The ugly truth about ageism: it's a prejudice targeting our future selves

You see them in most aged-care facilities, seated on pastel-coloured lounges, being babysat by a TV they are mostly not watching. Some are asleep, some are sedated, some are cognitively impaired. Seeing them like this, it’s hard to remember they were once young, vital and independent. What’s harder is thinking that it might one day be you.

“The staff call them the Os and the Qs,” says a seasoned nursing home visitor, describing residents with their mouths hanging open and those with their tongues hanging out.

The staff mean no disrespect, but reducing someone to a letter of the alphabet is just one example of the unconscious dehumanising that happens often in the treatment of the elderly.

Some older people take extreme measures to avoid this kind of lingering scenario: joining Exit International or taking steps to enable them to end their lives at a time of their choosing.

Guilt, shame and despair – often tempered with unspoken relief – colour many children’s lives when their parents go into aged care. Contrary to popular perception, it is an option chosen by a relatively small percentage of the population: there are around 200,000 residential aged-care places in Australia – although this is likely to grow as we all live longer.

So why have we failed to do better by our elderly needing care? Why do we settle for conditions that leave many of them bored, lonely and poorly fed in a way we would never tolerate for ourselves?

One underlying cause could be deeply entrenched ageism. It often begins with the language we use. According to writer Ashton Applewhite, if we diminish our regard for the senior members of our society verbally, we are likely to do the same when it comes to the way we frame policy – removing their dignity and sense of agency in condescending generalisations that assume vulnerability and dependence instead of resilience and independence.

Arguably the most prominent anti-ageism activist today, Applewhite is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism. Her TED talk on the subject has been viewed more than 1.3m times.

Even the term “the elderly” is problematic for Applewhite. “The implies a homogenous group, when nothing could be further from the case. I prefer the terms ‘olders’ and ‘youngers’ which are value neutral and emphasise that age is a spectrum,” she says on the phone from her home in Brooklyn.

“I don’t feel I can use ‘elders’ as that is not part of my culture and besides, I don’t like the way it implies that age confers value or authority. We have to give up on the bogus young /old binary view of the world.”

Unlike other prejudices such as racism and sexism, which are manifestations of fear of the other, ageism is unique in targeting our future selves.

“No prejudice is rational,” says Applewhite. “But with ageism, we have internalised it. We have been complicit in our own marginalisation and it will require active consciousness-raising to correct that, just as the women’s movement did.

“When you recognise it in yourself and then realise you can come together with others to effect social change, it radicalises you. Stanford University sociologist Doug McAdam calls it cognitive liberation. The next step is collective action. The rewards are real. I hear regularly from people who have begun to reject age shame that they feel instantly relieved and empowered.”

One of the reasons ageism is so embedded in our culture and hard to eradicate may be that it expresses decades of accumulated and deep-seated fear.

Consumerism urges us all to “fight” ageing as if it were a battle we could win, even though we know in our hearts that’s a lie. Mantras like “70 is the new 50” emphasise the need to be vigorous and vital for as long as possible, yet offer no alternative scenarios for those with degenerative diseases, loss of cognition or suffering from loneliness.

For those who can afford it, the latter phase of life is marketed as a “lifestyle” promising coastal, gated communities where well-groomed residents play bridge and endless rounds of golf with new chums. But we want those who cannot afford it parked out of sight.

We further disassociate ourselves from their needs, delegating their fate to poorly paid workers. When the former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said that those employed in aged care should aspire to better jobs, was he echoing a widely held sentiment? Is the ugly truth that prejudice underpins our complicity in accepting the low status of aged-care staff as one of those inevitable inequities of 21st century capitalism in a country more concerned with tax cuts than social justice? If we held the elderly in higher esteem, would we fight harder for their rights and those of their carers?

Those of us with parents living in nursing homes (rebranded as residential care facilities to sound more upbeat) reset our expectations of what constitutes meaningful living, comforting ourselves with the thought that their basic needs for safety and personal hygiene are being met. We try not to think too long or hard about how they spend their days.

When headlines about neglect, mistreatment or elder abuse appear in the media with increasing frequency, our inner alarm bells ring and we wonder what will be different by the time it’s our turn.

Applewhite is encouraged by increased interest in initiatives such as intergenerational housing and friendship networks in the UK, Europe and the US. She is optimistic “because younger people have grown up in a more mixed world and they know diversity is here to stay and that this is a good thing. It’s a much smaller ask for them to include age in the quest for social justice for all. And the #MeToo movement has also helped. It’s been a catalyst for universal equality. In that sense, activism feeds activism”.

“Even Hollywood is getting better; we are seeing more active, positive and sexual portrayals of olders,” she says, conceding that a comedy like The Intern, starring Robert De Niro as a 70-year-old widower returning to work at an online fashion company, addressed important issues.

“The workplace is where ageism awareness is definitely on the rise. And while there are genuine challenges to mixed-age workforces to do with retraining and seniority, all the research shows that they are the most effective, especially in the creative industries.”

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Applewhite rejects the notion of intergenerational conflict and says there is no evidence for it. “The fact is baby boomers like myself were born at an incredibly lucky moment; millennials were born at a less fortunate time. But we did not pull up the drawbridge behind us. We are all increasingly hostage to the macro-economic and social forces of unfettered capitalism and a heartless gig economy.”

It’s a view shared by the late Hal Kendig, professor of ageing and public policy at the Centre for Research on Ageing, Health and Wellbeing at the Australian National University.

In a report written for the journal Ageing and Society on Australian attitudes to intergenerational equity, Kendig rejected the notion of intergenerational conflict as a political ploy used to support cuts in expenditure. However his research found that millennials do feel some resentment that they will not enjoy the same degree of security in terms of home ownership and superannuation as their parents.

What is more significant, according to Kendig, is “the paradox that our sympathetic view of our grandparents, based on real human attachment, does not translate to public policy”.

In the final interview before his death in June, Kendig said he blamed the Howard government for attributing the accumulation of the budget deficit to “providing too many benefits for the elderly. Fortunately the public fought back and resisted taking money away from pensioners, so there is a limit to our tolerance of such policies, especially among women and groups who are vulnerable in terms of their health and social resources”.

“As far as governments are concerned, aged care has always been a minor issue, but it will come to matter more as more of us need to access it and live longer. To date, government has been unwilling to raise taxes to address this. Meanwhile the media has portrayed baby boomers as greedy geezers but, while there is no doubt that they have enjoyed tremendous economic advantages, there are inequalities even amongst that cohort.

“Those with a comfortable standard of living tend to own their own homes and have relatively modest expectations. There are lot of well-off people who benefit from the old-age pension. I would want to moderate that.”

Anticipating his own death from an incurable degenerative disease gave Kendig the freedom to be outspoken: “I would go further. Unlike the UK, we pay no death duties here. The fairest way to guarantee adequate aged income support is to fund it through that kind of tax. Where is the equity in inheritance? But it is certain political death to raise that.”

Like Applewhite, Kendig believed that ageism is a contributing factor in determining social treatment of the elderly. “We see them as less capable. The attitude in northern European countries is more enlightened, but even there, welfare states are retracting due to pressure on budgets. In developing countries, seniors stay in work longer which means that, on the one hand, they remain integrated and actively contributing members of society but, on the other hand, they are often exploited.”

He warned against idealisation of Asian and Indigenous societies as having a greater respect for older people. “We tend to romanticise other cultures as valuing the elderly more than we do, but if we look closely at the evidence, it presents us with scenarios we find confronting. For example, the Inuits value older people highly. So much so that they put them out to die in the snow – at their own request.

“Ageism has been found to be all-pervasive across eastern as well as western cultures, including Confucian-based Asian cultures where respect for elders and filial piety are social norms. It is possible that ageism is one of the main features of global ageing among modern, capitalist nations in which individual social views predominate over traditional collectivist views.”

British writer Anne Karpf says we all need to change the way we think about ageing. In her lucid and far-reaching book How to Age, she points out that most people over 75 spend more time looking after someone than younger people do and that much of the research on ageing has, until recently, been conducted in nursing homes where bodies and minds are often lacking stimulation, giving a distorted picture of reality.

Karpf has observed a backlash against the elderly in the UK, who are being blamed by some of the younger generation for Brexit. To counter this and more long-term unconscious bias, she says it’s time for “a major gestalt switch”. She says: “Each time we see an older person, we need to imagine them as our future self, and rather than recoil from their wrinkles or infirmities, applaud their resilience. We need to re-humanise older people.”

This is what the Benevolent Society hope to achieve with the launch of a 10-year campaign. The campaign called Every Age Counts launches in October with a multifaceted strategy to “shift norms, expectations, policies and outcomes for all older people”. Among their aims: a national agenda for older Australians, including a federal minister with a dedicated portfolio preferably at cabinet level.

Like Applewhite, the Benevolent Society identifies language and attitudes which characterise the issues of an ageing population “as a problem, a burden and a cost”, as reinforcing and perpetuating negative stereotypes.

The lengthy 10-year term of the campaign, says age discrimination commissioner Kay Patterson, is crucial to the long-term goal of deep change in the sector, as is the support from younger people.

“We need to enlist young people in this battle too ... they’re the ones who are going to create the culture of the future.”