Breaking the Age Code by Becca Levy

Author:Becca Levy
Language: eng
Format: epub

B: Place Blame Where It Belongs

Blame Ageism, Not Aging

Once you’ve become aware of your own age beliefs and of those permeating your culture, you’re ready to start reshaping your understanding of aging with the B phase of the ABC method. This involves redirecting the blame from oneself when targeted by ageism, including negative age stereotypes, to the proper target of blame: the ageism itself and its societal sources. This requires looking at the larger context in which a bad event occurs to find the true source of the problem. A good place to begin is by recognizing that it is often ageism that makes being old difficult, not the aging process itself.

I recently heard a doctor tell the story of an eighty-five-year-old man who goes to see his doctor with a dull pain in his knee, only to be told, “Look, this knee is eighty-five years old. What do you expect?” “Well, yes, Doctor,” the patient replies, “but my other knee is eighty-five years old, too, and it doesn’t hurt one bit.”

A doctor dismissing his patient’s concerns because the patient is old means the doctor is blaming old age when something else could be at play. By failing to investigate the source of the problem and relying instead on the ageist assumption that decline in later life is inevitable (an age belief that is often implanted in preschool and reinforced all the way through medical school), this doctor is shirking his medical responsibility. It could be that the patient’s knee is bothering him because he recently pulled a muscle while shoveling snow in his driveway. But since it’s “an old knee,” the doctor thinks the problem isn’t his to deal with. He’s misguidedly blaming the problem on something that is supposedly inherent to aging and therefore can’t be helped.

We have a natural tendency to blame people rather than their situation when something goes wrong. This is called the fundamental attribution error.16 If someone cuts you off while you’re waiting in line at the cash register, you might assume that they’re rude, rather than a harried parent who is rushing to buy medicine for a sick child at home.

Frequently, when I present my research to audiences, people come up afterward to say something along the lines of, “Well, of course negative age stereotypes abound. They are describing the reality that debilitation happens hand-in-hand with growing old.” The first problem with this idea is that the popular narrative of aging as a time of inevitable mental and physical decline is incorrect. Recall Patrick who continued to expand his vast recall of mushroom species in his seventies or Maurine who became a competitive swimmer in her nineties. The second issue is that this line of thinking gets cause and effect mixed up. As described earlier in the book, societally based age beliefs influence our health and the biological markers of aging. When it comes to how we age, society is often the cause, and biology the effect.

So what’s the best way to reframe our causal thinking? We can shift the blame.

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