2022 April 5 Empathy for Happiness

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight for a talk about empathy, ageism, and opportunity. We have all probably experienced ageism to some degree, right? But why? I suggest it’s rooted in how we perceive, and how we are perceived by, those who are different from us. So, let’s get started. 

But first, of course, the weekly reminder. I’m not a medical professional, and I’ll be talking about things that I find personally useful. If you find you're feeling truly hopeless or truly depressed, please seek professional help, or dial 911. Get assistance in one way or another. Also starting July 1st, 2022, and available in some areas now, dialing 988 will connect you with immediate assistance. This is the number for the National Suicide Hotline (800) 273-8255. Good to know, whether it’s for yourself or for a friend. Remember, just keep that number handy. 

So, it might seem like a harmless comment or colloquialism,or just being poked fun at, but how many of you have been asked something like, Whoa, what can I do for you, young man? Or Well, young lady, what can I get for you today? Or someone asked if you needed help picking up something like a gallon of milk or something? 

Then, of course, the more onerous assault, such as the recently uncovered IBM situation, where they had layoff policies against the DinoBabies, and the dated maternal workforce - those are two of the phraseologies used. They’re obviously referring to Baby Boomers. That just came to light recently. That was very recent, around Valentine’s Day of this year, 2022.  

So how do people get into this us vs them sort of mindset?  It’s not just about old age, it includes anything identifiable, right? Skin color is always a typical good selection criteria if you want to be prejudiced against somebody, and it’s often combined with age or nationality, language, hair color - just just a whole raft of things people want to find. It’s anything that they can just find that easily differentiates people one from the other. 

Almost all of it can be traced back to a lack of empathy and understanding: racism, ageism, sexism. They’re really all forms of a lack of empathy and understanding. Empathy can be defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. (Oxford Dictionary online) Many prejudices are based upon either direct fear or the fear of the unknown. 

If you’re unconfident and there are a bunch of people nearby, and they're laughing, but they’re speaking aforeign language, you might tend to think that they’re laughing at you. Anytime you see any sort of characteristic you’re not familiar with, you tend to get suspicious of it. That's, for better or worse, how we’re programmed. 

So, if you’ve heard about certain characteristics of some particular group, and you see a member of that group, you immediately think they must be like everything I heard about that group, right? That’s also one of those things where instead of trying to understand the individual, you just go with some preconceived notion or prejudice.  While there are a lot of other -isms, racism and others that get more coverage, ageism is usually somewhat glossed over because it’s perceived, especially by younger people, as kind of harmless, just like blonde jokes or just like anything having to do with race. 

Any one of those is harmful to self esteem, and always being teased because of your age is also harmful to one’s self esteem. Damaging one’s self esteem is very serious. It’s very harmful. It can cause physical and mental health problems. It can actually shorten your lifespan, increase the chance of serious illness, and bring on early-onset Alzheimer’s. There’s a lot more very well documented negative effects, but ageism is really perceived as negative and it’s just a joke, because people who are doing it really should stop to think how they would feel if we turned around and treated them in the same fashion. 

I was at a podcasting trade show, and there was this young gentleman staffing the booth. He replied to my question. I asked, What does your product do? So he raised the pitch of his voice. rolled his eyes, and starts to explain to me how these smartphones can actually send text messages, and yes! even pictures. Well,I didn’t spank him, though he certainly deserved it. What the product actually did was called audiograms. You’ve probably seen them. They’re little audio clips, and there’s either a waveform or some text playing over the picture of the video. He immediately assumed I had no idea what even social media was about, and then adopted this very condescending attitude. 

Why? Probably because he heard how Baby Boomers can’t use a smartphone. They don’t know how Twitter works; certainly can’t use a computer. The fact that I was wearing a big badge that said at the bottom, podcaster, that seemed to be lost, basically because his prejudice just blocked out everything else and he knew I was ignorant. 

Of course, the real core issue was that he had no empathy about living in a world that has changed amazingly in the past 40 years. From Dick Tracy wearing a wrist TV -if you remember that back in the 60s and 70s, it was absolutely laughable at the time that you could fit a TV on your wrist. Well, now you can get them from a number of different people, and taking space flights for pleasure, another thing just absolutely unheard of; regularly living to ages, we only couldn’t even dream of as kids. . .

All these things are things that he couldn’t possibly understand, and understand why somebody would find some particular piece of technology just so fascinating, because they grew up with it. It's a totally different mindset, and they don’t stop to try and think and appreciate how we might perceive the world. 

But honestly, my extreme annoyance with him probably was at least in part, because of my own lack of empathy towards him. The fact that I went through things that he can’t even imagine. He probably was insecure, dealing with an older person, because it was probably equally likely that I really didn’t know how to use an advanced cell phone, or I could have been the inventor of it, the inventor of it. I think he either just passed away or just got a reward, one of those two things. I guess they’re both kind of an award in a sense. 

But from the Baby Boomer Generation, like the other generations, span a wide range of capabilities. There’s been a lot of public bashing of people our age now with social media, so it’s fun to poke fun at us. A lot of people get this kind of ageism mindset. It’s really unfortunate. 

Now let’s widen our focus, not just to ageism, but to intolerance in many forms. One that always strikes me, because I do a little weekly rally, or a couple times a week, the little rally for Ukraine, exercising my First Amendment. Most of the rude remarks and threats (yes, threats. I do get threats in my little one-person rally) are from people who are most likely mostly isolated from society. Generally, it’s not a group of people who you would expect to see at the local McDonald’s. They tend to look like loners, or they’re a group of people who are probably not in the mainstream of society. 

Thus, they probably don’t have a lot of practice listening to, or rationally considering, alternative opinions. They don’t care how I think, only how they think. By making them think at all, I’m a threat to them because they formed an opinion. Nothing challenges that opinion, and my very presence challenges them and makes them think, and changes their expectation of how the world should operate. So they lash out at me because they want to keep those scary thoughts away and to feel safe. 

Now let’s look at how we ourselves are passing through our aging years, and how we’re interacting with the rest of our world. Are we like the examples above? Are we the ones that know certain things about other groups of people? Do we know that young people are lazy, or just play games, or can’t make change from the cash register? How many times have you heard people say that? Or how they just want handouts, and they don’t like old people. If you’re still working, do you avoid the young people because they dress differently? You can’t understand how they talk. They talk so fast or whatever the words mean. They always have earbuds in; you don’t even know if they hear you! Or do you try to reach out and make new friends? 

If you’re going to reach across the age divide, why not also reach out across the ethnic divide, the social, religious, and language divides? Instead of moaning about how it’s so isolating to be older, how about looking at it as an opportunity to share our life experiences and make new friends from all walks of life? I would suggest we are in an amazing time in our lives and in an amazing time in the world.   

Now, perhaps, more than ever, we have the opportunity to meet, learn from, and become friends with people that would have been unimaginable only a few years ago. You can join a meetup group or some other online function, not only in a different region of the US, but in a different part of the world. You can take virtual tours of a different country, or give a tour or a talk about where you live in your own country. You can take low- or no-cost courses in a huge variety of topics from hobby type courses, how to do whatever hobby you wanted to learn - calligraphy, whatever it is - to learning new skills that you can then share with those who need a helping hand. How fun would it be to work with a group of kids, or any group, teaching English or math to a child in another country who’s hoping to better themselves and help their siblings get into a better place in society.

You can even learn new skills to make your own life easier. If you’re having trouble with your phone because the letters are too small, how about taking a course and learning how to make the fonts bigger, and install some apps to get free audiobooks from the library. Once you learn those things, you can have a little afternoon get-together where you teach all your friends all those same tricks. So, now, not only have you learned something, you’ve crossed a barrier. The key to all this is being empathetic to other people’s needs and fears. Those are not only ourselves but those around us. Remember, if you have those fears, probably other people do too. 

Remember, empathy can be defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. If you’re feeling alone or threatened by the world, a lot of the people that you know who are like you and around you probably do, too. If you want to feel more connected and involved, try to connect and become involved with those around you.

There’ll be difficulties. Obviously, not everybody is perfect, but the only way to guarantee failure is to not even try. Try, reach out, make friends. Try to understand how other people feel. Because if you understand other people’s feelings and then share your own, you might find that there’s joy in all we have learned, and the many good things in life still lie ahead of us. 

Remember, so that’s actually kind of what I really wanted to cover tonight and I know we covered a couple different topics, but they all play together, and they’re all key to us taking control of our lives and making our lives into more what we want it to be. If we go around feeling isolated and alone, no one’s going to reach us, and we’re not going to reach anybody else. Nothing’s going to dissuade that opinion that we’ve convinced ourselves everything is like. 

But if we try to be a little more open minded and try to understand people, instead of me getting all snarky with the kid at the booth, if I’d said something like, I do run my own podcast and I’m an engineer, and I actually run a Computer Sciences department. He might have said, Oh, oh, sorry. We could have had a discussion and we both could have had the opportunity to change the situation, and we both dropped the ball. I was as responsible as he was. Opportunities abound all around us. Every day, we see them. Every day, we can use them or not take advantage of them. It's up to us to make our lives and everybody’s lives a little bit better. 

A reminder again. If you want to support Ukraine, or any other particular matter that’s important to you, please contact your members in Congress, your representative, and your senators. This is a shortcut link to the page from the Office of Congressional Services. You can find all the information about your senator and your representative. You can write them. You can email them. You can send them a phone call. There’s lots of different ways you can get a hold of them. Acting even in a small way, especially in a manner consistent with your core beliefs, you’ll find that you feel less threatened by the world, and a lot more involved and confident in your actions and in life overall. 

The other one that’s very important is UKR7.com. Don’t forget the war in Ukraine. It’s still raging. Putin is still purposely targeting civilian areas, hospitals, this goes on and on. There are tons of atrocities, some discovered just a few days ago. It’s just beyond miserable.If you’re able and interested, the page and donation links are still up at UKR7.com. One of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. If you can help others, please try and take that opportunity. Of course, this isn’t a promo for my website and my business. This just passes through to other people, really effective charities. We’re getting the aid out to other people. So, again, please pass it along. Consider giving yourself. 

So, as always, be true to yourself. Live life aligned with your true goals and feelings. Be aware, and have empathy for others. Try and respond to everybody with kindness and encouragement. You might find new opportunities for friendship and growth, and find the world’s a lot nicer than you had initially envisioned it. 

So that’s it for the week. Thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along. If not, please drop me a note. Let me know what you’d like to hear about. Have a great week and thanks for visiting. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of because that’s the path of true contentment. Love and encouragement to everybody. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com