Do We All Suffer from Gerontophobia?

What is the driving force behind ageism? Many theories abound, most of them grounded in prevailing myths and stereotypes that cast older adults in less than flattering terms. Those of a certain age are in mental and physical decline, the stories go, their best years well behind them. They may make good grandparents but are otherwise non-productive, nonsexual members of society who, with their Social Security and Medicare benefits, are a costly drain on taxpayers’ money. They certainly don’t belong in the workforce, except perhaps as greeters at Wal-Mart or in some other minimum wage job where they can do little harm. Keeping a safe distance from older people thus seems the best answer to the problem of their annoying habit of staying alive. Based on his research, Cornell University professor Karl Pillemer made the rather startling claim that contemporary America was “the most age-segregated society that’s ever been,” the result of many different and divisive decisions made in education, work, and housing over the course of a century.

Ageism is a global phenomenon, however, suggesting that there may be some basic psychological component for shunning older people. I believe that ageism functions as a vehicle by which we can vent our fears of dependence and death onto others, making it their problem and not ours. Older people are a convenient target of the anxiety and insecurity we feel about what is the ultimate existential dilemma of life—that it is certain to end. We blame old people for this troublesome truth, projecting onto them an inner angst that each of us carries around at a greater or lesser degree. We objectify older people, a way to safely contain the unsolvable problem that one day we too will disappear.

I am not the first to propose such a theory based on a kind of repulsion of one’s future self. In a 1972 article in The Gerontologist, J.H. Bunzel coined the term “gerontophobia,” defining it as “the unreasonable fear and or hatred of the elderly.” And in their 1980 Ageism: Prejudice and Discrimination Against the Elderly, Jack Levin and William C. Levin expanded the concept a bit. “Gerontophobia seems to occur, first of all, because most young people will someday be old, and secondly, because old age is associated with death,” they wrote. Finally, in a study that same year, two collaborating psychologists, Robert Kastenbaum and Bernice Neugarten, argued that Americans, in general, had “an irrational fear of aging and, as a result, maintain a psychological distance from older persons.” This was despite their broader findings that 70-somethings were a lot more like the rest of us than we liked to believe.

Is gerontophobia curable? I believe it is. Embracing, even celebrating the entirely natural process of aging represents our greatest opportunity to heal ourselves from the socially constructed condition of gerontophobia that does serious harm to millions of lives every day. Let’s begin the process today by granting older people full citizenship and equal rights in the workplace and in society as a whole.