Ageism

A woman turns forty and her Instagram feed fills with wrinkle creams before she's noticed a single new line. A man of fifty-eight sends out two hundred résumés and hears back from four—so he starts leaving his graduation year off his LinkedIn profile. A seventy-year-old walks into an emergency room with sharp abdominal pain and is told, gently, that "some aches are just part of getting older."

This isn't bad luck. It's ageism—and it's so woven into everyday life that most of us fail to notice it even as it's happening to us.

Ageism is a strange kind of prejudice, because unlike racism or sexism, it's a bias that nearly everyone will eventually hold against their own future self—and that almost everyone will eventually experience as its target. You may never change gender or race, but if you're lucky enough to keep living, you will one day be old.

Drawing on decades of research in psychology, economics, medicine, and public policy, Ash Payne traces ageism through every arena of modern life:

The workplace, where older workers are quietly filtered out

The exam room, where symptoms are dismissed as "just getting old"

The anti-aging industry, built on selling the fear of our own faces

The media, where older women are rendered invisible

The intersection of age with race, class, and gender

The loneliness epidemic that isolates so many older people

Ageism is not a book about denying the realities of growing older—it's a book about refusing to let a number substitute for an actual person. Because dismantling ageism isn't charity toward some other group. It's self-interest, deferred. We're all headed there—and we might as well stop treating the destination like a failure.