By Helen Hirsh Spence
Estimated read, 2:22 min

It really doesn’t matter where we live today. The ageist comments about President Biden being an ‘elderly man with a poor memory’ were broadcast worldwide.

There was, however, a silver lining. The best opinion writers in the Globe & Mail, the New York Times, and the Ottawa Citizen, among others, came forward to identify that the criticisms were largely examples of prevailing, incorrect age biases in society today.

One of the best rebuttals came from an article by Dr. Charan Ranganath, a neuroscientist and memory expert, which was published in the New York Times. Dr. Ranganath puts Biden’s forgetfulness in context by explaining that the average older person may experience “retrieval failure” but that doesn’t signal cognitive decline. On the contrary, it means the memory is there, it hasn’t disappeared permanently as some biased critics seem to want to pin on Biden.

Most of the ageist criticism is purely political, but it does highlight ageism as an ongoing societal issue. The pandemic, which has now receded in the memory of most, reinforced the bias that all older adults are frail, vulnerable, and cognitively deficient, thus stigmatizing ageing.

Remember all those scenes of the older masked person sitting in a hallway in his or her wheelchair staring into space? Or the calls to sacrifice older adults if it came to triaging who would gain access to the very few available hospital beds? With a few exceptions, the promised changes to care in nursing homes and seniors’ residences haven’t materialized. Do we not care about old people?

Even though only 7% of all older Canadians live in a congregated setting today according to the Canadian Census (2021), the fear of ending up institutionalized or with dementia prevails today. This characterizes the fear of growing older and falsely attributes older adults with misrepresented traits.

As Andre Picard, esteemed Health writer for The Globe & Mail, maintains in his article of  February 12, 2024 “…aging is not an illness. It’s a triumph”. He also advises readers to accept the fact that society is ageing, as is the workforce, and ’never-retiring‘ is becoming the norm.

A Pew Research study has found that workers over the age of 75 are the fastest-growing age group in the workforce today. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics anticipates that the older age cohort will account for 57% of the labour force growth over the next decade, compared to 40% of those between the ages of 45 and 64 globally.

I find it remarkable, stunning, and stupid, that ageism continues to be as socially acceptable as it is. It is time that younger and middle-aged adults realize that this is a prejudice against their future selves. They would be wise to invest time and energy to eradicate age bias now so as not to not to suffer the consequences of it as they become older.

We need old and young to step up to the plate and fight ageism together. Without concrete actions and a unified voice, the issues related to ageing will fester and grow and diminish the many contributions that older adults can offer society and the economy.