279: Rejecting Ageism with Ashton Applewhite

Today, I’m talking to Ashton Applewhite. Ashton is an author, journalist, speaker, and activist who is on a mission to raise awareness and push back against ageism. She is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and Cutting Loose: Why Women Who End Their Marriages Do So Well.

Her work was inspired by a project in which she interviewed older people in the workforce, learning about longevity and happiness–and discovered that most of her ideas about late life were either off base or completely wrong. She became fascinated by why ageism is so prominent, who benefits from it, and what she could do to change people’s perceptions and ideas around it.

Before becoming an advocate against ageism, Ashton wrote the best-selling, mass-market book of 1983, Truly Tasteless Jokes, and was the first-ever author to have four books on the New York Times bestseller list at the same time. She’s been recognized as an expert on aging by the New York Times, NPR, The New Yorker, and the American Society on Aging, and she’s contributed to Harper’s, the Guardian and many more.

In today’s conversation, Ashton joins the podcast to talk about why we’re so unnecessarily afraid of getting older, what drives those fears, and how to make aging a lot less fearsome (and a whole lot more interesting)–and the fascinating things she’s learned on her remarkable journey.

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