` ALadded a note 7 years ago

= Let's end ageism = (2)

Nobody's born ageist, but it starts at early childhood, around the same time attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about late life bombard us from the media and popular culture at every turn. Right? Wrinkles are ugly. Old people are pathetic. It's sad to be old.

Look at Hollywood. A survey of recent Best Picture nominations found that only 12 percent of speaking or named characters were age 60 and up, and many of them were portrayed as impaired. Older people can be the most ageist of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding. "Senior moment" quips, for example: I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn't call it a "junior moment." (Laughter)

I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64. My other knee doesn't hurt, and it's just as old. (Laughter) (Applause)

We are all worried about some aspect of getting older, whether running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. But what never dawns on most of us is that the experience of reaching old age can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. It is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. It's sexism. (Applause)

It's not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys. It's homophobia. And it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. It is ageism. When labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves, our failure to age successfully, instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. You can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. Who says wrinkles are ugly? The multi-billion-dollar skin care industry. Who says perimenopause and low T and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry. (Cheers)

The more clearly we see these forces at work, the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive and more accurate narratives. Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured. It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all.

Changing the culture is a tall order, I know that, but culture is fluid. Look at how much the position of women has changed in my lifetime or the incredible strides that the gay rights movement has made in just a few decades, right? (Applause)

Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too. There is no line in the sand between old and young, after which it's all downhill. And the longer we wait to challenge that idea, the more damage it does to ourselves and our place in the world, like in the workforce, where age discrimination is rampant. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botoxed and hair-plugged before key interviews — and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain. (Laughter)

The personal and economic consequences are devastating. Not one stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. Companies aren't adaptable and creative because their employees are young; they're adaptable and creative despite it. Companies —