On Occasion of a Facebook Friend's 40th Birthday

Preface: For those who don't reach this post via the link in this friend's comments, I'm omitting the name unless my friend asks for attribution. The call for comments upon this person's 40th birthday inspired the following. It turned out to be so pertinent in an everyday situation that I couldn't help but repost here.

You just turned 40? Congratulations! You now know *exactly* what it feels like to be 50; only with a decade less ageism to contend with; which will definitely become your increasingly intimate life partner, from here.

I love all the upbeat comments here and agree with every single one of them. At the same time, it's moments like this that can also help us to see the real life impacts of yet unrealized democratic ideals on real people in our everyday lives. This may not have impacted you yet, but from 40, it's a very real aspect of all our work lives, today.

It doesn't matter that the EEOC says ageism is just as illegal as racism or genderism so long as HR continues is institutionalized "don't ask, don't tell" policy toward rampant age based discrimination.

The web is teaming with ways to "don't bring it up, just dress hipper, act younger, be something you're not," anything that absolves employers of responsibility to obey the law.

"One explanation for ageism’s perseverance may be that historically society has perceived age discrimination as more of an economics issue than a question of fundamental civil rights. Ageism has been viewed as different from and less serious than racism or sexism in the work place. This perception has relegated the ADEA to second class status amongst the country’s civil rights statutes" ( EEOC, http://goo.gl/HTC5 ).

So see, it's not really discrimination like racism or sexism because everyone can agree that #OldPeopleSuck.

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Old Age, From Youth’s Narrow Prism

Excerpt from the New York Times:

All of us lapse into such mistaken impressions of old age from time to time. It stems in part from an age-centered perspective, in which we view our own age as the most normal of times, the way all life should be. At 18 the 50-year-olds may seem ancient, but at 50 we are apt to say the same about the 80-year-olds.

“So what’s it really like to be old?” I often ask my patients, who are mostly in their late 80s and 90s, and the responses are unexpected.

“I forgot I was so old,” a 100-year-old patient recently told me, and then excused herself to make it to bingo on time.

This age-centrism is particularly pervasive in people’s attitudes toward nursing homes. All too often we imagine that life seems to end at the nursing home door — that it is loveless and lonely, with death hovering close by.

We make this mistake when we refuse to see the needs for intimacy even in the most debilitated elderly. Our youth-centered culture equates love with sex; in contrast, I have seen with my older patients that love can be an endlessly blossoming flower, felt and expressed in hundreds of ways. A friend’s mother who suffers from Alzheimer’s disease has fallen in love with another resident on her floor, and they walk around holding hands and snuggling with a newfound innocence that perhaps only their memory loss restored.

We also project our terror of death onto the aged, assuming that fear and depression must stalk the final years of life. And yet in my 15 years of working in nursing homes, I have never heard a patient say that he or she was afraid of death. Sometimes there is acceptance, other times anticipation, but most often it is not a great concern. Life goes on in its shadows.

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How to live to 100: Rita Levi-Montalcini's Routine

If you want to live to a 100, you might consider following Rita Levi-Montalcini's routine: get up at five in the morning, eat just once a day, at lunchtime, keep your brain active, and go to bed at 11pm.

Scott Adams on Ageism

Sometimes, you find the most interesting things in some random,  dusty ol’ RSS feed that died in Thunderbird, or Free Agent, or Net News Wire, or some other random reader thingie that you set up and abandoned years ago. In Feb 2008, Adams wrote:

In other professions, how often do people over the age of 70 produce innovative or exceptional results? Look around your home or office and ask yourself how many of the technical innovations came from senior citizens. How many of the best selling books on your shelf were written by senior citizens who weren’t already famous? How many senior citizens wrote the music you have on your iPod?

I don’t have the time right now to take this to town with all the goodness that it deserves. Suffice to say, defending prejudice with statistical probabilities has never worked out too well. How often is it a non-white that commits the assault and ends up in prison? Statistically, I’m fully justified to move to the other side of the street, simply due to skin color. Adams adds:

You will be tempted to point out exceptions to the rule. Warren Buffet is a good example. But he plans to retire. Alan Greenspan already did. Evidently they think age matters.

Evidently, they have BANK, dude. What’s that got to do with age? Sounds like you were just too tired from creating super awesome cartoons to think this one all the way through.

In response to my skin-color analogy, you may be tempted to bring up Obama, or Shaq, or Tiger, but those are exceptions. Can you say "slippery slope?" I knew you could.

The fact is, people are ageing in greater numbers and with more success than ever before in human history. We don’t get to hide behind statistical justifications when they serve our own purposes and cry “exceptionalism” as a defense.

Many, if not most of us voted for Obama because he was the best man for the job and best represented the values that we all believe are most crucial to the success of a healthy, vibrant,  democratic republic, and for evolving beyond the short-sighted, unsustainable resource skews attributable to this insane era of cannibal capitalism, toward a post-scarcity free market socialism.

Bringing you up to speed on the empirically imperative  adaptive advantages of a Free Market Socialist Democratic Republic aside, dear reader, one might recall that back in the day, you could count on the fact that we would just die off before we could argue our own case; which obviously worked well for your increasingly obsolete ageist attitudes. Your handy little self-serving prejudice could just march right on, unopposed, and with a self-congratulatory, "whatchu’ talkin' ‘bout now, down there six feet under, you old useless phukr!?" for flair.

Um, well, these days, WE'RE STILL HERE, PUNK, that’s what we’re talkin’ ‘bout; and we’re mobilizing our social media networks; and we have 400-800% more life experience than your ADHD WTF-URL-TXTing lil smartass. And we're blogging, and GPSing, and camera-phoning, and thumb-typing, and we can see through your immature, inexperienced, unstable, irrational, relentlessly hormone-driven deranged lack of judgment. Underneath it all, especially in your most disastrous hiring and strategy decisions, social psychology reveals the fact that all you're deep down really hoping for is a good after-hours cubicle phuck.

Flash! Hiring your best flirty phuck buddies prolly ain't all that good for the company; not to mention the excuse of dissin' and pissin’ on people simply because they might remind you of your own parents and force you to deal with all your own petty, dysfunctional authority-figure baggage.

So, yeah, pretty much your ageism bullshit is utter bullshit, right? Yet somehow it is still The Other Acceptable White Prejudice.

So how about this, Mr. Scott Adams? How about let's see Catbert’s HR Agency hire some old fogies who may need glasses to read but who can also see right through Dogbert's little games? Maybe we can even have some fun making the world safer and more inclusive for everyone, in the process.

TIA, Scott. That is, if you're not too old to understand WTF that means.

Level Playing Field Institute

Mitch Kapor shows again that he is one amazingly enlightened and compassionate human being, in First Life and Second Life. THANK YOU for these gifts, Mr. Kapor. LPFI is one of the few places where we are beginning to see AGE represented on equal footing with race and gender in robbing people of fundamental civil rights, sociological common decency, and mutual respect.

Read about what actions survey participants and LPFI recommends to employers in order to improve race, age, and gender relations in the workplace.

Giving Notice: Why the Best and Brightest are Leaving the Workplace and How You Can Help Them Stay (Jossey-Bass, 2007) offers a first-of-its-kind look at how hidden bias and hidden barriers are having a costly and profoundly negative impact on Corporate America.

HealthyYears.Org : Not Just More, but Better Lives

Charlie Warren's brilliant Campaign for Aging Research has broken into full stride, complete with Resource Library, 7 Specific Causes targeting each facet of SENS, and Programmed Support opportunities. What greater legacy could we possibly leave to our future heirs than doing all that we can to End Aging, Poverty, and Scarcity over the coming decades and centuries. No matter how long it might take, it will certainly take that much longer if we do not begin and participate with all due haste, today. How can we not pursue such noble and timeless goals, given the extraordinary new tools that we have today?

Neuroplasticity: The Basics

Plasticity, or neuroplasticity, is the lifelong ability of the brain to reorganize neural pathways based on new experiences. As we learn, we acquire new knowledge and skills through instruction or experience. In order to learn or memorize a fact or skill, there must be persistent functional changes in the brain that represent the new knowledge (Neuroscience for Kids by Erin Hoiland).

Are there changes with life stage? Of course. Could there be trade-offs between talent, experience, wisdom, naiveties, insights, motivation, energy, work ethic, etc. which qualitatively level the Productivity Playing Field between the 18, 28, 58, 88, and 108 year old?

Because all human and market value is ascribed, the answer has to be, at the very least, a qualified yes; such trade-offs surely exist, but have perhaps escaped careful quantification and critical analysis for any number of sociological and technical measurement-challenging reasons. The premise strikes me as worthy of further pursuit, research, and documentation.

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Equal "props" to Old Masters and Young Geniuses

Some may mistakenly glance at this blog as unproductive griping or uncritical complaining. That would signal a sad failure on my part; a failure to be quick to highlight solutions and positive strides, as they emerge.

From PRI's To the Best of Our Knowledge:

Are you an experimental innovator who works by trial and error and is most creative later in life, like Cezanne? Or are you a conceptual young genius like Picasso. In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge we'll explore the theory of economics professor David Galenson that those are [at least] two life cycles of artistic creativity. Also British singer/songwriter Nick Lowe. He's been making music since the 1960's but many critics say he's doing his best work right now. And we'll meet Oscar-nominated Millard Kaufman. He's just published his first novel at the age of 90. [Finally,] Amy Gorman is the author of "Aging Artfully," a book with 12 profiles of visual and performing women artists between the ages of 85 and 105 (listen now).

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APA: Fighting Ageism

Age stereotypes are developed and instilled from a very young age, just like racist biases:

Whether battling "old geezer" stereotypes or trying to obtain equal standing in the workplace, those who are 60 or older may all too often find themselves the victims of ageism.

In fact, in a survey of 84 people ages 60 and older, nearly 80 percent of respondents reported experiencing ageism--such as other people assuming they had memory or physical impairments due to their age. The 2001 survey by Duke University's Erdman Palmore, PhD, also revealed that the most frequent type of ageism--reported by 58 percent of respondents--was being told a joke that pokes fun at older people. Thirty-one percent reported being ignored or not taken seriously because of their age. The study appeared in The Gerontologist (Vol. 41, No. 5).

Want an easy way to find out if you're an AGE-IST bigot? Just insert the word BLACK, or GAY, or JEW, or any other discriminatory term for the world OLD in a video like this. Ha, ha, funny, funny, this is sooo funny, right? Or maybe not. Try it ... make it, "yo ... Obama he's so BLACK ... or Lieberman, yo' he's so JEWY ... or Harvey Milk, yo' he's so GAY ...



P.S. I've been campaigning for Obama since before he even entered the race for President, so you can chill on that trip, too, yo. I don't want McCain to be President, but using AGEISM is wrong, period. "But, but, he might *die* in office," you may say. Yes, he may, and Obama may get shot, or run over by a bus. The prospect of dying faces every leader, it has nothing to do with ability to do a job. Moreover, people much younger than McCain, in their 60s, 50s, 40s, even 30s are skipped over for jobs every day for NO OTHER REAL REASON than AGE. It's wrong, and it's ILLEGAL.

Mrs. Hughes

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62 y.o. Heavy Metal Monk

Yeah, so like F.U. you whiney little snot-nosed, weenie-pierced, punk-ass 18 to 34 y.o. worshipping society ... we can do WHATEVER WE WANT at ANY AGE we want.

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Just take the "black" or "hispanic" or "latino" or "gay" out of your resume

Could you imagine a major newspaper, magazine, or media outlet suggesting one of those courses of action ... in order to make your resume "portray a modern image?"

And yet, that's precisely what today's Wall Street Journal suggests in "Botox for the Resume: One Woman's Image Makeover."

It's not just offensive it's utterly REVOLTING and should be ILLEGAL in the context of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act. Period.

Is this what we have to look forward to now that Murdoch owns the WSJ? That's another topic altogether.

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Out of a job and out of luck at 54

Can't retire, can't find job:CNN - May. 21, 2008

It took those age 55 and older an average of 21.1 weeks to land a new job in 2007, about five weeks longer than their younger counterparts, according to AARP.

"Clearly older workers will be more adversely affected because of the time it takes to transition into another job," said Deborah Russell, AARP's director of workforce issues.

In other words, we now have at least ONE EMPIRICAL METRIC by which to measure the current impact of AGE DISCRIMINATION. It's a weak, manufactured, and understated figure, but at least it's a figure: "five weeks longer." In practical reality, it's five months to five years ... or maybe NEVER.

Companies like Bank of America (who tried to rip off my mother-in-law's 30 year service pension after 29.5 years of faithful service!) at least used to wait until 64 to toss you on the scrap heap. Now it's 54. At just 54 workers are increasingly told, "you're old, you're a burden, you suck, now get the hell out of here!"

But that's how it's supposed to be, right? It's a free market, baby. Stop your whining. You're old. You suck. Now get the hell out of here and go die like you're supposed to. You did your part and the value you left in your wake is now OURS. Surely you realized you were always just another disposable interchangeable part in the manufacturing engine, right? If not, you are not only old and pointless, but STUPID and therefore deserve even more to live in stress, debt, and squalor for the rest of your days.

The basic message from American business: "So what if you have a Master's Degree ... you're old, so you suck ... now go bag groceries. What? You spent all your money raising children? What? You spent all your money simply existing? What? You have some vestigial professional pride and self respect? How DARE you! Back to the cotton fields, WAGE SLAVE!"

Facts About Age Discrimination

In the words of the EEOC, The Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA) protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. The ADEA's protections apply to both employees and job applicants. Under the ADEA, it is unlawful to discriminate against a person because of his/her age with respect to any term, condition, or privilege of employment -- including, but not limited to, hiring, firing, promotion, layoff, compensation, benefits, job assignments, and training.

It's time to start filing these claims, people.

More Useless Trends and Non-starter Upstarts in Social Networking

True, only someone under 24 could POSSIBLY clue us in about such things, right? So go ahead and skip this post and be sure to keep up the Age Discrimination, even though you yourself are a victim of its relentlessly sclerosing sociological malignancy. Let's all just keep on working against our own best interest, shall we? Sure, yeah, that sounds good.

Besides, what's The Point, if you can't accomplish all of your life's goals in Less than The First Thirty Days, right? Anything that takes longer than that is a waste of time, right?

Oh, and since by far the fastest growing demographic in America is over the age of 50 -- and they only control more disposable wealth than any generation of consumers in history -- I think we should focus on their children and grandchildren ... you know, the really sexy hot ones who are like Totally Hot like Paris. The svelte and savvy experts at not just gaming consoles, but gaming your intricate accountability systems, abusing your pseudo-affiliate programs, and who have zero interest in "playing by the rules" of your meticulously thought out "programs."

Yeah, that sounds like a low-maintenance-cost plan, a real gold mine. So yeah, keep on hiring more young people and firing more old people. Make sure everyone is always chipper, chirpy, perky, and cackling merrily along with the herd. After all, anything less would be ... un-American.

And always, always, always remember: any proposed deviance from these Comfortable, Familiar and Self-Destructive Norms could instigate thoughts of CHANGE -- and change must always be opposed at all costs!

So I say, keep chasing those penniless, near-do-well MySpace cadets (anyone over 40 on MySpace is clearly a creep with nothing of value to offer) and forget the growing Eons of users in Well Established and Proven Markets who are flush with CASH and on average have 30 to 50 more years to SPEND IT.

Yeah, that's the ticket!

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That's com-SMASH-tic!

What drives super productive, accomplished, and perfectly normal [1] people to such extremes?

The insulting idea that, as Shaw puts it, "they thought just because we're old enough to get Social Security that we lack both brains and backbone."

Taking a Whack Against Comcast - washingtonpost.com highlights the BEST of Brains and Backbone. This lady got WAY more than here money's worth for the very paltry price of "a three-month suspended sentence for disorderly conduct, a $345 fine in restitution and a year-long restraining order barring her from the Comcast office." Congratulations, Mona! Well done!


Note [1]: "She is a nice lady who lives in a nice house. She and Don are both retired from the Air Force (she was a registered nurse). They have been married 45 years. She is secretary of the local AARP, secretary of a square-dancing club and takes in strays for the local animal shelter (they have seven dogs at the moment). She has a heart condition. She lifts weights at a local gym. The couple attend a Unitarian Universalist church."

Old People Have No Creativity

I guess that's why:

While others would likely suggest otherwise, [66-year old inventor Leonard Duffy] doesn't seem willing to budge on the name, insisting that "it's slidingly engaging... it's the slidingly engaging fastener."

Winner of a Popular Science invention award, SEF is able to support eight times the weight of velcro and is COMPLETELY SILENT. BTW, when you invent something better than SEF, you get to call it whatever you want; until then, STFU with even the slightest name critiques, deal?

Oh yeah, and just be sure to remember that all old people have nothing to offer because they've lost all their creativity, initiative, focus, and ambition when you pay $200 for that first pair of arrogant punk-ass SEF shoes, right?

Yes, it's a rare cross-post, so relax already.

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Elderly iPod users skip a beat

The excuse:

this kind of test had never been carried out before because it was never really an issue, being that most pacemaker wearers tend not to have an iPod.

"Never really an issue" because we ASSUME that All Those Old Morons will NEVER understand our hip, young, cool bullshit. I am getting increasingly outraged as the methodical disenfranchisement of older people in our society. "Yeah, don't even test it for safety, they're all too old and tired and lazy and stupid." With that prejudice driving so much of product development, and with product development driving so much of popular culture, is it any wonder that age discrimination is not only alive and well in America, but getting WORSE and affecting younger old people (down into the 40's and even 30's), every day?

Meet the Lackluster Omnivore Next Door

Missing Image Note: Hmmm, ImageShack apparently lost or killed access to http://img527.imageshack.us/img527/9301/ topographychart4974685sa8.png which was here in the original post. Not exactly clear why.

Bear with me on this one, it's a very rare cross post from the sardonic early-adopter MMBBG (massively multi-faceted blog-based game) known as Too Late, Somebody is Already Doing That. I promise you'll see the temperamental tie-in tirade here, very shortly. I know, I know, you just can't wait for more scintillating Infective Invective. That's okay, it's a safe place here, we're all friends, so feel free.

You gotta hand it to PEW for trying, but they still missed one segment ... the Lackluster Omnivore. Sure, this may be like .02% of the market, but it's also the .02% that will risk millions of dollars of it's own capital in order to make things better (yeah, yeah, a loaded term, yada-yada) for the both ourselves and our friends across the 99.98% side of the aisle. It's not that this tiny slice of society is any better than the rest, it's just DIFFERENT. Remember the old Apple Computer campaigns? Okay, maybe that makes Apple users a little better than the rest of the world; but this post isn't about that.

One of the whole points of this blog is to skewer my own inner technology "Omnivore, [those] who fully embrace technology and express themselves creatively through blogs and personal Web pages," while navel gazing in contemplation of the myriad and sundry inconsistencies, ironies, and even injustices involved in these peculiar little human practices we like to call: innovation and adoption.

According to the quiz, I'm about as hard core an omnivore as you can find (but if you look at the charts, it helps explain the very frustrating and discriminatory experience of encountering 99.9% of Omnivores who also come with an equally hardcore PREJUDICE against people like me because I break the "age rule" by about 20 years); hence, I wonder why I might bring a Lackluster Veteran's perspective, "those who use technology frequently but aren't thrilled by it" according to the latest survey that claims to 'shatter technology assumptions'?

Now is where this post crosses over into the Old People Suck blog category. The blatant overlap doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it's always ugly. So the squeamish may want to click away from the page, right away.

It's not the technology that's a problem for me, it's the Workplace Discrimination and dismissive and condescending guffaw's from many younger omnivores whom I'd probably eat for lunch when it comes to configuring an OpenBSD firewall rule set, or configuring AMPS on FreeBSD. On the other hand, of course, are my demographic cohorts who simply seem to be too damned tired and lazy to RTFM, or too impatient to learn new and FAR BETTER ways to do things.

So, what the study fails to address is WHY some otherwise enthusiastic and successful technology innovators might become equal parts enthusiast, grizzled veteran innovator, early adopter, and simultaneously skeptical as hell. One suspicions is that for those who pursue the leading edge, the coercive market power of the middle of the bell curve can often hang like a dead weight around the neck of truly creative, breakthrough innovation. Finding a balance amidst the opposing forces of anthropological, technological, and financial vectors isn't exactly an exercise for the feint of heart. All too often, it seems, an innovator either has a rich uncle (or VC who thinks you're kinda cute) or not; and that's the deciding factor of what gets built to scale and what does not. Yeah, that could pretty much lay a foundation for "lackluster" probably.

So, unless you can point me elsewhere to prove me wrong, I'll now pompously and unceremoniously proclaim myself the the First Self-Identified Lackluster Omnivore in the Pew Internet segmentation model. Ah, the lengths we creatures of reason will go to just to feel more-or-less differentiated. What's up with that, anyway? I guess we'll have to find out in the next study.

In the meantime, you too can still take the quiz yourself, even though like myself, you are WAAAY TOO LATE to be first to this particularly swanky sardonic soiree; unless, of course, you can explain to me why you too are some statistically insignificant variety of under-appreciated, underpaid, under-recognized unholy half-breed or multi-dimensional freak-consumer that somehow defies the deistic power of the latest Official Market Segment Survey.

MY RESULTS (FWIW):
------------------
Based on your answers to the questionnaire, you most closely resemble survey respondents within the Omnivores typology group. This does not mean that you necessarily fit every group characteristic.

Omnivores make up 8% of the American public.

Basic Description
Members of this group use their extensive suite of technology tools to do an enormous range of things online, on the go, and with their cell phones. Omnivores are highly engaged with video online and digital content. Between blogging, maintaining their Web pages, remixing digital content, or posting their creations to their websites, they are creative participants in cyberspace.

Defining Characteristics
You might see them watching video on an iPod. They might talk about their video games or their participation in virtual worlds the way their parents talked about their favorite TV episode a generation ago. Much of this chatter will take place via instant messages, texting on a cell phone, or on personal blogs. Omnivores are particularly active in dealing with video content. Most have video or digital cameras, and most have tried watching TV on a non-television device, such as a laptop or a cell phone.

Omnivores embrace all this connectivity, feeling confident in how they manage information and their many devices. This puts information technology at the center of how they express themselves, do their jobs, and connect to their friends.

Who They Are
"They" are young, ethnically diverse, and mostly male (70%). The median age is 28 [so if you're in your 40's, you suck and you should act your lame age, despite your intellectual interests and capabilities]; just more than half of them are under age 30, versus one in five in the general population [so clearly, you are some kind of a CREEP if you're just as accomplished and interested in technology at the age of 50]. Over half are white (64%) and 11% are black (compared to 12% in the general population). English-speaking Hispanics make up 18% of this group. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many (42% versus the 13% average) of Omnivores are students. [So surprising, living off the WAGE SLAVE income of their parents and student loans, they have TIME AND ATTENTION to devote to embracing novel technologies -- how impressive of "them!"]

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Old People Can Now Get a Master's at Stanford, without going to the Farm

Oh, oh. Now those organized and annoying Old People can get a master's at Stanford, without going to the Farm: "Online education is not appropriate for undergraduates, who benefit from on-campus socialization, [said Andy DiPaolo, executive director of the Stanford Center for Professional Development, which sponsors the program]. Nor does it work for doctorate candidates, who work one on one with faculty.

But a masters-level degree from the School of Engineering is a good fit for older students who are working and so cannot attend class, he said."

-- INTERVIEW: A 2012 Odyssey --

HR: "Oh, I see here that you're 34 and earned a master's 8 years ago."

APPLICANT: "Yes, from Yale."

HR: "Yes. I see. I'm sorry, but I have a 64 year old candidate who just earned a Master's from Stanford this year, with distinction, and who obviously better understands the most current knowledge in the industry. In this competitive market, we need the freshest talent available. I'm sorry, but you've just become too irrelevant for our needs."

Paybacks will be a bitch, punk. But you just go right on ahead and keep discriminating. Oh, and have a nice day.