Defying Expectations: Women Redefining Ageing with Ashton Applewhite

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:00:00

You. On today's show, I was speaking to Ashton Applewhite. She's an internationally renowned expert on ageism. Two years ago, the Un named her as one of the healthy, ageing 50. That's 50 leaders who are transforming the world to be a better place. We spoke about the impact that ageist attitudes are having on women globally, both mentally and physically, and the importance of the inter generational conversations to get to the root of how to combat ageism. Plus, we delved into the old school anti ageism clearinghouse. That's a wonderful resource that Ashton's made available to anyone who wants to tackle the issue of ageism to enable us to live our best lives as we get older.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:00:42

Before we get started though, can I ask that you give us a follow on your podcast, app or Instagram? Okay, well, that's it. Let's get on with the podcast. Welcome to retirement. Rebel life after 60. I'm your host, Siobhan Daniels. Join me on a journey to meet inspiring rebels who've redefined retirement. Together, we'll explore new passions, triumphs over challenges, and discover the vibrant possibilities of life after 60. This is about living boldly, not just ageing.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:01:14

So, are you ready to rebel? Ashton, I'm grateful that you found the time to talk to me on my podcast. Welcome. Thank you, Siobhan.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:01:23

It's lovely to be here.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:01:25

When did you get involved in the ageism movement? Or have you always been involved in it?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:01:33

Certainly not. If you had told me 15 years ago, which is when I started to look into it, that I would become fascinated by ageing, I would have said, why do I want to spend my time thinking about something sad and depressing? And it was true, really. I mean, I knew nothing. And it's only recently dawned on me that I've really been at this for a while, which is to say almost 20 years. Yikes. And I tell the story in the introduction of my book, which unfortunately, there is no adorable aha. Reveal here. But at some point it dawned on me that this getting old thing was actually happening to me.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:02:16

And I think that denial is partly because of ageism, but I just think it's human. We age slowly. As you're a kid, you can't imagine wanting to sit down in a chair when you could run around. And I think part of it is just, we just don't think it's going to happen. But guess what? It is if you're lucky. And so I realised that I was really apprehensive. Just sort of this free floating, probably not as strong as dread. But I started to look into it and researching longevity because I'm a nerd and interviewing people over 80 and just realised in a very short time, I want to say weeks, it was probably months, but that almost everything I knew about getting older was way off base, not nuanced enough, too negative or flat out wrong.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:03:06

And I just got a b in my bonnet about why we only hear one side of the story. Because I started to feel a lot better about getting older, not whitewashing, not looking at, just the happy facts. And I just thought, everyone's living longer. We need to have the full picture in front of us.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:03:24

I mean, that's. It's the negativity surrounding ageing that got me. I couldn't believe comments that were just glibly being made by people when I was working in the newsroom and I'm a newbie on the block, I've only been really looking at it for the last five years, and I've learned so much from you. I read your book, a manifesto against ageism. What made you actually want to put pen to paper? Did you feel so strongly about what you were seeing?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:03:50

You're asking me these questions that if I should say, oh, I was compelled. I was dreading writing another book. Writing a book is the hardest thing I've ever done. And I thought this time around, I thought, oh, I will just be a modern idea person and I'll just blog and tweet and never have to write another damn book. But books change things. And enough people said, you got to write a book. That I did write another book, and I'm very glad that I did. I couldn't find a publisher had an option on it.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:04:22

I figured they would pay me a lot of money for this one. And they actually said to me in the. We had a big meeting, I got a fancy agent, blah, blah, and the editor looked at me and said with a straight face, we're concerned that no one else is writing about, about this.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:04:36

Exactly.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:04:37

As our jaws drop. And I knew it was all over right then and there. And instead of saying, are you effing kidding me? I managed to croak. Well, I think you should see that as a feature, not a bug. But I ended up self publishing because I couldn't get the kind of offer that I thought it deserved. And I wasn't asking millions, but take it seriously. Yeah. I self published with the help of my partner, who has worked in electronic publishing his whole life.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:05:05

So I had huge assist there. And then two years later, sold the rights to a new division of Macmillan.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:05:12

Right. But what an incredible achievement, because, I mean, the Washington Post, they actually said that it was one of the best books that people needed to read at any age.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:05:22

Yeah, it's a really good book, and I wish that I have no regrets. If I were younger, I just turned 70, about to turn 72. So I started this when I was in my mid fifty s. I would have held onto the rights, but I got tired of carting books around. I would have liked the review attention. It's a snobby business, and if it's a self published book or it's not new, people won't review it. But I've never had much or any institutional support for what I'm doing. But some british person wrote me once, she said, you just keep beavering away.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:06:00

And I thought that was the perfect verb. I am persistent by nature, luckily. And it just gets more interesting all the time.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:06:10

And you're getting your message heard, which is brilliant. So if we go back to sort of, we're talking about your book, writing about ageism, but what is ageism? I mean, that's the age old question. And it doesn't just affect old people, does it?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:06:24

No. Often people say, oh, I know this old person. They'll love to hear what you have to say. Or, I sell things to old people and you're perfect for us, and I'm glad and I'm grateful and I am perfect for them, of course. But ageism is stereotyping prejudice on the basis of age. The World Health Organisation writes, it's how we think, feel and act about age and ageing, which I love. We are being ageist. Anytime we make an assumption about someone or a group of people on the basis of how old we think they are, and it can be too young in quotes, air quotes around that, as well as too old, especially for women.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:07:06

Women are never the right age. First we're too cute and pretty to be taken seriously, and then we're too sexy, and then, boom, we're not sexy anymore. So it's, of course, a social construct. I think people are starting to know what the word is. Robert Butler, wonderful physician, coined the term in the 60s in the US to piggyback alongside racism and sexism, as it was during the heyday of the mainstream civil rights and women's movements.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:07:36

But I think in England in particular, well, in Great Britain, a lot of people, if you start trying to talk about ageism, you're sort of the whinger, the moaner, the old woman in the workplace who maybe didn't quite get where she wanted to get to. You don't seem to have a voice. And that was one thing that I found came alongside this recognition of ageism, and feeling of ageism was being voiceless.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:08:02

Yeah, there's so many ironies here. I mean, ageing is the one universal human experience. Ageism is the one prejudice that every human encounters. And one of the reasons I'm optimistic about the work that I do is that I think in some way that we have, perhaps, that we have yet to leverage. Maybe that's just a creepy, transactional way of putting it, but we can come together around this experience. It is the first form of prejudice that many white men encounter, and their first encounter with what everyone else, every woman, every queer person, every disabled person, every black or brown person, grows up knowing that the world has prejudice and stereotypes around what we are capable of. And so I think there is enormous power, at least in the abstract, around the universal nature of this experience, that we could come to the table to address that. What drives me nuts is an attitude on the part of younger, progressive people, some of them, that somehow ageism is like prejudice, light li t e, or it's less important.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:09:13

And first of all, it is a mugs game to compare any form of prejudice to any other. It's a losing battle because it frames it as zero sum when the opposite is true. When we work against any form of bias and oppression, we chip away at the fear and ignorance that underlie them all. And in order to uproot ageism, we're going to have to uproot in particular ableism, which is stigma around physical and mental function, because we confuse the two, but also sexism, because ageing is gendered. Also racism, because it denies to so many black and brown people the chance to age at all. I'm still untangling this idea, but I think the issue with the younger progressives is they conflate ageing with privilege. And indeed you need privilege to age. But that is the problem.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:10:09

It should be possible for all of us. The mission of old school, which is an organisation that I run with two other wonderful colleagues, old school info, it's a repository of ageing resources and a gathering place, is to help everyone live long and live well. And so we need to work to disentangle this idea of ageing as privilege, to focus on the barriers that make it a privilege, because that's the problem.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:10:37

But I think we do need to have far more intergenerational discussion to address that problem. I think during COVID in particular, the old and young seemed to be pitted against each other in lots of conversations about how we needed to behave when Covid was at its height.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:10:55

That's what prejudice does. That is the function of prejudice to pit working moms against stay at home moms, to pit polish workers against italian factory workers. When we fall for that over and over, it's divide and conquer, and it's a huge problem. Siobhan, you're right that we live in such an age segregated society, especially in the US.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:11:14

Well, I try and say when I'm giving my talks that I'm trying to stop younger people fearing getting old and encouraging older people to live their best lives and the most positive lives. And I sort of want the younger ones to see that, to have a chat with the older ones, say, how do you think it's going to be when you get old? What do you think the reality is going to be like? And you're going to be the older people of the future. What are you going to do to change it? And they still seem quite reticent to acknowledge how profound this problem is.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:11:48

I mean, I would have a less abstract goal in those conversations. I would say just try and seek out people deliberately who are older or younger than you, because to do so is itself a radical act in a very segregated society, just like it was to mix black and white earlier in the 20th century in the United States. So it is brave and it changes things. But not to talk about ageing and whether you like it or not, there are old people who are cranky as hell and don't like being old. Talk about fishing. Talk about the novel you read. Talk about why you hate dog people. I mean, it doesn't matter.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:12:25

Talk about all the things you would talk about, and you might not like that person or you might like them, but you're not going to like them or not like them because of how old they are. You're going to like them or not like them because of all the other things that shape affinity, background and whether all the things that make you drawn to a person or not. And age has much, much less to do with that than we think it does. I couldn't agree with you more that it is essential that we come together in groups of all ages just because segregation of any sort sanctions discrimination and sanctions isolation. And I think if older people and younger people are in more contact, I think it's really, really important for older people because we do live in a youth obsessed society where older people do become less visible and less heard to be reminded that being young is hard, right? I don't know anyone who would actually go back to their youth. And likewise, I think if young women in particular, and perhaps it's a problem that I see it through somewhat of a gendered lens, but there's all this messaging that if you're 30 and God forbid, 40, you might as well just pull over the road and shoot yourself how much we enjoy being the age we are and what a source of power and pleasure it is. So I don't think you have to be talking about how much you like being old. I think you can talk about whatever the heck you feel like talking about.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:13:57

It's simply being around people who are different from us. Different sexual orientation, different background, different everything that expands our view of what it is to be human and what we have in common and what we don't.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:14:11

Which is exactly why I've put together this podcast, retirement Rebel Life after 60, is because I want to have that platform to expand what people think. I want to show the reality. I want them to hear the reality of what women in their sixty s, seventy s, eighty s, ninety s and beyond are actually thinking and saying and how they're living, so that the younger generation have got examples of what it is. And hopefully that will lessen the fear. And it will also get people talking positively about being lessen the fear defect.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:14:41

Though I say, I guarantee that reading my book will make you feel better about the rest of your life, which I do, or your money back. But part of that, if I was being completely honest, which of course I shouldn't be, is because our picture of late life is so grim, so that anything seems like an improvement. But looking at the thing that scares us always makes it less fearsome, even if you are staring down a terrifying medical diagnosis. Better to have the facts than because the monsters of our nightmares are always more terrible than the actualities. And especially when it comes to ageing, because we only hear one side of the story. I don't love the term positive floating around in this context. I think there are days when you wake up and it's hard and everything hurts. Life is hard.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:15:32

We need both sides of the story.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:15:34

But even if life is hard, you can try and find the positives out of it. It doesn't lessen how hard it is. And that's basically what I'm saying. Out of adversity can come opportunity. I was broken in my mid fifty s and now approaching my mid 60s. I'm the happiest I've ever been. But that's because I ripped up the rulebook and I thought, I'm not going to age the way that everybody thinks I should age, much to the shock of all my friends. I got rid of the security of a home, I got rid of the security of possessions and hit the road.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:16:06

I've rewritten my own rulebook to do it because I was not going to be fearful.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:16:12

Yeah. I mean, one of the massive data sets that I bumped into early on is the one that underlies this u curve, or in Britspeak, it's ubend of happiness, which shows that people are happiest in their childhood and in later life, and that in midlife, when we are wrestling with the most amount of financial responsibilities, typically most amount of caring responsibilities, we're also supposed to be saving for retirement and ramping up our careers, I think, and dealing as humans with the fact that we might not ever get to the moon or be a ballerina. It's a really hard time and one of the things that makes it hard is the presumption that it's all going to get worse. Right, because you're just going to get older and that's going to be awful. And that's not the case. I want to urge people not to that. There's a lot about how a positive attitude towards ageing helps you, and I'm happy to talk about all the effects of ageist stereotypes and thinking on our mental and physical well being. There's just more and more data all the time.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:17:18

But I like to frame that as an accurate attitude towards ageing. That's what we need. We need to understand the ods of what's ahead, not put on a happy face and think that no matter what evils lie ahead, we can sing our way out of them.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:17:32

One of the big problems I've encountered personally, and I'm well aware of, is ageism in the workplace and it not being spoken about, people being fearful of losing their jobs. Your organisation, the old school ageism clearinghouse that you set up, has got lots of tools to enable people to try and address this problem, because it is a problem. And so many people. Oh, no, I don't see ageism. They dare, didn't call it out, they dared and acknowledge it, because they're fearful of their own careers. But what needs to be done to change those attitudes in the workplace? Because in England, you can't get your pension out till you're nearly 70. They used to retire at 60, put up with a couple of years of ageism but retire at 60, get the pension, it was okay, but now they've got 1520 years of this toxic environment.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:18:21

It's problematic to speak as though everyone is facing the same things. There are people who have jobs that they loathe. I have a friend who's a public school teacher. She's done it for 40 years. She can't wait to retire so she can go make music, which she's wanted to do. What the problem is mandatory retirement. And certainly age bias in the workforce, which is paired with gender bias, which is paired with bias against disability, and the presumption, the maddening stereotype that older people can't handle technology, which is total. No evidence for that.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:18:52

No evidence for that.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:18:53

I know. But in the workplace, often people are denied going on courses, career opportunities, all because there's this presumption that they wouldn't know how to deal with it.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:19:04

Right? And if you can't get your foot in the door, if you even get an interview and it's over in the minute you turn on your camera or come in the door, that's a terrible problem. But I would answer your question by saying that we can't undo ageism in the workplace or anywhere else in the dating scene, in healthcare without fundamental culture change. And that is why I do the work. I do the idea behind old school, which is a repository of hundreds of carefully vetted, all free, accept the books, resources of all types about what ageism is, how it's manifest in different settings, how ageist language, ageism in the workplace, podcasts, animations, campaigns, you name it. This movement is new, and wouldn't it be amazing if all the good stuff could be found in one place? So my advice would be to people to go look at the site, oldschool info and noodle around. It's searchable by topic, there's lots of different media, so it depends on how you learn and what you're interested in. The first step for anyone is to examine our own attitudes towards age and ageing, because we can't do anything. Most bias is unconscious, and we can't do anything about it if we're not aware of it.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:20:23

You said people saying, I don't see age. It reminds me of people saying, I don't see race. And the little I'm colorblind. The formulation on that, which I didn't come up with, which I found so useful, is that if you don't see race, you don't see racism. And we do see colour, we do see age, and they are important key aspects of each of our identities. And we shouldn't pretend that's not the case. The part we need to work on is attributing a value, right? A hierarchy, to how dark your skin is, to how elastic your skin is. All those things so that we need to train ourselves to unlearn and think about differently.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:21:01

And that starts between our ears for each of us. And then once you see it in yourself, which is uncomfortable, boom, automatically you start to see it in the world. That's what consciousness raising is. And then you see, oh, it's not that I'm a flawed human, although we all are. It's that this stuff is embedded in the systems around us, and that means that we can come together and do something about it.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:21:26

I find myself tripping myself up sometimes. I'm a pro age campaigner. And then I'll say something, I think, oh, my goodness, that's ageist. And I try so hard.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:21:34

Thank you for acknowledging that I do it all. The a young person will forget something or not remember the name of the movie they saw. And I'm like, ha. See, you can't remember anything either. And then I'm like, oh, Ashton, that was not your most elevated moment.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:21:46

We've touched on the fact that healthcare is ageist. What are the problems within the healthcare and health systems to do with ageism?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:21:54

Right. Well, again, for a really comprehensive answer to that, go to old school, old school info and enter healthcare, and you will see dozens of reports and podcasts and stuff exactly about that. Ageism is embedded in all the systems around us, especially in healthcare, because it is a certainty that your body will work less well as you age. It's mental. Loss of cognition is not inevitable, but our bodies work less well. It's not an irony. It's a fact that the one thing that all older people have in common is some loss of physical function. The problem is when we equate the two most doctors.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:22:34

Healthcare deals with more older people because of this. So it is understandable, if not excusable, that they conflate. They think older people are frail. They assume that at your age, what do you expect? If you ever have a health professional who says, at your age, what do you expect? It is time to find a new doctor, because there's no such thing as an age at which x, y, or z sets in, and you and I might get condition x, but because you are an athlete and I am a couch potato, it is a terrible loss to you, and I don't even notice it. I may have money to.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:23:10

I love being called an athlete, I.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:23:12

May have the money to go to an experienced physio person and you might not have the assets, so I will heal faster than you. And also, there's loads of other people our exact age who can do that thing better than us, and loads of others who don't want to do it or are unable to do it. So generalising by age is always a mistake. And in healthcare, it's really important to call it out because there is no. I would like. One of the many thought experiments I would like to see is have your age be on page two of your medical charts, so that a physician coming in and they are really good at diagnosing people just by how you look and how you walk across the room and your skin tone and have them form their initial impression of you without knowing your age. And I don't mean to be critical of healthcare people, I would like the same of dating sites. It is true of any of us.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:24:08

The minute you know my age, all sorts of associations click into place. We are humans, we put things in categories. But the longer we can defer that, the better, because then we have to rely on a more complicated but authentic set of indicators of whether this person is politically conservative or not, whether they'd like to go for a hike tomorrow morning, or they might not be physically able to, or they might be older than you and far fitter than you. We just don't know until we find out.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:24:38

When you talk about the medical profession assessing you just by looking at you, one of the things that struck me very early on, when it was getting on my radar, that I wanted to be more proactive with challenging ageist attitudes, was the images that were used to represent how we were ageing were just outrageous. I did not see any women like me coming back at me in advertising, the media and working in the media. I can say there are not enough older women on screen.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:25:12

Well, what you are doing, which is wonderful, is increasing representation of older voices, women in particular, because women are underrepresented and then women of colour even less represented and so on. We know these things, so it is really important to make a space for that and then bring people who are, we hear from less into the conversation and be conscious about that. You're absolutely right. But I will say there has been enormous progress. And again, I hope I don't sound like I'm pimping old school. I do not make any money from this, but if you enter image in the search, you will see there are now several image banks, including a terrific one, created by the Centre for Ageing Better, which is based in the UK and which just launched a national anti ageism campaign, by the way. But lots of image banks. The Centre for ageing better's images are free.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:26:04

There is a hashtag that entertains me. No more wrinkly know calling out when any picture about ageing, it could be some wonderful news. But the photo is either the gnarled hands on the cane and there's nothing wrong with gnarled hands. Mine are getting pretty gnarled. They remind me of my mother's now all the time. Or the sad. My least favourite, the sad old lady looking out through the rain streaked window at life. Yes.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:26:30

You've seen her, haven't you?

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:26:32

Well, when I was a journalist for over 30 years, one of the things that we were taught very early on was, if you're going to do a story that's representing older people, try and pick anonymous images or parts of their anatomy just in case they pass away and we wouldn't upset their relatives. I mean, it was a ridiculous excuse for just using inappropriate images.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:26:56

Yeah, but we now, I have to say, social media is really handy calling this stuff out. We do have platforms now, others, tribes.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:27:04

Of women, and that's what I love. And I've taken part in campaigns where I've held up a sign that's saying, this is what 64 looks like, to try and encourage us to be more representative of how we're actually ageing. But you mentioned there the amazing campaign by the Centre for Ageing Better. I'm just so thrilled that that has been launched.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:27:26

It's called age without limits and the website is agewithoutlimits.org.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:27:31

Yeah, and everybody should get on board. There's a questionnaire there. So that's asking people how ageists they are. Hopefully, it'll just make people start to think and it'll get the conversation going. And that's the important thing, isn't it?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:27:44

Yeah. It's a three part campaign and the first just launched and it's so exciting to see it on billboards and bus shelters, really out there saying, are you ageist? Which reflects on what I was saying 5 minutes ago. The first step is to look at your own attitudes towards age and ageing. Because we have been bombarded with mainly negative messages from childhood on, and unless we stop to question them, they become part of our identity unconsciously. So it is unpleasant to realise, like, oh, crap, I have all this bias inside me, but it is really liberating. That falls right on the heels of that is this sense of, oh, I see now that I've been brainwashed to some degree, and I can do something about that, and that's very empowering.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:28:32

I think the fact that it is a three part campaign is good because you don't want to just bombard people straight away with everything you do want them to stop and think, and what is it? What is ageism? And am.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:28:46

You know, I think there's a lot mean. It's complicated, especially in the US, which is so individualist oriented and so, quote unquote, independence oriented. And neither of those attitudes are our friend in life in general. But especially as we age, there's an assumption that we can, if we eat enough kale, and this is, of course, only if you are wealthy enough to have these options, do enough sit ups, have enough purpose, capital p, you have to want to cure cancer or something, that it will all be okay. And those assumptions are, no matter how wealthy or even lucky you happen to be, there are many aspects of our ageing that are not within our control. But we can do our best. And we all know that you need to exercise and you need to not live off processed food, et cetera. But one thing we can control is our attitudes.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:29:43

And you know this because of the work that you do, helping people see ageing in a more nuanced and positive way. And study after study shows that attitudes towards ageing affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. Most of the research has been done by a woman named Becca Levy at Yale, who is just fantastic. And her latest study, I love quoting the study, that shows that people with these, I say more accurate attitudes, not more positive attitudes. They're more positive because we used to be so terrified. But simply who have learned about what ageing actually involves. For most people, they are less likely to get Alzheimer's, even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease. Right.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:30:31

Knowing more, it's stress. The problem here is stress. We know all the way stress is bad for us. If you can't find your glasses and you go, and it's a terrible fear. I am not mocking that fear. Oh, my God. This is probably the first sign of dementia. That's super stressful.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:30:49

That stress makes you more, literally more vulnerable to exactly what you fear. If you think, God damn it, where are my glasses? I must have left them behind the fridge again. Or I need to buy a couple of extra pairs of cheap reading glasses and strew them about the house.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:31:06

Oh, I do that right.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:31:07

Well, we all do or whatever. We have our strategies. I use postits. I do forget when I stand up and forget why I stood up. And it's aggravating, but momentarily. That's why God invented postits. Or I sit back down and then it comes to me again. And guess what? Young people do forget things all the time.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:31:27

Yeah, definitely. But I mean, I love the fact that the campaign for the centre of ageing better is getting people to think about ageism. I mean, my mission with this podcast is to dig deeper into the thoughts and attitudes surrounding ageism, and just so that we can all challenge it together. I want to hear from positive.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:31:48

Social change is hard.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:31:49

Yeah, well, so if the more positive and vibrant people I know not positive, more accurate, I'm going to try and change that slightly.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:31:58

You do? You? I do think it's also really important to show people with disabilities, people who use canes. I have heard these stories firsthand from doctors and seen them myself, people who refuse to use canes or walkers, because the stigma is so great, even if it means staying home. I have a friend who is. He is a vain man. He's diagnosed with Parkinson's. He moves incredibly slowly. He falls all the time. And it has taken a year for his wife to get him to use his wife and kids.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:32:37

They keep giving him canes, he keeps losing them. And in fairness, he's not used to using a cane. And also, it takes a little while of using a cane to get the hang of using a cane. I understand that. But the last time we saw them, he came in the room and she was carrying the cane. I'm a little intolerant of that. It's true, because he aggravates me, which is, I need to work on that. But we also need to represent in our portraits of people who are ageing well, people who are experiencing reduced physical function, dealing with chronic illness, because we age well, not by avoiding those things, but by adapting to them.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:33:21

And that is the key thing. It's adapting, isn't it? When I'm talking to people about what I've done, and yes, I'm lucky that I'm physically able to do it, and I've got the finances to do what I'm doing. And I do appreciate that. But I say to them, just to age positively and to be alive and to feel alive, it helps your mental attitude and things that I used to do when I was a child, like lying down and looking at the clouds and just taking in the feeling of just peace and happiness and calm. I stopped doing for over 40 years. And now I've started doing it again. You don't need to have to be climbing mountains.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:33:57

No, I mean, that's another. There's all this conversation around how we need a sense of purpose and how older people want to give back. And all that is true, but there's a certain class bias to it in order to want to help out at the local library. I mean, it tends to be a very privileged discourse about people who have pensions and are able to donate their time to things. And I know that elder poverty is an issue in the US. There are people who do not have the freedom to sit back and smell the roses. But as we get older, for the most part, we get better at exactly what you just described, of taking in the positive moment, of becoming, feeling like we can inhabit the present moment more. And that is an absolute gift.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:34:50

I mean, I feel turning 70 was a thing, not in a terrified way, but that's a big number. And I realised that I feel a little less driven. I'm every bit as ambitious, but I am better at stopping. I'm not exactly a very Zen person, as you can probably tell, but these are changes, not for everyone, but that accompany ageing, that are very welcome and that enable us to worry less, for the most part. Now, if you are sick, if you have no money, if your daughter is ill, you have been dealing with a hurt child, of course you're going to worry. No one is ever free of this. But if we are lucky, and in the great majority, ageing confers the ability to adapt and absorb and take the long view. Stanford Longevity Centre did a study right at the beginning of the pandemic.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:35:42

They had good timing because they had set it up before the pandemic struck. That showed that despite dying in greater numbers, despite being more isolated, older people were more resilient during the thick of the pandemic. Simply not because we're angels, not because we're wise, because we have lived through more stuff and we interesting. The knowledge that we will probably get through this broken heart, whatever it is, is accessible to know. That's. That's a huge gift.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:36:13

One of the things I love about you, and I follow you on instagram, is that you regularly respond to queries from people about whether a scenario is ageist. And I've learned an awful lot from that, from situations that you've described, that when I hear the initial question, I think, oh, well, no, it's not. And then you go into detail and you unpack it. How do you feel about people approaching you and asking you to be able to unpick things, that you're able to be a kind of authority on ageism.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:36:42

I'm honoured that they want my opinion. Truthfully, anytime someone asks me to speak, I'm flattered that people want to hear what I have to say. That's online, I should say. I have a blog called, literally, yoisthisageist.com, and you can send in a question or an image. I think hard about those. They are often ethics questions. If I have learned anything, there is no what is the right answer for me is an answer that might not work for you, or you might have a very, totally different answer for a totally legitimate reason. So these are just my takes on the question.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:37:20

But because ageism is so unexamined, people don't know. Which is why I created the blog and modelled it with permission, on yo is this racist? Because we're awkward talking about race and we're really ignorant talking about age. So it gives you a chance. And I work very hard on the answers.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:37:40

Now, the global.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:37:41

And I try and be funny.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:37:42

No, you are. And I don't always agree, to be honest. Like you said, I don't always agree totally, but I've learned a lot from it and I enjoy it. I do find it very interesting.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:37:51

And when you're thinking about why you don't agree, you are thinking in a very high level about what it means to you. And that's the kind of analysis the point is not that you agree with me, the point is that you think about what age means to you and what it means in society, and you're going to arrive at a different place than I, because there are no rights or wrongs. And you're different than I am.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:38:13

Yeah, and that's it. But that ageism, it is there. I mean, a global report by who, I think that showed the extent of ageism, really, one in two people have ageist attitudes they don't realise. But that report by who showed that?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:38:28

Well, I'm sure it's actually two out of two. But I love pointing out that it is the World Health Organisation that launched a global campaign to combat ageism in 2021, which, when they were a little busy, right, they had a global pandemic to deal with. It's not the world old people organisation, it's not about oldness, it's about health. And they realised that the single most important thing they could do to increase health span, our percentage of years spent in relatively good health, along with lifespan, was to address bias between our ears and not clean water, not vaccines, not physical therapy, not religion. Age bias. So that, to me, is the most telling fact of all about how pervasive this is. But how I haven't even pitched. Learning to think more accurately about age is good for your health.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:39:20

You'll live longer, you'll live better.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:39:22

Nobody's true. But I think we clutter our lives with possessions, with ideas that we need all this thing and that these are going to make us feel better. Going to the gym. Yes, all those enhance the way that we live. But if we can really improve our ageist attitudes with these campaigns, and by having discussions and having platforms like this, having the tools that you're making available, then we will live better lives longer.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:39:50

I mean, I sometimes think about as a little girl, I used to jump onto my bed from as far away as possible because of the monster under the bed. Obviously, that was going to grab my ankles. And there are monsters. There are only two inevitable bad things about ageing, but they are real. People you have known all your life are going to die, and those are real losses, and parts of your body are going to work less well, and none of that is desirable. And it's important to acknowledge that there are those monsters, if you will, but looking at them makes them less fearful, fearsome, and equips us then to address them as best we can. And also the monster that you look at is never, ever as scary and awful as the one you imagine.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:40:40

But those monsters can rear their ugly heads at any age. My sister died at 53. Absolutely. My brother died at 53, my dad died at 50. So those have all contributed to me wanting to grab life and run with it and do it the best way that I can in honour of them, really, to live life for them.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:40:58

And then there are people whose relatives lived to be 100, but spent much of them incapacitated or unhappy. So it works in all the directions. I mean, it's fantastic that you are setting a higher record, but that's where you drew inspiration, is to get you have more life than they got, to make more of it.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:41:18

But I also get inspiration from younger women. My daughter's 35 and talking to some of her friends the way they're as excited about what I'm doing as I am, because they can see the possibilities for them when they get older.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:41:34

And we've come full circle too. Spending time with people of all ages. Think of something you like to do and find a mixed age group to do it with. If we spent more time with young people, we would be reminded of how hard it is to be young, right? And we would be especially young women who are just on instagram. There are preteens doing videos and I don't think there is many of them as we think there are, because they get a lot of traffic. But talking about their wrinkle prevention skincare regimen and their twelveth. So capitalism, if we can make age a problem, we can sell remedies, air quotes around the remedies to stop it. Good luck with that.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:42:25

Or cure it. Good luck with that. Ageing is not a disease.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:42:29

But I also think that they tap into the insecurities to human nature's insecurities. The body shop here in Great Britain has announced that it's no longer putting antiaging on any of the publicity for its products. And there are more and more cosmetic companies like Studio Ten and a few others that are actually promoting pro age products. And that warms my heart. But do you think we'll ever get to a situation where we're not as ageist?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:43:00

Yeah, I know we are. There's no doubt about it. How often have you seen ageist or ageism in a headline last year compared to the year before?

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:43:10

Yeah, a lot more.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:43:11

Much more. Now people say there's more ageism. I disagree. Like people said, the pandemic made ageism worse. I disagree. I think it brought ageing out of the dark corners into the middle of the room. And what has been there all know all the discourse about the presidential candidates in the United States being too old. Almost all of those articles start with, I know this is ageist, but.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:43:42

Or is this ageism? I mean, granted, I am listening to the more progressive end of the spectrum, but still, that's huge progress. We'll know we've gotten somewhere where people don't say, I mean, they talk about everyday ageism. Well, we don't talk about everyday racism. It's not okay, we're not where we need to get, but we'll never get there. We're never going to eliminate all bias. Humans are tribal. I think that's what you are getting at. We do invest in hierarchies of human value and that is a horrible human trait exploited by political systems and by capitalism.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:44:16

So we're up against plenty, but we're making enormous progress.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:44:22

But you taught there about racism and lots of legislation had to come into play to really combat the whole problem of racism. And there's still a long way to go.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:44:32

But it. Agreed. Agreed. But it is human behaviour. It is people in the streets that provoke policy change and behaviour change not the other way around. Common assumption. My first book was about women who initiated their divorces. And people thought that in the US, the no fault divorce laws which started happening in the 70s were once there were.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:44:57

Once the laws were on the book, more women started filing for divorce. It's the reverse. People pushed for change, social change, and then gradually the legal system and policy networks adapted to change that people demanded. That's how it works.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:45:15

Do you think then we will ultimately get legislation in place? More legislation in place than to combat mean.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:45:22

There is legislation in the US passed.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:45:26

It doesn't work. It doesn't seem to work in Great.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:45:28

Britain because people have to embody those changes and demand that behaviour in the systems around them reflect those changes. I mean, it's not legal to discriminate by race. The elder Justice act was passed by Congress a decade ago. Guess what? They've never bothered to fund know. But still, getting the legislation passed was a start. Now we need to demand funding. We are talking about massive social change and it's important at every level to. What's the old song? Be the change.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:45:58

You hope to see each of us. If you hear something in this interview or read something in my book which costs money, but I make all my ideas available for free on my website, thischairrocks.com. Learn one thing that changes at the smallest thing about how you see yourself at a given age, and not necessarily even as an older person, and carry that knowledge out into the world, you change the world. I mean, a perfect example that I know is familiar to every woman and I suspect to men as well. You can be all dressed to the nines, but not like the way you look, or be in a bad mood, or mad at the person you're with and you don't feel good in the world. You can be wearing an old house robe and fluffy slippers, but feel sexy, feel good, feel energised, and you will change the room when you walk into it. When we change any aspect of our thinking, it radiates outward. Maybe you stop buying ages birthday cards.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:46:59

Maybe when a friend says, oh, I'm too old for that, you say, wait, what do you actually mean? You might be too smart for that, you might be too lazy for that. But it's never about age, because someone else your age is out there doing it right. So that changes the world. You can't start too small and you can't start too late. And it's in our hands.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:47:23

I love that phrase. You don't feel good in the world. For most of my life, even though I've got this confident sounding voice. I had a great job with the BBC and I think I succeeded as a single mum. I didn't feel good in the world. Something changed when I hit 60, and when I hit the road and I was exploring Scotland and I ran to the top of the hill and I screamed on the side of a lock and got rid of lots of emotions and stuff, something changed where I found my voice, I found my warrior, and I feel good in the world, and that's a nice place to be, and that's where I want more older women to feel. But my 60s have given me that.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:48:02

I mean, the pandemic did help us come together across distance. And so many groups of older women, and I do see this through a gendered lens, have emerged because we are raised to not feel good about ourselves, because dissatisfaction is profitable, because we can then be sold things to make us happy, like another million pieces of clothing. Or we can be exploited because we are pitted against another group that we see has more, has what we want, or has higher status. So those systems are in place, they are powerful, and they don't want us to be happy, because for those reasons. And so for older women in particular, often it is a liberation that comes at a cost that many wish they didn't have to pay, which is to become less admired in conventional terms, to become less visible in conventional terms. But we need to change that too, of course. But that is liberating. I mean, you often see it in terms of older women giving fewer f's, right? And to be liberated from what the world thinks of you, if that opinion is that you were never good enough, thin enough, blonde enough, perky enough, is massively liberating.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:49:17

Yeah, totally, totally agree with you. And just a final question that I ask all my guests, because I myself call myself a retirement rebel. I just wondered, when's the last time that you personally ever felt like a rebel?

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:49:32

I feel like it all the time. I think that my work has always sort of swum against the cultural current. Writing a book in the early 80s saying it's better to leave an unhappy marriage than to stay hostage to it, which was written. My manifesto against ageism is for everyone. This was a book about the divorce book, was a book about women's experiences. This was at the time where people saying, if you single moms, children would fail, you would suffer devastating economic consequences. Often the case, and not to excuse them, but not a reason to stay in a relationship where you are being exploited and exploited by these big forces, not because it's not an anti man book, but it is a book about how it is hard to have an egalitarian relationship in a society that values men and women differently. Right? So you always have to zoom out and look at the structures.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:50:30

So that was contrary to the mainstream. But I'm lucky. I had for many, many years a half time job that enabled me to do this ageism work on my own. And then eventually, just as I retired from that, sorry. God, I can't believe I said that as I quit that job when I was turning 65 because I became eligible for Medicare here, which is finally, you live long enough, you do get single payer health care. So those things enabled me to work on my own. I am very lucky that I don't have to. If someone doesn't hire me because I'm too old, I never know it.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:51:11

Yeah.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:51:13

So I am insulated from a lot of the buffeting that people who have to make their way in the conventional job market and dating market. I also have a partner, so I'm very lucky that way. So I've been able to say what I want to say without worrying about whether I wouldn't get the job. And that helps you be brave.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:51:36

Thank you so much for joining me today and talking to me. And continue being a rebel for as long as you can and challenging ageing strategies. So if anybody wants to read your book or make use of your tools, just remind us again of the name of your book, where they can get it and where they can access the tools.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:51:53

Right. Well, Ashton Applewhite, if you can't find me, you're not trying hard enough, because I think there's now another one of me. I think there are a young kid in the south somewhere. So, Ashton Applewhite, the book is called this chair rocks, a manifesto against ageism. My website is thischairrocks.com and you can find a link there to yo is this ageist? You can see my main blog where I have been thinking out loud for 15 years. You can find, for example, all this information about ageism and health if you search under health or dementia or levy. And you can find, if you're wondering who that person was that I referenced about health, go to oldschool info, do the same thing. All these things are there as well.

Ashton Applewhite [: 00:52:39

Redundancy on purpose. Almost everything is a free download. And I also am pretty active on social media, as at thischair rocks on Instagram. I haven't weaned myself away from Twitter, same and LinkedIn, Facebook blah, blah, thischair rocks. Or Applewhite, go find me.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:52:57

I hope you enjoyed that conversation I had with Ashton Applewhite as much as I did. But I wanted to take a moment to reflect on it and to share with you what I'm going to take away from it. It hit home to me that ageism is a global problem and it's affecting predominantly women, both physically and mentally. And until we address it, we're never going to have fulfilled lives as we get older. For me, it heightened the need to get the conversation going about ageism so that we can truly eradicate ageist attitudes. And that conversation needs to be with young people and old people together and campaigns like the one that's just been launched by the Centre for Ageing Better in Britain. Age without limits is what we need to challenge us to ask ourselves, do we have ageist attitudes? I mean, so many of us don't realise our everyday conversations can be ageist. For example, we'll say to somebody, you look good for your age.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:53:54

You don't need for your age, you just need to say, you look good. So it's made me even more determined to create a retirement rebel community and to hear from you what we need to do to transform society's attitudes. Next week, I'm looking forward to speaking to Barbara Scully. She's an irish journalist and broadcaster in her 60s who's written a book about the wisdom and power of older women called wise up. That should be a good chat. Thank you so much for joining me on today's retirement rebel Life after 60. I'm truly grateful for your time and your willingness to embark on this journey with me. If today's conversation sparks something within you or if you've your own rebel story to share, I'd love to hear from you.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:54:41

Please reach out through our social media channels or email and let's keep the conversation going. Email us on podcast at retirementrebel Co, UK. And remember, if you found value in our time together today, consider sharing this episode with a friend who might also enjoy and benefit from our retirement rebel community. Spreading the word helps us grow and continue to challenge the narrative around life after 60. All of our details can be found on Retirementrebel Co, UK. Retirement Rebel Life after 60 is written and hosted by me, Siobhan Daniels and produced by the incredibly talented Matt Cheney. Join me again next week for another episode mode. Until then, keep embracing your inner rebel and living life to the fullest.

Siobhan Daniels [: 00:55:30

Bye for now.