Age – is it relevant?
Why, for example, do tabloids insist on listing a person’s age within the first sentence of an article, regardless of the context? Doesn’t this just nourish society’s obsession with age – and consequently preserve its ageist attitudes?
As such, there’s the inclination to believe the antidote is eliminating age all together. Remove age, remove the issue. But that doesn’t fix it; it just plasters over it. It doesn’t address the fundamental belief that ageing is a negative rather than a positive.
So is age relevant or not?
At Ageism Is Never In Style, we believe the answer isn’t absolute. Instead, we should be reassessing when age becomes relevant, rather than if it is.
To do this, the first step is to embrace age as a whole. Which is why ‘Embracing Age’ is chapter 2 of our Ageism Is Never In Style Manifesto.
By embracing age, we can reframe it into what it truly is: a privilege. We can release it from the shackles of the stigmas and ageist attitudes weighing it down, and non-prejudicially begin to understand when it should and shouldn’t be relevant. Because age does fundamentally exist. So rather than fear it, we should feel empowered to celebrate it and wear it proudly as a badge of honour.
