, you know, in some ways, means that she will be freer to return to you as a grown-up eventually on her own terms.

You're doing great.

It's good.

And Ginny, you might have a guest room.

A guest room.

God.

And you know what?

Like a phase of your life.

I think that the phase of life that she's moving through might have come to an end and a new one is beginning.

And I think that Glennon and I.

I think Glennon is also very pre-nostalgic.

I think that she realizes things that

will be problems if we don't work on them now.

So, you know, Chase went off to school and then we have Emma and Tish to head out over the next four years.

And we're just like, we need friends.

Yeah.

So we're entering a new part of our life.

But it's also a little bit like, I mean, I'm not anti-aging and I'm not anti-children leaving the house.

You must think of the alternatives.

Like, if they don't leave,

they don't leave.

And that is way worse for your sex life than menopause.

Let us count our blessings so we can become sex queens.

That's all I'm saying.

Now is our time.

Okay,

we're going to end with our next straight thing.

And I just want to say, you could do this little thing if you wanted to do this little thing.

I have always had this vision of myself as an old lady.

Okay.

And it is my favorite vision of myself.

Cool.

Okay.

You know this one, actually.

I've talked to you about this.

So I don't, basically, I'm just walking walking on a beach.

Okay.

And I have the great, the most beautiful gray hair and it's kind of like long and curly, but it's in a ponytail.

And in my, I'm just walking on the beach, just doing my daily walk.

And I'm like so full of peace and

power and calm.

In my vision, I had just, I've always just left my small purple beach house, but I don't, I feel like that's a little bit capitalistic of me.

So now I've changed it to a purple sweater.

I'm just wearing a purple sweater.

Okay.

I'm just

purple is involved, but it's just a sweater because that feels like something I can control more.

Right.

Yeah.

But the point is that I love this vision of myself.

It's like, it's not something to fear or worry about.

It's like a goal to get to.

It's like, what do I have to do now to become that badass, peaceful woman in the purple sweater on the beach?

It's like the truest, most beautiful version of myself is that.

And it's an old version of myself.

So maybe

if you feel like it, you could just

imagine what's the truest, most beautiful, older version of you.

And then it could become this beautiful lighthouse as opposed to something that you're avoiding, but it's like something you're becoming.

And also, there's a whole thing in my book about becoming an old person in training, which is a phrase I appropriated from a geriatrician named Joanne Lynn.

You can have that future older you be as far off down the road as you need her to be, you know, for it to be psychologically tenable.

But the minute you perform the exercise that you just so beautifully described, you have stepped off the hamster wheel of age denial.

You aren't right.

It's a little trick of the mind in a way, but then you're not, and you look at the older people around you instead of looking past us and think, oh, I love what she's doing, or ooh, I hope I don't do that, you know, and that helps you gradually relate to the future future you instead of being distanced from her

which is where ageism takes root in pretending we're not going to get old and making the older you a subject of fear and even self-loathing this is the opposite so i think it's a really beautiful exercise and i hope i hope everyone listening is able to engage in it and it's full circle because where we started with in the moment we end because she is already inside of you so you're just oh yeah

you already have her.

So get to know her.

Thank you for this beautiful conversation, Ashton.

I just feel like it really moved me.

Well, it makes me know.

I've got a lot of work to do because I got some ageism inside of me.

It's cool.

Yeah, but you're already so far ahead by just acknowledging that that you have less work to do than you think.

Thank you.

Good job, babe.

All right, y'all.

We can do beautiful things like get older.

We'll see you back here next time.

Thank you.

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