Monday, November 09, 2015

Ageism

Your feelings on ageism:

I’m betting that nobody ever says, “I’m all for ageism!”, even if they happen to be practicing ageists.

From what I’ve read, for most of human history, people respected their elders. I’m sure there were exceptions, of course, but during a time of very little technological progress and/or in societies without written language, the survival of a group (whether it be a tribe, farming community, or any other similar grouping) depended on the passing down of information through the generations. More often than not, the village elders were founts of information and wisdom. They were the torch passers.

The older you are, the more life experience you’ve accumulated. That said, I’m sure that even then there were people who were so full of being young and in their prime that they resisted the advice of their elders.

These days, one doesn’t have to look far to come across evidence that elders are no longer always treated with respect. With technology changing faster than people can keep up with it (I’ve often said that our technological progress has long outstripped our social progress), a lot of people stick with what they know and avoid new innovations. This leads younger people to sometimes discount the life experience accumulated by the elderly due to their perceived helplessness when it comes to navigating modern technology.

Sure, grandma can’t figure out the computer, but have you ever sat and listened to what she has to say? Yes, grandpa would rather use his rotary dial phone than an iPhone, but he has accumulated 80 years of life experience. For all I know, it has always been this way, at least to a point. We tend to romanticize the past to a certain degree, even if we sometimes discount the people who have actually lived it. As a species, we’re maddeningly inconsistent, aren’t we?
Our society is centered on the young. Just look at who the ads are aimed toward. We tend to infantilize the elderly, and some of them, after enough treatment of this kind, almost seem to buy into it. The next time you watch a funny YouTube video of an octogenarian trying to navigate Facebook or a grandkid’s iPhone, thing about why you’re laughing and realize that your grandkids will most likely be laughing at you for a similar reason.

At the very least, if you’re middle aged or older, you can almost feel the wind from the giant broom as it sussurates across the floorboards to sweep you under the carpet. It’s an iBroom, of course, with all of the bells and whistles of modernity.

My feelings? It’s a shame.


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