Three Books, A Thousand Lives: What Today’s Aging Culture Is Teaching Us About the Next Twenty Five Years

I walked into Iconick, one of my neighborhood cafés here in Santa Fe last week and watched two scenes unfold at once. In the front, a young barista helped an older patron with their payment app, leaning shoulder‑to‑shoulder like kin. In the back, a table of retirees argued politics with a ferocity that would make the current junta sweat. It struck me that this is the frontier: not just gadgets and pills, but the stories we tell while we pass the phone across the table, the way we claim space for our voices, the way we practice our endings and our beginnings.

Three recent books have been companions for me on this frontier—Ashton Applewhite’s This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism, Louise Aronson’s Elderhood: Redefining Aging, Transforming Medicine, Reimagining Life, and Becca Levy’s Breaking the Age Code. Read together, they are less a stack of arguments and more a braid of invitations. They invite us—story workers, educators, clinicians, neighbors—to stop treating aging as a private shame or a clinical problem and start regarding it as a cultural project. Below I offer a practitioner’s reading: A wee bit about what each book says, what it means for story practice with some project ideas, and what I believe the next two decades might look like if we take them seriously.

This Chair Rocks — Naming the Water We’re Swimming In

“Fear of dying is human. Fear of aging is cultural.”   - Ashton Applewhite

Applewhite’s gift is a clean, bright light. She shows how ageism is everywhere: in workplace policies, in punchlines, in glossy ads that sell “ageless” as if time were a stain you could launder out. She also shows how it intersects with sexism, racism, ableism, and class—compounding disadvantages for the people already pushed to the margins. The book asks us to stop seeing these as attitudes and start seeing them as a system.

Implication for story work: Systems don’t change because we prove them wrong; they change because other, truer stories take root. The anti‑ageist narrative is not a single speech or campaign. It’s a chorus: workers challenging discriminatory hiring practices; grandmothers running for school board; queer elders teaching chosen‑family kinship to their clinics; men naming loneliness and rebuilding social ties; older immigrants insisting their accents are assets. The work we do in story, like my various workshops with folks over 60, can become the greenhouse for these counter‑stories.

Practice prompts for your own story work-

• Inventory the air: Ask participants to list five ageist messages they absorbed before age 20. Then have them rewrite each one into a statement of agency or possibility.
• Intersection check: Invite a sentence starter—“When I am treated as ___ and ___, I feel… I respond by…”—to surface the layers of discrimination and the strategies of resistance.

Elderhood — Making Room for a Third Act

“So many parts of our complicated human lives don’t easily lend themselves to measurement or experimentation.”  - Louise Aronson

Louise Aronson, a geriatrician, argues that “elderhood” is a distinct life stage, as rich and varied as childhood or adulthood. Our systems, however—especially healthcare—treat it like the absence of youth, a long hallway of deficit and decline. She invites us to redesign medicine, policy, and daily life around meaning, connection, and quality of life, not just around the management of disease.

Implication for story work: If elderhood is its own stage, it deserves its own narrative forms and rites of passage. That means more story circles in clinics and senior centers, more time‑budgeted listening in care planning, more public platforms where elders author their futures in their own language. In story terms:

• Connection: Begin with the lived dilemma, not the diagnosis.
• Context: Name the social and clinical scaffolding that helps or hinders.
• Change: Track the meaning shift—what matters now, and why.
• Closure: Point to the next, small, human step (for the teller, for the listener, for the system).

Practice prompts

• The Appointment I Needed: Craft a 250‑word script about a medical encounter that honored—or erased—your sense of self. End with one specific change you want from the system.
• Rite of Passage: Design (and narrate) a personal ceremony that marks entry into elderhood—who is present, what is promised, what is let go.

Breaking the Age Code — Beliefs as Biology, Stories as Medicine

“First, their sheer prevalence; according to the World Health Organization, ageism is the most widespread and socially accepted prejudice today.”
- Becca Levy

Levy’s research is a revelation: the beliefs we hold about aging—absorbed from families, media, and institutions—don’t just color our moods; they shape our health, our memory, even our longevity. Negative age beliefs elevate stress and narrow behavior; positive, realistic beliefs expand what we try and how our bodies respond.

Implication for story work: If beliefs become biology, then story work is public health. The images and words we circulate—and the micro‑stories we repeat to ourselves—are interventions. Narrative reframing is not denial; it is a shift from “aging equals loss” to “aging equals complexity, contribution, and change,” with plenty of space for grief and grit.

Practice prompts

• Belief Audit: Write down your go‑to sentence about getting older. Replace it with one that is truer and more generative. Record it as a daily voice memo for a week.
• Intergenerational Remix: Pair older and younger partners to script two‑voice stories that bust a shared stereotype, each naming what they learned from the other.

What These Books Portend

Taken together, these books signal a cultural swing that I believe will define the next twenty plus years:

1. From Anti‑Aging to Pro‑Elderhood: The market will keep selling youth in a bottle, but policy and practice will move toward supporting elderhood as a stage with civic responsibilities and cultural gifts. Expect more elder councils, more teaching artist residencies in care settings, and more elder‑led community design.
2. Healthcare That Listens: Geriatrics will inch out of the margins as health systems learn (often the hard way) that shorter hospitalizations, fewer readmissions, and higher satisfaction follow when you treat the person, not just the chart. Story circles and narrative care planning will become standard in primary care and home‑based services.
3. Workplace Realignment: As demographics shift, the myth that older workers block innovation will erode. Mixed‑age teams will be a competitiveness strategy, not a concession. Digital storytelling in organizational change work will help re‑script “succession planning” as knowledge gardening, not exit choreography.
4. Design for Dignity: Tech will finally meet elders where they are—not as “users to be trained” but as co‑designers. You’ll see more voice‑first interfaces, privacy‑first data stewardship, and storytelling tools designed for shaky hands and tired eyes. The best of these will be built with elder makers at the table.
5. Death as Curriculum: Palliative care will grow. So will ritual literacy. Communities will reclaim practices of mourning and celebration. Story workers will be asked to facilitate legacy projects that are not saccharine “bucket lists,” but fierce, truthful reckonings.

So What Do We Do—Tomorrow?

Here’s a starter kit for our community of practice. Use it as is, or remix to fit your context.

A. Build Anti‑Ageist Story Environments

• Name the values at the door: dignity, consent, cultural humility, agency.
• Set mixed‑age tables whenever possible. Cross‑pollination is medicine.
• Budget time for follow‑up. Consent is a process, and memory ripens. Keep a door open for changes in how stories are shared.

B. Teach a “Four C’s” Story Form for Elderhood

1. Connect: open inside an unresolved scene in your experience as an elder (a setback, a confrontation, a disappointment, a breakthrough, a discovery!)
2. Context: briefly place the moment in a longer arc (family, work, migration, faith, place).
3. Change: what shifted in how you see yourself or what you want now.
4. Conclusion: one insight, one action, one resolution that came from this experience

C. Put Intersections at the Center

If a Black lesbian elder and a white straight elder tell “the same” hospital story, they are not the same story. Build processes that see and honor how identities and systems collide. Invite people to author the labels that matter to them.

A Good Life, and Equally, a Good Death

In workshops over the years, I’ve watched something tender happen when people give themselves permission to speak frankly about finitude. The fear doesn’t vanish; it ventilates. People plan, forgive, reconcile, give things away. The story becomes a kind of practical love.

A good life in elderhood looks like purpose with room for rest; interdependence without shame; competence mixed with curiosity; a calendar with commitments and blank space. A good death looks like choice, comfort, and company; fewer secrets and fewer surprises; legacy defined not by inheritance but by the stories we have had the courage to tell and the questions we have had the humility to leave open.

If we accept the invitations of Applewhite, Aronson, and Levy, we can help make both more possible. Not by arguing people into better beliefs, but by hosting rooms where different beliefs become livable. By building publics where elders speak for themselves. By returning medicine to listening. By making technology feel like a warm hand, not a cold gatekeeper. By telling the truth about grief and by dedicating ourselves to delight—yes, delight—right to the end.

Looking Ahead

We don’t need permission to start. The next twenty plus years will be shaped by the stories we dignify now: about care, about work, about who belongs in public, about how we face endings. Let’s keep a chair open for the person who hasn’t felt invited, keep a hand on the mic so it passes often, and keep our eyes on the small moves that add up to cultural change.

If you’re running a project in this space, I’d love to learn from you. If you’ve got a hard story to tell, I’ve got a circle. And if you’re still on the fence, pull it up—you’re already part of the conversation. The future of aging is not “out there.” It’s us, in this room, line by line, making it up together.

As always, I await your comments at joe@storyhost.net.

—Joe