2024 August 27 Stopping ageism one comment at a time

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website about reimagining your life. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about life's little lessons. If you like what you hear today, please leave a like, subscribe, tell your friends, and send me a message.

Thanks for joining me tonight to talk about more of life's little lessons. They just showed up over the past week, some today actually, just by paying  a little bit of attention and observing things that were going on around me. 

But first, a note about the phenomenon. Maybe you've heard of it—maybe not. It's called the  Baader–Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusion. It's a cognitive bias that affects our perception of the frequency of objects, words, or events, and it involves selective attention and confirmation bias. It's also called the red car bias. For example, you always wanted a red car and you don't see very many, but then you buy a red car, suddenly all you see are red cars.

It involves selective attention. If you start thinking red, you look for red, you notice red. The way that plays into tonight is about noticing ageism. The past couple of episodes, I've talked about ageism, age bias, and the language around that—and how it's all around us. After I did those, I got a little more in tune to it. I heard them sometimes and noted it, but after I did those episodes and really started listening, I realized that it's just in my face constantly. I know what it is. It's the Baader–Meinhof effect—or the red car effect.

What has surprised me is how many times I had been unconsciously exposed to it and filtering it out. It's good that I wasn't focusing on it, but subconsciously, I clearly was keeping track of it because that's what our subconscious mind does. That's how it gets feedback from society on things. It's always listening to things, comparing them to our own thoughts and modifying our beliefs. So, multiple times a day, sometimes dozens of times a day, there would be ageist statements or assumptions made, and they're registering with my subconscious, building up this tremendously biased model in my brain, which then affected both my conscious thoughts and my expectations about myself and aging.

I get a daily financial summary newspaper. I don't really read it. I read it partially for the finances, but really more as an indicator for the economy overall and how things are going. I know the author, as a matter of fact, and I know he respects his elders a lot. He's from the Indian continent.

Right there, as a humorous note to close today's newsletter, there is this ageist story. The context was a caution to not take old people's health advice because their diets are often very unhealthy and they don't exercise. The only reason they're old, according to the experts, is good genes and a hundred years of luck.  That's what the story was. The story was based upon an actual story in the Guardian newspaper, and it's under the category of aging. It was written by Nicola Davis,  a science correspondent. 

I will be writing all three groups—my friend and his newsletter, the Guardian editorial staff and the letters page, and of course, Nicola Davis.  The article then referenced additional experts who echo the same false story we've been discussing about distorted memory and genes, and how you have no control over it—all of the common lies that hav completely pervaded the medical system and medical treatment.

It's amazing that this false narrative, and many other similar false narratives in medicine, as well as how you even deal with the whole aging population, continue to propagate, even though there's ample evidence to the contrary, to the tune of hundreds, if not thousands, of studies that disprove a lot of this. 

It was an unbelievable piece of ageist writing, and it somehow managed to skip all the authors that had contradictory opinions that didn't match common knowledge. Now, as Mark Twain once said, Why is it that common sense is so uncommon? Clearly, the same thing could be said about common knowledge. Why is that? Things that have been disproven for years—and it's not just this, there are lots of things like that, particularly when they come to medicine—they just never go away.  

A related topic to this is another one of our regular topics. So I had this whole ageist thing on my mind. I've been more aware of it over the past few weeks. Another one of our regular topics is how you can have a positive impact on people around you. There are two ways you can get examples of that. One is that something positive happens or you're a positive influence somewhere, but then life provided me with one of those contradictory examples. 

It was actually rather stunning in the magnitude tonight. I was waiting in line to check out at a store that has two adjacent checkout lines that face each other. Very often, people will form one line in the middle so the first person in line can go to the next available register, and the whole process moves faster. 

A very impatient person comes up behind me and says, Well, which line are you in? I explain that there's often one line, and there's one line today so everyone can check out faster. They weren't pleased with the answer. They kept trying to push me along or push me to one side or the other. Finally, they said, Well, if you can't choose, I'm just going to go around you and get into that line. They said with great bluster and annoyance. 

My response was simply, Go for it, which they did—again, with much eye rolling and outward annoyance. Now, unfortunately, they had just called for more cashiers to come up front. Right after their whole little exposition,  two more lanes opened. The rest of the people quickly moved to short lines and checked out before the person did who had to get in that one line, causing them even more angst and outward annoyance. 

The lessons of this are many. To start with, right at the very beginning, they could have considered that a different approach might have served them, and everyone, better, but they had no interest in looking for a different way. They were locked into their belief system that there are two registers, there are going to be two lines. That's that, and you're just annoying me. 

They missed  a whole different way of looking at life.  They may have been driven by the chance of winning by picking the faster line. I see that very often.  People jump from line to line trying to beat everybody else. If everyone had cooperated, the downside is they would have been second no matter what. 

But they figured by forcing the way ahead, they might have won and been first to check out.  But instead, they lost to pretty much every other person behind them—and because they all went to shorter lines, that just seemed to anger them even more.  They could have accepted personal responsibility for this, but judging from the looks I was getting from them, it was pretty clear that I was being held accountable for their bad luck. 

That last one's really insidious, and it's a double edged sword.  By not accepting the results of your own actions, and then blaming others for your own choices,  you never have the opportunity to improve your decision process. Even worse, you typically feel put upon because someone else did something to you. 

This is a very quick way to get yourself into a really bad state in many different ways, because you might convince yourself that the world is against you or that everyone is ganging up on you to make your life worse. In reality,  it's you yourself who are operating against your own best interests. 

But since you wouldn't even consider that, you never change your ways, and the cycle continues.  While I often talk about how we have the opportunity, each and every one of us, to spread goodness to those around us, realistically, we can also spread confrontation and discord if that's how we act.  I was doing nothing, yet I was attacked for it. The result was not only was it unpleasant and uncomfortable for me, but the other person likely set themselves up for more annoyance for the remainder of their day and lost out on a learning opportunity. Who knows what other havoc they caused. Now they're mad and driving in traffic, so they're yelling at people and they're on this death spiral that started out of their own actions. 

Each of us has the ability to make the world a better place in both small and large ways, but sometimes that isn't good enough for someone else. They're determined to spread bad feelings.  In those cases, the best we can do is to try to mitigate it, not encourage it—trying to learn from it. 

That's it for the evening. We all have the opportunity to be an agent of positive change and make things better. I would encourage you to try and do that even in small situations. There were probably eight people or more affected by that one person's behavior,  and it could have been a good time. I was surprised at their aggressiveness  but instead of making it eight people better off, they decided to spread bad feelings. 

I would encourage you—look at the good side. Even if it's an unusual situation, let's see what good we can find out of it, and play off the good parts of it. 

Your homework (always optional) is to be alert for ageist remarks in the news, in ads, in conversations at work, etc. You don't have to do anything yet. Just start to become aware of them. You'd be surprised how many are actually floating around. Extra points if you take a couple of those situations and start reframing the comment in a more positive way. Be an agent for positive change, even if something is socially embedded and acceptable as ageism or age bias. We can change it if we stop considering it as an okay conversation, one little comment at a time. That's it for the night. 

Please remember the many wars that are going on in the world.  There are wars going on almost everywhere. None of them are for good reasons. It's not just Ukraine. It's also in the Mideast, in Africa, things are heating up in South America again. The Philippines, the East Indian Ocean area, Southeast Asia. Everybody seems to want to get in a fight with everybody else.

If you're able to donate, we still have the page up at UKR7.com with links to donation sites to aid Ukraine. You can also donate to the World Central Kitchen at WCK.org. They operate in many different areas, and are very relevant and all they do. The primary thing they do is use local food supplies to get the food back out to the people following a disaster. It's an awesome organization. 

If you choose not to donate, that's fine too. You can still be an agent of positive change. We all can make the world a little better place— even with just a simple smile to somebody. When you look outside yourself and look at the rest of the world, it changes your perspective on the world and helps you understand other people. It gives you more power to make the world a nicer place, and that's a nice power to have. Remember that one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. 

As always, thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting, useful, please pass it along. Please hit that subscribe button and the like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Remember to live the life that you dream of, because that's the path to true contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you.