This guest post is by Jeanette Leardi, a Portland, Oregon, writer, editor, and community educator who is changing perceptions about the aging process and helping people appreciate elders’ inherent dignity, wisdom, and unique value as mentors and catalysts for social change. You can read more of her blog posts at ChangingAging, where this post first appeared, and reach her through her website.

As a social gerontologist, community educator, and writer, I am passionate about explaining how language affects –– in good or bad ways –– our perceptions of aging, and vice versa. Three particular phrases raise my hackles.

“Successful aging” is often used to depict the process of getting older as solely an individual’s responsibility rather than to also acknowledge powerful socioeconomic factors that affect a person’s ability to survive and thrive throughout life.

“Silver tsunami” is a phrase that mischaracterizes the arrival into older adulthood of America’s Baby Boom generation as a sudden and catastrophic force that will wipe out national productivity as well as entitlement program funds, without taking into account the potentially vast contributions elders can and do make in our society.

These two terms are regularly employed by the media when covering aging issues. But we hear the third term –– “senior moment” –– all the time, used by practically everyone from youth to the oldest old among us. The phrase is so pervasive that it has taken on a kind of scientific validity, as if the act of forgetting familiar information is limited to the behavior of older people. It’s not.

Here’s the reality about senior moments: They happen to all adults decades before they reach elderhood. According to University of Virginia psychology professor Dr. Timothy A. Salthouse, “some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.”Within five years after a cognitive peak around age 22, we begin to experience a gradual decline in the speed at which our brains work, as well as our ability to make quick comparisons, to think abstractly, to remember unrelated pieces of information, and to perceive patterns and relationships. And by our late 30s, problems with our memory become more apparent to us.

In short, senior moments belong to us all. Or as Ashton Applewhite eloquently states in her ground-breaking book This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, “I used to think that those [‘senior moments’] quips were self-deprecatingly cute, until it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn’t call it a ‘junior moment.’”

So instead of unrealistically attributing senior moments only to the elder experience, I’d like to offer a refreshing (and more accurate) meme for older brain activity: the “Sully moment.”

Enter famed airline pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, hero of the “Miracle on the Hudson,” who made a successful 2009 emergency landing in New York’s Hudson River of a U.S. Airways plane carrying 155 passengers. The inspiring story of his accomplishment can actually be explained by a brain phenomenon known as bihemispheric processing.

This skill fully develops around age 50, when the corpus callosum –– a bridge of tissue connecting our left and right hemispheres –– reaches its maximum maturity of approximately 200 million to 250 million nerve fibers. At this point, our brain reaches a state that geriatric psychiatrist Gene Cohen has described as shifting from two-wheel drive to “all-wheel drive.” Evidence of this shift is a greater ability to approach problem-solving from many different perspectives and to detect more subtle differences in circumstances and viewpoints.

Just catch Sully’s 2009 60 Minutes interview with Katie Couric, and you’ll hear an account of all-wheel drive in action as he ticked off in succession the various factors he had to consider and computations he had to make within seconds. “I was sure I could do it,” he said. “I think in many ways, as it turned out, my entire life up to that moment had been a preparation to handle that particular moment.”

As he also told Couric, “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years, I’ve been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience, education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”

All of this is not to say that younger adults can’t process information bihemispherically. Of course they can. It’s just that they get better at it as they get older. Like much of life, we experience many things as tradeoffs. Sure, we may have more tip-of-the-tongue brain stutters, and our reaction times may get slower. On the other hand, as Salthouse has noted, our vocabulary increases and we accumulate and retain more general knowledge at least until we reach age 60. And older adults with healthy brains continue to integrate that knowledge as they apply their skills throughout their lives. Overall, when you think about it, it’s not a bad deal.

I don’t know about you, but I’ll happily trade a “senior moment” for a “Sully moment” anytime.

As a media partner of the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society, where I spoke in Paris last week, the New York Times commissioned a piece on how women could respond to ageism. "Working to Disarm Women's Anti-Aging Demon" came out today, in the lean international edition as well. To my delight, they paired it with this photo of  the actress Frances McDormand (with son Pedro and husband Joel Coen), who credits Pedro for one of her wrinkles and calls her face a map that carries her history.

The piece makes some very big asks, and I was braced for a slew of comments along the line of "Why should getting old mean looking bad?" Instead the response has been massive, heartfelt, and enthused:  "This should be our manifesto." "Let's go!" "I'm in!" I hope readers will follow my last suggestion to "come together at all ages and talk about this stuff." Let's use Who Me, Ageist?  How to Start a Consciousness-Raising Group as a starting point and collaborate on a version for women and allies.

The New York Times magazine opens every Sunday with an essay about what a given word or phrase reveals about the moment. This week’s was “anti-aging.” The line at the top of the print version read, “After years obsessing over ‘anti-aging,’ our culture finds itself at an impasse. We don’t want to look older—but we don’t want to feel as if we fear it, either.” The catalyst was the announcement in Allure magazine’s September issue that the word has been banned from its pages. Editor-in-chief Michelle Lee commended instead “the long-awaited, utterly necessary celebration of growing into your own skin—wrinkles and all.”  Huzzah!

But not so fast. As writer Amanda Hess points out in the Times, Allure is still promoting products that promise to make women look younger. The next sentence reads, “No one is suggesting giving up retinol”—God forbid! (It links to an article that begins, “It's no secret that retinol ticks practically every box in your anti-aging wishlist.”) Titled “The Ever-Changing Business of Anti-Aging,” Hess’s piece is a sharp critique of the re-branding of “anti-aging”—it's just another opportunity to sell us the same old stuff. Campaigns have changed over time, from cautionary tales to aggressive pitches grounded in “science” to appeals to the easy and “natural”—from shame to combat to self-care.

Notably, attitudes, too, have shifted. “As the business of fighting aging has consumed the culture, it has produced a secondary aversion, not just to the signs of aging but to the signs that we’re trying to stop the signs of aging,” Hess observes. In other words, we’re moving from anti-aging to anti-anti-aging. Can pro-aging be far behind? Don’t hold your breath. We may nod and agree that it's fine to embrace our wrinkles, she concludes, “while quietly understanding that none of us, individually, want to be the one who actually looks old.”

I do think a more profound shift in the zeitgeist is underway, however.  As Hess observes, no matter how glossy the images, flawless the celebrities, and clever the jargon, they're an ever-tougher sell. “They must paper over large and knotty things—our discomfort over our own mortality, our deep-rooted habit of valuing women largely in terms of their attractiveness, our growing sentiment that both ageism and gender roles ought to be things of the past—with a cheery promise that a little face cream will help.”

Appearance matters. Adornment pleases. We each have to age in our own way on whatever terms work for us. As one audience member wrote on her “Questions for the Speaker” form at a gig in New Hampshire last August, “I am fine with using anti-aging products. Whatever makes you feel and look good, do it.”

But society’s obsession with the way women look is less about beauty than about obedience to a punishing external standard—and about power. When women compete to “stay young,” we collude in our own disempowerment. When we rank other women by age, we reinforce ageism, sexism, lookism, and patriarchy. In our guts, we know this to be a bad bargain. It sets us up to fail. It pits us against each other. Because different forms of discrimination compound and reinforce each other, it’s why the poorest of the poor, around the world, are old women of color. That’s intersectionality, a term coined by  black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw that millennials have grown up with, along with the idea that diversity is a good thing and is here to stay. In 1970, to believe that women could run Fortune 500 corporations as well as men was a big ask. Fifty years later gender is a basic criterion for diversity, along with race and sexual orientation. Age isn’t usually on the list—yet. It’s the last socially acceptable prejudice. But when I propose including it, no one says, “That’s a dumb idea,” or, “Whoa, let me get back to you on that one.”

We have a long way to go on all those fronts, racism in particular.  But if the goal is a society where access to opportunity is not determined by what you look like, gray hair and wrinkles count. Hitching age to the diversity sled makes sense, personally and politically. The ground has been plowed.