This Chair Rocks

People are happiest at the beginnings and the ends of their lives. The vast majority of Americans over 65 live independently. The older people get, the less afraid they are of dying. Aging is a natural, powerful, lifelong process. So how come so many of us unthinkingly assume that depression, diapers, and dementia lie ahead? That the 20th century’s astonishing leap in life expectancy is a disaster-in-the making? Underlying all the hand-wringing is ageism: discrimination that sidelines and silences older people. So I’ve written a book. I blog about it. I led the team that developed Old School, a clearinghouse of anti-ageism resources. I am the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist? (Go ahead, ask me.) I’ve written a consciousness-raising booklet. And I speak widely. All tools to help catalyze a movement to make discrimination on the basis of age as unacceptable as any other kind.

About the Book

Buy the book

From childhood on, we’re barraged by messages that it’s sad to be old. That wrinkles are embarrassing, and old people useless. Author and activist Ashton Applewhite believed them too—until she realized where this prejudice comes from and the damage it does. Lively, funny, and deeply researched, This Chair Rocks traces Applewhite’s journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical, and in the process debunks myth after myth about late life. The book explains the roots of ageism—in history and in our own age denial—and how it divides and debases, examines how ageist myths and stereotypes cripple the way our brains and bodies function, looks at ageism in the workplace and the bedroom, exposes the cost of the all-American myth of independence, critiques the portrayal of olders as burdens to society, describes what an all-age-friendly world would look like, and concludes with a rousing call to action. Whether you’re older or hoping to get there, this book will shake you by the shoulders, cheer you up, make you mad, and change the way you see the rest of your life. Age pride!

One of The 100 best books to read at every age —Washington Post
One of 10 Books to Help You Foster a More Diverse and Inclusive Workplace —Forbes

Wow. This book totally rocks. It arrived on a day when I was in deep confusion and sadness about my age—62. Everything about it, from my invisibility to my neck. Within four or five wise, passionate pages, I had found insight, illumination and inspiration. I never use the word empower, but this book has empowered me.

ANNE LAMOTT, New York Times best-selling author

Along comes Ashton Applewhite with a book we have been waiting for. Anti-ageism now boasts a popular champion, activist, and epigrammatist in the lineage of Martial and Dorothy Parker. Until This Chair Rocks we haven’t had a single compact book that blows up myths seven to a page like fireworks.

LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS

Vibrant, energetic, fact-filled and funny, This Chair Rocks is a call to arms not just for older people but for our whole society.

KATHA POLLITT, poet, essayist, and Nation columnist

Sometimes a writer does us all a great favor and switches on a light. Snap! The darkness vanishes and, in its place we find an electric vision of new ways of living. I want to live in a world where ageism is just a memory, and This Chair Rocks illuminates the path.

DR. BILL THOMAS, founder of Changing Aging

This Chair Rocks is radical, exuberant, and full of all sorts of facts that erase many of the myths and beliefs about late life. As Applewhite defines and describes ageism, new ways of seeing and being in the world emerge, empowering everyone to see things as they really are.

LAURIE ANDERSON, artist

A knowledgeable, straight-talking, and witty book that briskly explains to anyone how-wrong-we-are-about-aging. There’s radical news here to enlighten the most “done” starlet, and
tart turns of phrase to captivate the most expert age critic: ‘All aging is “successful”—not just the sporty version—otherwise you’re dead.’ This pithy primer ought ideally to be given to every American adolescent—to inoculate them against the lies and stereotypes that can spoil the long life course they will all want.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Aged by Culture and the prize-winning Agewise and Declining to Decline

Ashton Applewhite is a visionary whose time has come, tackling one of the most persistent biases of our day with originality, verve, and humor. Her magic formula of naming and shaming may just shake all of us out of complacency and it into action. Whether you relate through being older now or recognize that aging is in your future, this is one of the most important books you’ll ever read.

Marc Freedman, CEO of Encore.org and author of The Big Shift: Navigating the New Life Stage Before Midlife

A smart and stirring call to add ageism to the list of ‘isms’ that divide us, and to mobilize against it. Applewhite shows how ageism distorts our view of old age, and urges us to challenge age- based prejudices in ourselves and in society. An important wake-up call for any baby boomer who’s apprehensive about growing old.

Pepper Schwartz, Professor of Sociology, University of Washington and AARP’s Official Love & Relationship Ambassador

This Chair Rocks is a 2016 Foreword INDIES Winnerin Adult Nonfiction!

Smart, sassy and oh so wise.

AARP

Finally, a take-down of the last acceptable prejudice. Applewhite eloquently and expertly exposes the structural discrimination that makes growing older so much harder than it should be—not just for the white, affluent, healthy, and able-bodied, but for women, people of color, people with disabilities, and poor people. Full of treasures, This Chair Rocks should be required reading for everyone in aging services, to help us confront ageism in our personal and professional lives and join forces against it. As Applewhite writes, ‘It’s time for Age Pride.’

Donna Corrado, Commissioner, NYC Department for the Aging

An eloquent and well-researched exposé of the prejudice that feeds age bias, and a passionate argument to mobilize against it. This must-read book is also a fun-read for every age.

Stephanie Coontz, author, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap

To live agefully – what a wonderful word! With warmth, wit and clarity, Ashton Applewhite explains what it means, while never falling into age-denial or age-shame. This is a book packed with provocative and liberating ideas, to make you leap into the air with pleasure – even if your knees, like mine, are a little dodgy.

Anne Karpf, author of How to Age


Blog

Readers are encouraged to distribute, remix, and tweak this material! Please credit This Chair Rocks/
Ashton Applewhite

What fact brings us closest to a world without ageism?

Posted on Thursday, February 6, 2020 by Ashton Applewhite

I’m spending two months in the Bay Area this winter, making myself at home in the western outpost of the Home for Superior Women (read the book!), getting to know my four left coast grandchildren better, and being a Fellow at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto. One of the signs in the institute’s big storefront windows features this quote from futurist Jim Dator: “Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous.”

How’s this for a useful statement about the future? “Thinking all older people are the same will be as absurd as thinking all younger people are the same.” It’s from an animation made by EveryAGE Counts, Australia’s terrific national anti-ageism campaign, asking us to imagine a world without ageism. Because we age at different rates—physically, cognitively, and socially—the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. This fact takes a lot of people by surprise, but it’s anything but ridiculous. It’s science: in nerdspeak, heterogeneity is the defining characteristic of old age.

If there’s one age stereotype about olders I wish I could banish, it would be that “the elderly” belong to some homogenous group when nothing could be further from the truth. All stereotypes are ignorant and wrong, of course, but this one—the mother of them all, so to speak, when it comes to aging—is particularly damaging and misinformed. As I put it in my TED talk, “We tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age—“old”—when they can span four decades. Would you ever think that way about people between age 15 and age 55?” Yet youngers are far more alike.  The older the person, the less their age tells us about what they’re interested in or capable of.

If I could choose one fact about aging to plant in every head, it would be this one: the longer we live, the more different from each other we become.

That heterogeneity is of course the source of many headaches, making it incredibly difficult to calibrate pension and retirement eligibility fairly, for example.  What if the key to equitable solutions were to take age out of the equation? Peg financial assistance to socioeconomic status, for example, and support with caregiving to physical and cognitive capacity—not age.  Of course people will always game the system, social change is slow, and policy is a blunt instrument, but it’s worth thinking about. While you’re at it, spread the word: the longer we live, the more different from each other we become.

"At your age" is the new "Girls don't." We don't have to listen to that either.

Posted on Thursday, January 2, 2020 by Ashton Applewhite

This guest post is by Shannon West, a 68-year-old fitness professional working to empower older women to see their potential, and a music blogger who believes older musicians are often the ones on the cutting edge. This is her spin on a viral social media post that struck her as suggesting that older women should resign themselves to the fact that their best days were over, so she "took a shot." Shannon lives in Jacksonville, FL, and can be reached at  ShannonWest0201 [at] gmail [dot] com.

To all my female friends who have passed our cultural expiration date which by now I think is...like...25. (see Amy Schumer's brilliant "Last F***able Day" video). We get told we are at that age where we see wrinkles and are destined to have saggy muscles and put on extra body fat. We read it in a women's magazine see it on TV so it must be true. Right? We see cute 25-year-olds, especially in movies, TV shows, and other media, because there are so few multidimensional roles for older women. So we reminisce, because we have been told that our 20s are the last decade in our lives where we can be attractive, fashionable, and adventurous. We have been told that the synonym for vibrant, engaged, forward thinking, healthy, adventurous, empowered, and creative is "young" even though those qualities are actually available to everybody. We hear that we should consider qualities like wisdom and experience the lesser cards we are dealt as we drift into invisibility, even though both are valuable and some of us are still a long way from getting the "wisdom" part down, although our life experiences have definitely given us a sense of accomplishment, perspective, and confidence in our ability to navigate the messy unpredictability that life brings.

Many of us see ourselves as warriors in the quiet and
survivors. It's time to let go of the quiet and engage our warrior spirit in
the act of questioning everything our youth-obsessed culture has told us about
growing older and actively seeking change on both a personal and political
level. It is time to ask why we feel bad about getting older and why we see our
growth and years of experience as a process of decline and increasing
limitations. Who made these rules? Who said we had to live under them? Should
we honor the wishes of advertising agencies and the "anti-aging"
industry that create and exploit our fear of aging into a multibillion dollar
industry? Should we take as truth research that says we must become sedentary
and rapidly decline at a specific birthday when it was conducted in a previous
century on older adults whose life experiences were so different from ours
today?

We need to actively combat ageism and age stereotyping, first by looking inward and seeing how we are affected personally. Is what we are being told really our personal truth? Are we being pressured to limit our vision of who we are? Then we have to actively challenge ageism everywhere—in the workplace, in our relationships, in what we are told about how we dress and how we "should" wear our hair, in how we take care of our bodies, in how we move through the world. We may choose to ease into elderhood in the traditional way or we may choose to run an Ultra at 65. The path you choose is the path that is fine for you. It is the ability to create and walk our own path instead of being forced onto someone else’s idea of what our path should be that matters. We have the skills to do this. We were the ones who grew up with "girls don't". We didn't listen to that. "At your age" is the new "Girls don't." We don't have to listen to that either. Start on Ashton Applewhite's groundbreaking This Chair Rocks website, and be sure to check out the Resources area.

There’s more

Other Writing by
Ashton Applewhite

Beating age discrimination

Beating age discrimination

May 1, 2019

Article in The Big Issue

An Essay by Ashton Applewhite

An Essay by Ashton Applewhite

March 14, 2019

Article on Books Inc.

Eight surprising facts about getting old in America

Eight surprising facts about getting old in America

March 10, 2019

Article in the New York Post

If you care about equality, fight ageism – just as you fight sexism and racism

If you care about equality, fight ageism – just as you fight sexism and racism

March 4, 2019

Article in the Independent

Age of distinction: Don’t believe the ageist myths. We only get better in our golden years.

Age of distinction: Don’t believe the ageist myths. We only get better in our golden years.

March 3, 2019

Article in The Globe and Mail

There’s more

Yo, Is This Ageist?

(Go ahead, ask me.)

There’s more

Appearances

My We Are All Aging talk explains the roots of ageism – in society and in our own age denial – how it divides and diminishes us, and ends with a rousing call to mobilize against it. This Chair Rocks: How Ageism Warps Our View of Long Life charts my journey from apprehensive boomer to pro-aging radical and proposes an alternative to all the hand-wringing: wake up, cheer up, and push back. Aging While Female, Reimagined describes how the double whammy of ageism and sexism makes aging different for women, and what we can do about it. I also speak about the medicalization of old age, ageism and elder abuse, and how to reframe the new longevity in order to make the most of longer lives. To book me for your event, please contact the Lavin Agency.

What People Are Saying:

I was encouraged by the statistics you quoted, forced to acknowledge my own ageist thoughts, and ultimately fired up to fight them in myself and others. You are on to something big!

Sarah Meredith, painter

Why can’t we stop ageism? Good question. For some answers, start looking in the mirror and look around you. For a good dialogue on the subject, visit Ashton Applewhite’s website, This Chair Rocks.

Harry R. Moody, Director of Academic Affairs, AARP

Consciousness-raising at its sharpest and most useful.

David Watts Barton, journalist and playwright

This Chair Rocks confirms our knowledge that emotional well being is abundant in later life, challenges us to face our own internalized ageism, and inspires us to envision a future in which our society is released from age-related prejudice and discrimination. And it’s fun, too!

Geriatric Mental Health Alliance of New York

Holistic, deep, urgent, and also fun.

Lenelle Moise, playwright and performer

All practitioners working with older adults need to be informed about the pernicious influences of ageism. Nobody does this better than Ashton Applewhite. Her thinking is deep, her passion infectious, and her cogent message is spot on: we urgently need to have a national conversation about ageism to raise awareness about it and to stop it.

Risa Breckman, LCSW, Executive Director, NYC Elder Abuse Center

You have found a fantastic mission: raising consciousness that older is far better than the stereotype that enslaves us all.

Jennifer Siebens, producer, CBS News

Ashton Applewhite’s plenary address at the 2013 New York State Adult Abuse Training Institute was compelling and original, and really resonated with our 400 participants. She is an articulate and committed voice for an important cause: challenging the demoralizing shadow that ageism casts across society.

Jean Callahan, Director, Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging

Octogenarians are the fastest-growing segment of our population, yet most Americans are scared stiff at the prospect of growing old. [Applewhite’s work] is a welcome and important tonic.

Dr. Robert Butler, founding director of the National Institute on Aging, coiner of the term “ageism”

We need an anti-ageist movement, for sure. Ashton is already in it.

Margaret Morganroth Gullette, author of Agewise and Aged by Culture

A beautifully delivered, provocative description of how ageism clouds our vision of what life holds in store.

Sabrina Hamilton, director, Ko Festival for the Arts

Ashton Applewhite is on a crusade. A journalist and author, her mission is to raise awareness of ageism in America and get people young and old to join her in speaking out against it.

Senior Planet

Thank you again for your terrific keynote yesterday. I heard from so many attendees that it affected them deeply. You are wise, funny, and provocative – a great combination!

Teresa Bonner, Program Director, Aroha Philanthropies

Upcoming Appearances

Talk at Senior Planet @ Avenidas

Where: 450 Bryant St., Palo Alto, CA 94301

When: March 5, 2020 12:00 pm

More info: Here

All About Old School, with co-creator Kyrie Carpenter

Where: Institute on Aging, 3575 Geary Blvd., San Francisco, CA

When: March 9, 2020 07:00 pm

More info: How and why we created Old School, a clearinghouse of anti-ageism resources; how we're turning it into a hub for movement-building; and how you can join us. Tickets here.

keynote, Financial Planning Association 2020 Retreat

Where: Hyatt Regency Lost Pines, Cedar Creek, TX (outside of Austin)

When: May 6, 2020 08:30 am

More info: Register here.

Boston Public Library

Where: 700 Boylston Street (at Exeter), Commonwealth Salon

When: June 17, 2020 02:00 pm

More info: in collaboration with Beacon Hill Village; free and open to the public

talk, 2Life Communities

Where: Temple Emanuel, 385 Ward St, Newton, MA

When: June 18, 2020 12:00 am

More info: Details here.

keynote, National Service Coordinator Conference

Where: Gaylord National Resort and Convention Center, 201 Waterfront St, National Harbor, MD

When: August 31, 2020 12:00 am

More info: Details here.

keynote, The Upside of Aging

Where: Palos Verdes Golf Club, 3301 Vía Campesina, Palos Verdes Estates, CA 90274

When: September 16, 2020 01:00 pm

More info: Sponsored by Palos Verdes Peninsula Village. Free and open to the public. Details pending.

 

Sage-ing Institute Summit on Longevity

Where: ASB Waterfront Theatre, Auckland, New Zealand

When: September 29, 2020 12:00 am

More info:

keynote, American Alliance of Museums Creative Aging Convening

Where: High Museum, Atlanta, GA

When: November 5, 2020 12:00 am

More info:

public talk, High Museum

Where: High Museum, Atlanta, GA

When: November 7, 2020 12:00 am

More info: Free and open to the public. Details here

Modern Elder Academy

Where: Baja, California

When: February 14, 2021 12:00 am

More info:

 

Past Appearances

Media

article, Restless.co.uk

article, Restless.co.uk

February 20, 2020

Link here.

podcast, Women With Clout

podcast, Women With Clout

February 11, 2020

Link here.

talk followed by conversation with Kathleen Brown, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

talk followed by conversation with Kathleen Brown, Rancho Mirage Writers Festival

February 11, 2020

Link here.

podcast, Australian Broadcast Corporation Radio National

podcast, Australian Broadcast Corporation Radio National

February 5, 2020

Link here.

interview, Deutsche Seniorenliga. E.V.

interview, Deutsche Seniorenliga. E.V.

January 24, 2020

Link here.

There’s more

Resources



You’ll find many more resources on Old School, a clearinghouse of free and carefully vetted blogs, books, articles, videos, speakers, and other tools (workshops, handouts, curricula etc.) to educate people about ageism and help dismantle it.

Video

Keynote address at the United Nations
6 October 2016

Talk at Future Trends Forum in Madrid
1 December 2017

Talk at the Library of Congress
25 October 2016

On Vimeo

What Is Ageism?

Ageism is stereotyping and discrimination on the basis of a person’s age. We experience it any time someone assumes that we’re “too old” for something—a task, a haircut, a relationship—instead of finding out who we are and what we’re capable of. Or “too young;” ageism cuts both ways, although in a youth-obsessed society olders bear the brunt of it.

Like racism and sexism, ageism serves a social and economic purpose: to legitimize and sustain inequalities between groups. It’s not about how we look. It’s about how people in power assign meaning to how we look.

Stereotyping—the assumption that all members of a group are the same—underlies ageism (as it does all “isms”). Stereotyping is always a mistake, but especially when it comes to age, because the older we get, the more different from one another we become.

Attitudes about age—as well as race and gender—start to form in early childhood. Over a lifetime they harden into a set of truths: “just the way it is.” Unless we challenge ageist stereotypes—Old people are incompetent. Wrinkles are ugly. It’s sad to be old—we feel shame and embarrassment instead of taking pride in the accomplishment of aging. That’s internalized ageism.

By blinding us to the benefits of aging and heightening our fears, ageism makes growing older far harder than it has to be. It damages our sense of self, segregates us, diminishes our prospects, and actually shortens lives.

What are the antidotes?

  •    Awareness: the critical starting point is to acknowledge our own prejudices about age and aging. (Download a copy of Who me, Ageist? How to Start a Consciousness Raising Group.) Then we can start to see that “personal problems”—such as not being able to get a job or being belittled or feeling patronized—are actually widely shared social problems that require collective action.
  •    Integration: connect with people of all ages. An equitable society for all ages requires intergenerational collaboration.
  •    Activism: watch for ageist behaviors and attitudes in and around us, challenge them, and create language and models that support every stage of life.

Bio

I didn’t set out to become a writer. I went into publishing because I loved to read and didn’t have any better ideas. I had a weakness for the kind of jokes that make you cringe and guffaw at the same time, my boss kept telling me to write them down, and the collection turned into the best-selling paperback of 1982. I was a clue on “Jeopardy” (“Who is the author of Truly Tasteless Jokes?” Answer: “Blanche Knott.”), and as Blanche made publishing history by occupying four of the fifteen spots on the New York Times bestseller list.

My first serious book, Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, was published by HarperCollins in 1997. Ms. magazine called it “rocket fuel for launching new lives,” and it landed me on Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum enemies list. It also got me invited to join the board of the nascent Council on Contemporary Families, a group of distinguished family scholars. I belonged to the Artist’s Network of Refuse & Resist group that originated the anti-Iraq-invasion slogan and performance pieces titled “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War.” As a contributing editor of IEEE Spectrum magazine, I went to Laos to cover a village getting internet access via a bicycle-powered computer. I was on staff at the American Museum of Natural History for 17 years, where I wrote about everything under the Sun, quitting in 2017 to become a full-time activist.

The catalyst for Cutting Loose was puzzlement: why was our notion of women’s lives after divorce (visualize depressed dame on barstool) so different from the happy and energized reality? A similar question gave rise to This Chair Rocks: why is our view of late life so unrelievedly grim when the lived reality is so different? I began blogging about aging and ageism in 2007 and started speaking on the subject in July, 2012, which is also when I started the Yo, Is This Ageist? blog. During that time I’ve been recognized by the New York Times, National Public Radio, the New Yorker, and the American Society on Aging as an expert on ageism and named as a Fellow by the Knight Foundation, the New York Times, Yale Law School, and the Royal Society for the Arts; I’ve written for Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times, and I speak widely, at venues that have ranged from universities and community centers to the Library of Congress and the United Nations. In 2017 I received a standing ovation for my talk at TED 2017, their mainstage event in Vancouver.

My book, This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, was published in March, 2019 by Celadon Books, a new division of Macmillan, Inc.

HONORS & RECOGNITION

Contact

Contact information

Mailing list

Sign up to receive announcements for This Chair Rocks and information about my upcoming events.