Reflections from a 2024 NAHSL Annual Meeting Award Winner
This is merely an opinion, but I think Baby Boomers like myself grew up as the most age-conscious generation ever. For years we heard the mantra “Don’t trust anyone over 30”, as socially conscious teens and young adults rejected their elders’ values. We wanted to shake up racist views and protest a war many found unethical. Then we started turning 30 and having children, and our attitude changed. We started buying into the cultural stigma against looking and acting older, thus exploding the market for fitness, facial rejuvenation, and a bias against anything that resembled our grandparents’ wardrobe. We might not have invented ageism but we definitely wallowed in it.
Dr. Tracey Gendron’s talk “Ageism, Unmasked” was both enlightening and thought-provoking. Ageism is not just a bias against growing older, but occurs anytime we make a judgment based on someone’s age. Phrases such as “okay boomer” and the idea that certain generations have no work ethic are everywhere today. Despite efforts to keep our minds open we tend to group people by age, or generation. This is reinforced by market analysts who report what each generation thinks or does, as if all people of a certain age do exactly the same things.
For Dr. Gendron, ageing is something that takes place over a person’s entire lifespan and should be looked at positively rather than as something to dread. She takes a holistic approach to the human lifespan and champions an attitude that treats people as individuals, not as members of a group in lock step with each other. She noted that even when we try to be positive about getting older we can suffer from ageism. An example of this is the phrase “successful ageing”. It underscores the idea that if some people are good at ageing, others are bad at it. There should be no good or bad, simply individual ways that each of us live out or lives. We are successful when we are being ourselves, at any given age.
Dr. Gendron’s quest is to re-train our thinking about how we grow older. No one should be judged as part of a group, or be considered a success only if able to conform to an ideal of what one looks like while growing older, or what one has achieved by a certain age.
Donna Belcinski
Coordinator of Library Services
Greenwich Hospital Medical Library
0 Comments.