We Can See The Intergenerational Future.

Two days, forty-two amazing speakers. Almost 2000 attendees split between in person and online.?The Century Summit is truly the Lollapalooza of Longevity.?

You can’t reduce all that learning to three lousy bullet points, can you??Well, if they can turn Wuthering Heights into a song, Paradise Lost into a graphic novel, and A Midsummer’s Night Dream into a Mr. Magoo cartoon, we can absolutely turn the Century Summit into a TNSB column.?

Here are three emerging themes from the Summit:?

1. Ageism Is Not Just For Older People Anymore.

We generally associate ageism with the challenges of older age, and for good reason: older people routinely face discrimination at work, are too often ignored or treated poorly in media and popular culture, and if you would wade even a little into the cesspool of social media, you will quickly find that “OK Boomer” is just the tip of the iceberg.?But speaker after speaker at the Summit reminded us that ageism can be experienced at any age, and that many people, especially women, face age related challenges and prejudices across a lifetime.?

That fact was captured in our pre-conference poll that drew more than 400 respondents.?Seventy-seven percent told us that they had experienced age-related bias, and it starts early.?Twenty one percent reported experiencing age bias before age 35, and a full 40 percent told us that they had experienced age-related bias before age 50.???

Many speakers shared stories of experiencing ageism in the first half of life.?Kate Rarey, age 24, spoke about an interview she gave to the Wall Street Journal, where she described some of her concerns about planning for the future in an uncertain and chaotic world.?The response from the commentariat: “The participation medal generation is scared of life??Sad”.?She had many more examples, but you get the picture.?When we don’t engage with people outside our own group, it’s easy to reduce others to caricatures, usually unflattering ones, and that is true across all age groups.???

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2. Progress Against Ageism Is Being Made, But It Is Still An “etc”-ism.

Speaker after speaker described positive steps towards reducing ageism and bringing the generations together. Martha Deevy from the Stanford Center on Longevity described how the number of multigenerational households has almost quadrupled over the last decade; Amy Baer of Gidden Media spoke about?the cultural impact of programs featuring older protagonists, like Man on the Inside and Grace and Frankie (which lasted an unheard of seven years on Netflix); Tim Parr of Caddis and other business leaders recounted the growing impact of older consumers; and Ashton Applewhite extolled the impact of informational efforts, such as the Age Without Limits campaign in the UK launched by the Center for Aging Better and the Old School Clearing House here in the US.???

But it was also widely acknowledged that the corrosive impact of ageism remains largely ignored by the broader public and by key institutional actors.?Ageism is an “etc” ism, in the evocative words of Stacy Torres of UCSF - sometimes acknowledged, sometimes not, and often not treated as a significant issue within society.?Many speakers noted this failure, with a particular focus on the groups that often face the most significant barriers from ageism: women who face the “no right age” challenge, and people of color or low-income groups that often encounter ageism combined with other societal and institutional barriers.?Many speakers, such as Karen Chong of AARP, noted that women in particular face age related barriers at work and at home over the entire course of their life: dismissed as too young early in careers, facing pay and caregiving inequities in midlife, and then being ignored and isolated due to gendered ageism in later years.???

The bottom line, according to Applewhite, who has been on the ageism beat longer than most: “It’s a slow and incremental undertaking, but we are making real progress.”?

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3. We Can See The Intergenerational Future.

What is the remedy for decades of structural ageism??Lots of different answers to that question, ranging from continuing to raise awareness to working with businesses to understand the changing demographics of workers and consumers alike, but the consensus answer was focused on bringing the generations together.?The American model in which generations live and socialize separately is viewed as a barrier to common understanding and a petri dish for generational suspicions.???

Marc Freedman of CoGenerate pointed out that the generational divide is an artifact of the 20th century, and Americans for centuries lived, worked, and socialized across all generations.?It was only the mass urbanization of the 20th century and the ascendency of the nuclear family that began to pull the generations apart.?Many of the speakers at the Summit are working on ideas to bring generations together, including Nicole Kenney with Hey Auntie!, and Pooja Tilvawala, Founder and Executive Director of the Youth Climate Collaborative.?Despite the successes of these efforts and others like them, it is clear that there is a long way to go.?

Our pre-conference poll asked: Do you have a close friend who is 15 years younger or older than you? If yes, where did you meet that friend??Seventy-seven percent said yes (more than double?the general population AARP poll), and the leading answer for where they met was work with 34%, followed distantly by mutual friends with 19%.?The role of the workplace in forming intergenerational bonds is critical, especially in this era of remote work, and one of the paths of success will be to support age-friendly workplace practices that allow the generations to come together.?

Shameless Self Promotion #1.

It’s a challenge to boil down all these important thoughts to this newsletter format – we clearly lack the incisive story-telling of Mr. Magoo – but fortunately you have options to learn more: by watching the videos of the event, now available here, or by reading the forthcoming report from the Stanford Center on Longevity and the Longevity Project on the takeaways of the Century Summit.?Coming soon.??