演讲者：Ashton Applewhite · Author, activist
It's not the passage of time that makes it so hard to get older. It's ageism, a prejudice that pits us against our future selves -- and each other. Ashton Applewhite urges us to dismantle the dread and mobilize against the last socially acceptable prejudice. "Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured," she says. "It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all."
This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.
00:12
What's one thing that every person in this room is going to become? Older. And most of us are scared stiff at the prospect. How does that word make you feel? I used to feel the same way. What was I most worried about? Ending up drooling in some grim institutional hallway. And then I learned that only four percent of older Americans are living in nursing homes, and the percentage is dropping.What else was I worried about? Dementia. Turns out that most of us can think just fine to the end.Dementia rates are dropping, too. The real epidemic is anxiety over memory loss.
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I also figured that old people were depressed because they were old and they were going to die soon.
00:57
00:59
It turns out that the longer people live, the less they fear dying, and that people are happiest at the beginnings and the end of their lives. It's called the U-curve of happiness, and it's been borne out by dozens of studies around the world. You don't have to be a Buddhist or a billionaire. The curve is a function of the way aging itself affects the brain.
01:18
So I started feeling a lot better about getting older, and I started obsessing about why so few people know these things. The reason is ageism: discrimination and stereotyping on the basis of age. We experience it anytime someone assumes we're too old for something, instead of finding out who we are and what we're capable of, or too young. Ageism cuts both ways. All -isms are socially constructed ideas -- racism, sexism, homophobia -- and that means we make them up, and they can change over time. All these prejudices pit us against each other to maintain the status quo, like auto workers in the US competing against auto workers in Mexico instead of organizing for better wages.
02:05
02:07
We know it's not OK to allocate resources by race or by sex. Why should it be OK to weigh the needs of the young against the old? All prejudice relies on "othering" -- seeing a group of people as other than ourselves: other race, other religion, other nationality. The strange thing about ageism: that other is us. Ageism feeds on denial -- our reluctance to acknowledge that we are going to become that older person. It's denial when we try to pass for younger or when we believe in anti-aging products, or when we feel like our bodies are betraying us, simply because they are changing. Why on earth do we stop celebrating the ability to adapt and grow as we move through life? Why should aging well mean struggling to look and move like younger versions of ourselves? It's embarrassing to be called out as older until we quit being embarrassed about it, and it's not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. The sooner we get off this hamster wheel of age denial, the better off we are.
03:13
Stereotypes are always a mistake, of course, but especially when it comes to age, because the longer we live, the more different from one another we become. Right? Think about it. And yet, we tend to think of everyone in a retirement home as the same age: old --
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when they can span four decades. Can you imagine thinking that way about a group of peoplebetween the ages of 20 and 60?
03:36
When you get to a party, do you head for people your own age? Have you ever grumbled about entitled millennials? Have you ever rejected a haircut or a relationship or an outing because it's not age-appropriate? For adults, there's no such thing. All these behaviors are ageist. We all do them, and we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. Nobody's born ageist, but it starts at early childhood,around the same time attitudes towards race and gender start to form, because negative messages about late life bombard us from the media and popular culture at every turn. Right? Wrinkles are ugly.Old people are pathetic. It's sad to be old.
04:16
Look at Hollywood. A survey of recent Best Picture nominations found that only 12 percent of speaking or named characters were age 60 and up, and many of them were portrayed as impaired.Older people can be the most ageist of all, because we've had a lifetime to internalize these messages and we've never thought to challenge them. I had to acknowledge it and stop colluding."Senior moment" quips, for example: I stopped making them when it dawned on me that when I lost the car keys in high school, I didn't call it a "junior moment."
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I stopped blaming my sore knee on being 64. My other knee doesn't hurt, and it's just as old.
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05:00
We are all worried about some aspect of getting older, whether running out of money, getting sick, ending up alone, and those fears are legitimate and real. But what never dawns on most of us is that the experience of reaching old age can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. It is not having a vagina that makes life harder for women. It's sexism.
05:23
05:25
It's not loving a man that makes life harder for gay guys. It's homophobia. And it is not the passage of time that makes getting older so much harder than it has to be. It is ageism. When labels are hard to read or there's no handrail or we can't open the damn jar, we blame ourselves, our failure to age successfully, instead of the ageism that makes those natural transitions shameful and the discrimination that makes those barriers acceptable. You can't make money off satisfaction, but shame and fear create markets, and capitalism always needs new markets. Who says wrinkles are ugly? The multi-billion-dollar skin care industry. Who says perimenopause and low T and mild cognitive impairment are medical conditions? The trillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry.
06:12
06:13
The more clearly we see these forces at work, the easier it is to come up with alternative, more positive and more accurate narratives. Aging is not a problem to be fixed or a disease to be cured. It is a natural, powerful, lifelong process that unites us all.
06:32
Changing the culture is a tall order, I know that, but culture is fluid. Look at how much the position of women has changed in my lifetime or the incredible strides that the gay rights movement has made in just a few decades, right?
06:44
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Look at gender. We used to think of it as a binary, male or female, and now we understand it's a spectrum. It is high time to ditch the old-young binary, too. There is no line in the sand between old and young, after which it's all downhill. And the longer we wait to challenge that idea, the more damage it does to ourselves and our place in the world, like in the workforce, where age discrimination is rampant. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botoxed and hair-plugged before key interviews -- and these are skilled white men in their 30s, so imagine the effects further down the food chain.
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The personal and economic consequences are devastating. Not one stereotype about older workers holds up under scrutiny. Companies aren't adaptable and creative because their employees are young; they're adaptable and creative despite it. Companies --
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We know that diverse companies aren't just better places to work; they work better. And just like race and sex, age is a criterion for diversity.
07:50
A growing body of fascinating research shows that attitudes towards aging affect how our minds and bodies function at the cellular level. When we talk to older people like this (Speaks more loudly) or call them "sweetie" or "young lady" -- it's called elderspeak -- they appear to instantly age, walking and talking less competently. People with more positive feelings towards aging walk faster, they do better on memory tests, they heal quicker, and they live longer. Even with brains full of plaques and tangles,some people stayed sharp to the end. What did they have in common? A sense of purpose. And what's the biggest obstacle to having a sense of purpose in late life? A culture that tells us that getting older means shuffling offstage. That's why the World Health Organization is developing a global anti-ageism initiative to extend not just life span but health span.
08:41
Women experience the double whammy of ageism and sexism, so we experience aging differently.There's a double standard at work here -- shocker --
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the notion that aging enhances men and devalues women. Women reinforce this double standard when we compete to stay young, another punishing and losing proposition. Does any woman in this room really believe that she is a lesser version -- less interesting, less fun in bed, less valuable -- than the woman she once was? This discrimination affects our health, our well-being and our income, and the effects add up over time. They are further compounded by race and by class, which is why, everywhere in the world, the poorest of the poor are old women of color.
09:29
What's the takeaway from that map? By 2050, one out of five of us, almost two billion people, will be age 60 and up. Longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress. All these older people represent a vast unprecedented and untapped market. And yet, capitalism and urbanization have propelled age bias into every corner of the globe, from Switzerland, where elders fare the best, to Afghanistan, which sits at the bottom of the Global AgeWatch Index. Half of the world's countries aren't mentioned on that list because we don't bother to collect data on millions of people because they're no longer young. Almost two-thirds of people over 60 around the world say they have trouble accessing healthcare. Almost three-quarters say their income doesn't cover basic services like food, water, electricity, and decent housing. Is this the world we want our children, who may well live to be a hundred, to inherit? Everyone -- all ages, all genders, all nationalities -- is old or future-old, and unless we put an end to it, ageism will oppress us all. And that makes it a perfect target for collective advocacy.
10:43
Why add another -ism to the list when so many, racism in particular, call out for action? Here's the thing: we don't have to choose. When we make the world a better place to grow old in, we make it a better place in which to be from somewhere else, to have a disability, to be queer, to be non-rich, to be non-white. And when we show up at all ages for whatever cause matters most to us -- save the whales, save the democracy -- we not only make that effort more effective, we dismantle ageism in the process.
11:15
Longevity is here to stay. A movement to end ageism is underway. I'm in it, and I hope you will join me.
11:24
11:28
Thank you. Let's do it! Let's do it!
终结年龄歧视
在座的每个人终将会变得怎样？ 变老。 大部分人想到这个 都吓得不敢动弹。 你对那个词的感觉是什么？我曾经也有同感。 我最担心的是什么？ 以在阴暗的疗养院的 过道上淌着口水告终。 然后我发现只有4%的美国老年人 住在疗养院， 而且这一比例在下降。 我还担心什么？ 老年痴呆。 但是大部分人直到死之前 脑子也还能运转。 老年痴呆的比例也在下降。 真正的流行病是 对失忆的焦虑。
我也在想老年人很忧郁， 因为他们老了 而且快要死了。
结果发现人们活得越久， 就越不害怕死亡。 人们在出生和死亡之时 是最快乐的。 这是快乐U型曲线， 是被全球许多研究证明的。 你不必成为佛教徒 或是亿万富翁。 这条曲线展示变老 是如何影响大脑的。
所以我开始感到变老 不是那么糟糕了。 我也开始好奇为什么 没几个人懂得这些道理。 原因在于年龄歧视， 即基于年龄的歧视和偏见。 比如有人说我们太老了， 不能做某事， 而不关心我们是谁 我们能做什么。 或者说我们太年轻。 这两种都是年龄歧视。 所有的“主义”都是社会构建的意识， 像种族主义、性别歧视及同性恋恐惧。 这意味着这些都是 我们自己创造出来的， 而且它们是可以随着时间改变的。 因为这些偏见，我们互相争斗， 使得现状难以改变。 就好像美国汽车工人和 墨西哥汽车工人斗争， 而不是团结起来提高工资。
我们知道不能根据 种族或性别分配资源， 那又怎么能把年轻人 的需求和老年人相比较？ 所有的偏见都基于 “异化”——把一群人 当做自己之外的群体： 其他种族、其他宗教、 其他国籍。 年龄歧视的奇怪之处在于那个所谓的“异” 是我们自己。 年龄歧视来自否认—— 我们不愿意承认 我们终将变老。 这种否认体现在希望“逆生长” 或者迷信抗衰老产品， 或者觉得我们的身体 在背叛我们， 但其实只是身体 在发生自然变化。为什么一路走来，我们不再为 增强的适应力和生长 欢欣鼓舞了呢？ 为什么优雅老去就意味着 拼命让自己的外表和行为 要和年轻时一样呢？ 我们自己不以变老为耻， 才不会觉得被人说老丢脸。 而且时刻担心着未来 是不健康的。 越早走出否认自己年龄 的死循环中， 我们会变得越好。
刻板印象总是错的， 而年龄歧视更是如此。 因为我们活得越久， 我们彼此就变得越不相同， 对吧？想想看。 然而，我们却默认住在疗养院的人 都是一个年龄——老人。
而他们的年龄跨度可达40岁。 你能说一群20岁到60岁的人 都差不多大吗？
你在派对上是不是 只和同龄人一起玩？ 你是否抱怨过新一代的年轻人？ 你是否放弃一个发型， 一段关系或者一次约会， 只因在年龄上不合适？ 对成年人来说，根本没有这回事。 这些行为都是年龄歧视。 我们都这么做， 只有意识到偏见的存在， 我们才能去挑战它。 年龄歧视并非与生俱来， 而是形成于童年早期。 与此同时形成的还有 对于种族和性别的态度。 因为我们每时每刻都在被 媒体和流行文化中 关于晚年生活的负面信息轰炸。 不是吗？皱纹太难看， 老人很可怜， 变老很可悲。
看看好莱坞。 一项关于最近的 “最佳影片”提名的调查 发现有台词或是名字的 角色中只有12% 年龄在60岁及以上。 他们中有许多 都是有缺陷的形象。 我们老年人的年龄歧视观 可能是最严重的， 因为我们用一生 来内化这些信息。 我们从没想过 提出异议。 我不得不承认这一点， 并停止内化负面信息。 比如，“这一刻我老了”的玩笑 我不再开这种玩笑， 因为我想到 在高中弄丢车钥匙时 我没有说“这一刻我还小”。
我不再抱怨说我酸痛的 一侧膝盖64岁了。 另一边膝盖不疼， 却也64岁了。
我们都在担心变老 带来的一些问题， 像是钱用完了， 或者生病、独居， 这些恐惧合情合理 而且真实存在。 但大多数人不应该认为 步入老年后的生活 会变得更好或更坏。 这好和坏取决于所处的文化。 让女性的生活更为艰辛的， 不是生理结构的差异， 而是性别歧视。
让男同性恋生活更艰难的 不是爱上一个男人， 而是社会对同性恋的排斥。 给老年生活增加额外困难的，不是时间的流逝， 而是年龄歧视。 当商标看不清， 或者没有扶手， 或者那可恶的罐头打不开时， 我们责怪自己， 怪自己输给了年龄， 而忘记了是年龄歧视使 这自然的过渡成为羞耻， 使生活的障碍变得可以理解。 人人都满意的地方没有商机， 但羞耻和恐惧却能创造市场， 而资本主义总是需要新市场。 是谁说皱纹丑的？ 是市值几十亿美金的 护肤产业。 是谁说绝经、男性功能障碍 和轻度认知障碍 是疾病？ 是市值上万亿美元的 制药产业。
我们对其中的运作 看得越清楚， 越能产生另一种更积极、 更准确的认识。 变老不是需要解决的问题， 也不是需要治疗的疾病。 它是一个自然的、强大的 生命历程，把所有人连结起来。
改变文化很难，这我知道， 但文化会流动变化。 看看女性地位在我经历的 时代里变化多大， 看看同性恋运动 在短短几十年里 取得多了不起的进展，对吧？
看看性别观念。 我们曾经认为性别是二元的， 只有男或女， 现在我们了解了 性别是连续的频谱。 同样，当前正应该抛弃 “老或少”的二元年龄观。 在年老和年少之间 没有一条明确的界限， 过了那条线都是下坡路。 我们越是等待这种观念自行改变， 其对我们自身和我们的地位 造成的损害越大。 例如在普遍有年龄歧视的职场中。 在硅谷，工程师们都会 打医疗美容针，做植发， 才去参加关键的面试。 这还是三十多岁、 专业过硬的白人男性。 所以想象一下在食物链 更下层的影响。
这对个人和经济的 影响是灾难性的。 对大龄职员的偏见 都经不住检验。 企业不是因为其员工年轻 才具有适应性和创新能力。 就算没有很多年轻雇员也行。 企业——我们都知道人员多样化的企业 不仅是更好的工作环境， 也运作得更好。 就像种族和性别， 年龄意味着多样化。
越来越多的惊人研究 显示对老龄的态度 影响了我们的大脑和身体 在细胞层面上的运作。 当我们和年长的人 这样讲话（说话更大声）， 或称呼他们“甜心”或“年轻女士”的时候—— 也就是所谓的“老人腔调”—— 他们似乎一下就老了， 走路和说话方式趋于弱势。 有些人对年老的态度更积极， 他们走路更快， 在记忆力测试中 表现得更好， 康复得更快， 活得越久。 即使是大脑布满了 团块和结节， 一些人直到生命将尽 仍然思维敏捷。 他们有什么共同点？ 目的性。 在晚年仍有目标 的最大障碍是什么？ 将老去等同于被淘汰 的文化观念。 因此，世卫组织在进行 一项反年龄歧视的全球性运动， 不仅是要延长生命，还要 延长保持健康的时间。
女性遭受两重歧视， 既有年龄歧视， 又有性别歧视， 因而老去的过程 别有一番滋味。 职场中有一个 双重标准令人震惊：
年龄增长使男人升值， 却使女人贬值。 当女人竞相要留住青春， 这个观念进一步固化。 另一个观念具有惩罚和失败的意味。 在场的女同胞们，你们真的相信 现在的自己是个次品—— 与从前的自己相比，更无趣， 更难享受床笫之欢， 更没有价值？ 这个歧视影响着我们的健康、 生活质量和收入。 随着时间流逝， 这些影响越来越强。 种族和社会阶级的压力， 加强了负面影响。 这就是为什么 世界上的任何地方 最最贫穷的是 有色民族的老女人。
地图上显而易见的是什么？ 是到了2050年，我们中 每五个就有一个， 也就是将近两百万人， 将会达到或超过60岁。 长寿是人类社会进步的 一个基本特征。 这些年老人群意味着一个巨大的、 前所未有的、没有被触及的市场。 然而，资本主义和城市化 使得对老龄的偏见 在全球的每一个角落扩散， 从老年人生活最好的瑞士， 到在全球老年人生活状况指数中 排名垫底的阿富汗。 但那个排名遗漏了 全世界一半的国家，因为人们不愿意投入精力 去收集近两百万人的数据， 因为这些人已不再年轻。 全世界60岁以上人口中， 将近三分之二表示 他们得不到医疗服务。 近四分之三的人说他们的收入 满足不了基本生活需求， 比如食物、水、电 和像样的住房。 我们的孩子也许能活到上百岁， 这难道是我们想要留给他们的 世界吗？ 每个人，无论年龄， 无论性别，无论国籍， 都终将变老。 我们必须果断行动，否则 都会面临年龄歧视的压力。 于是我们就有了一个 集体倡议的完美目标。
我们已经有如此多的“主义” 需要消除，尤其是种族主义， 又何必另添一个？ 事实是， 这些主义不分先后。这个世界一旦变成 可以安然老去的地方， 也就变成人们可以 坦然面对出身异国、 身有残疾、 与众不同、生活不富裕、 身为有色民族的身份。 无论是几岁，当我们为自己 最重视的东西挺身而出—— 拯救鲸鱼或是维护民主—— 我们不仅是在使 这些行动更加高效， 在这一过程中也是 在消除年龄歧视。
我们将更加长寿。 结束年龄歧视的运动在进行中。 我是其中一员，我希望你们也加入我。
谢谢，让我们行动起来！行动起来！
