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An Activist for the Ages
Ashton Applewhite ’70 is on a mission to end ageism. She’s getting somewhere.
On Sept. 22, the U.N. Decade of Healthy Ageing named her one of “fifty leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older,” writing that, “Ashton Applewhite shows us that a world for all ages is indeed possible if we recognise the potential within each of us, speak truth to power, and stand together as one.”
The NCS alumna does not like the way Americans are brushed aside, ignored, and even outright discriminated against on the basis of age, and she has spent the past 15 years doing something about it. She spearheaded a team that created Old School, an online repository of anti-ageism resources. She wrote a book called This Chair Rocks—A Manifesto Against Ageism. She blogs and is the voice of “Yo, Is This Ageist?”, and her mainstage TED Talk, “Let’s End Ageism,” has garnered more than 1.8 million views.
All of this might seem odd coming from someone who was once apprehensive about getting old herself. But, facing the inevitable, she pursued the same approach she had taken 20 years earlier when—profoundly apprehensive about divorcing the father of her two young children—she dug into the data. Her research on aging soon revealed that many of her fears about late life, like her worries about life after divorce, were unfounded.
“I’m nerdy,” Applewhite says. “I started learning about longevity and interviewing octogenarians. I found out that many people’s views of late life, including my own, were way more negative and less nuanced than the reality.”
People are not just living longer and healthier lives, they are happier at the beginning and the ends of those lives. “It’s called the U-curve of happiness, and it’s been borne out by dozens of studies across the world,” says Applewhite. “The curve is a function of the way aging affects the brain.”
Applewhite recalls once assuming that old people were depressed because, well, they were old. It turned out that “older people enjoy better mental health than the young or middle-aged, and the longer people live, the less they fear dying.” It is not that our fears are without basis, she points out, “but that they’re way out of proportion to reality.” The evidence that older people—and divorced women—enjoy interesting, fulfilling lives is all around us, she says.
Applewhite wondered, “Why do so few people only know one side of the story?” The reason, she discovered, “is because we live in an ageist, sexist, patriarchal society, which pits us against one another and profits from our fears.”
Ageism, she believes, should be recognized alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression, because they are interrelated systems. “The emerging anti-ageism movement is part of the broader social justice conversation that’s gaining momentum because of movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter,” Applewhite explains. “Activism is intersectional, too. When we push back against any kind of discrimination, we chip away at the fears and ignorance that underlie them all.”
Applewhite readily concedes that it is not easy to unlearn messages that all of us have internalized, beginning as early as childhood. Still, she believes people cannot challenge biases until they are aware of them.
"We are all ageist,” Applewhite says, stressing that ageism is any judgment on the basis of age and includes bias against younger people. “We are all learning. It’s hard, it’s iterative, it’s uncomfortable. It’s also worth it because it’s not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. Ageism is prejudice against our future selves.”
The skills that equip Applewhite to be a thought leader hearken back to NCS, where she developed the writing skills and power of concentration that continue to serve her well. “Study habits!” she says with a laugh. “I studied so hard! When I got to college, I was like ‘when are they going to start giving us something to do?’ I received a wonderful education at NCS.”
Now based in Brooklyn, N.Y., the alumna was a clue on Jeopardy for writing the best-selling paperback of 1983—Truly Tasteless Jokes—written under a pen name, Blanche Knott. She became a writer with the publication of her first serious book, Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, which she describes as “not an anti-man book, but an anti-patriarchy book. It’s about why it’s hard to have an egalitarian marriage in a world that values men and women differently.” A staff writer at the American Museum of Natural History for almost two decades, Applewhite quit when she turned 65 (and went on Medicare) to become a full-time activist.
Applewhite stresses that people’s fears around aging—whether of running out of money, getting sick, or ending up in grim institutional care—are legitimate. Yet only 2.5 percent of Americans 65 and older live in nursing homes, and the numbers are dropping.
She says whole markets have been created to exploit those fears and to convince people, especially women, that old is synonymous with ugly and incompetent, and that to age is to fail.
“A lot of products exist to help you ‘stop’ or ‘cure’ aging. But aging is neither a problem to be fixed nor a disease to be ‘cured’,” Applewhite says. “Aging is moving through life, and everybody is doing it. It is a fascinating, powerful, lifelong process, and longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress.”
NCS is proud that this alumna is leading the conversation.
This story, written by Dawn Onley, a freelance writer, based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, originally appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of NCS Magazine.
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On Sept. 22, the U.N. Decade of Healthy Ageing named her one of “fifty leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older,” writing that, “Ashton Applewhite shows us that a world for all ages is indeed possible if we recognise the potential within each of us, speak truth to power, and stand together as one.”
The NCS alumna does not like the way Americans are brushed aside, ignored, and even outright discriminated against on the basis of age, and she has spent the past 15 years doing something about it. She spearheaded a team that created Old School, an online repository of anti-ageism resources. She wrote a book called This Chair Rocks—A Manifesto Against Ageism. She blogs and is the voice of “Yo, Is This Ageist?”, and her mainstage TED Talk, “Let’s End Ageism,” has garnered more than 1.8 million views.
All of this might seem odd coming from someone who was once apprehensive about getting old herself. But, facing the inevitable, she pursued the same approach she had taken 20 years earlier when—profoundly apprehensive about divorcing the father of her two young children—she dug into the data. Her research on aging soon revealed that many of her fears about late life, like her worries about life after divorce, were unfounded.
“I’m nerdy,” Applewhite says. “I started learning about longevity and interviewing octogenarians. I found out that many people’s views of late life, including my own, were way more negative and less nuanced than the reality.”
People are not just living longer and healthier lives, they are happier at the beginning and the ends of those lives. “It’s called the U-curve of happiness, and it’s been borne out by dozens of studies across the world,” says Applewhite. “The curve is a function of the way aging affects the brain.”
Applewhite recalls once assuming that old people were depressed because, well, they were old. It turned out that “older people enjoy better mental health than the young or middle-aged, and the longer people live, the less they fear dying.” It is not that our fears are without basis, she points out, “but that they’re way out of proportion to reality.” The evidence that older people—and divorced women—enjoy interesting, fulfilling lives is all around us, she says.
Applewhite wondered, “Why do so few people only know one side of the story?” The reason, she discovered, “is because we live in an ageist, sexist, patriarchal society, which pits us against one another and profits from our fears.”
Ageism, she believes, should be recognized alongside racism, sexism, homophobia, and other systems of oppression, because they are interrelated systems. “The emerging anti-ageism movement is part of the broader social justice conversation that’s gaining momentum because of movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter,” Applewhite explains. “Activism is intersectional, too. When we push back against any kind of discrimination, we chip away at the fears and ignorance that underlie them all.”
Applewhite readily concedes that it is not easy to unlearn messages that all of us have internalized, beginning as early as childhood. Still, she believes people cannot challenge biases until they are aware of them.
"We are all ageist,” Applewhite says, stressing that ageism is any judgment on the basis of age and includes bias against younger people. “We are all learning. It’s hard, it’s iterative, it’s uncomfortable. It’s also worth it because it’s not healthy to go through life dreading our futures. Ageism is prejudice against our future selves.”
The skills that equip Applewhite to be a thought leader hearken back to NCS, where she developed the writing skills and power of concentration that continue to serve her well. “Study habits!” she says with a laugh. “I studied so hard! When I got to college, I was like ‘when are they going to start giving us something to do?’ I received a wonderful education at NCS.”
Now based in Brooklyn, N.Y., the alumna was a clue on Jeopardy for writing the best-selling paperback of 1983—Truly Tasteless Jokes—written under a pen name, Blanche Knott. She became a writer with the publication of her first serious book, Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well, which she describes as “not an anti-man book, but an anti-patriarchy book. It’s about why it’s hard to have an egalitarian marriage in a world that values men and women differently.” A staff writer at the American Museum of Natural History for almost two decades, Applewhite quit when she turned 65 (and went on Medicare) to become a full-time activist.
Applewhite stresses that people’s fears around aging—whether of running out of money, getting sick, or ending up in grim institutional care—are legitimate. Yet only 2.5 percent of Americans 65 and older live in nursing homes, and the numbers are dropping.
She says whole markets have been created to exploit those fears and to convince people, especially women, that old is synonymous with ugly and incompetent, and that to age is to fail.
“A lot of products exist to help you ‘stop’ or ‘cure’ aging. But aging is neither a problem to be fixed nor a disease to be ‘cured’,” Applewhite says. “Aging is moving through life, and everybody is doing it. It is a fascinating, powerful, lifelong process, and longevity is a fundamental hallmark of human progress.”
NCS is proud that this alumna is leading the conversation.
This story, written by Dawn Onley, a freelance writer, based in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, originally appeared in the Winter 2022 issue of NCS Magazine.
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Ashton Applewhite '70
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