Turning Down the Volume

On age, attention, and the weight of an opinion

Last week, I started feeling ignored. My email messages were not responded to.

That isn’t, by itself, remarkable. People are busy. Inboxes are crowded. Messages fall into spam filters, get buried under newsletters, or land in that mental category labeled I’ll get to this later, which is where perfectly reasonable intentions tend to expire. Still, when the silence stretches longer than expected, it becomes noticeable in a way that’s hard to ignore.

Is this just my insecurity, or is something going on?

Ageism. Is it real? I mean, does the age of a person make a difference as to the weight of his/her/its opinion?

Friends are a different matter. Your friends’ opinions will almost always carry more weight than the opinion of some stranger, and your friends are generally in your age bracket. But strangers are a more interesting test case. If you’re presented with two—one close to you in age and one thirty years different—which opinion are you more likely to value?

I’ve read and heard that the opinions of older people hold little value for younger people now—the “Okay, Boomer” shorthand—but I hadn’t really experienced that devaluing myself.

Perhaps that’s because I’m a woman, and women in general haven’t been granted much public authority throughout my lifetime, so the shift is harder for me to notice. Maybe a man’s experience would be different. I don’t know.

What I do know is what I grew up absorbing, without anyone ever laying it out explicitly. I grew up with the understanding that elders were expected to have something worth listening to. That age brought perspective. That experience counted. That growing older meant being consulted, not quietly passed over.

That expectation wasn’t universal, and it wasn’t flawless, but it existed. It shaped how I thought the arc of a life was supposed to work.

It’s still that way in some cultures. In ours, we tend to put old folks who can’t care for themselves anymore out of sight and wait for them to die. And now we’re, apparently, doing something similar with voices over sixty—not silencing them outright, just lowering the volume and pretending we can still hear.

So I needed to step back—outside of myself, outside of my ego—and look at the situation more carefully.

Am I a victim of ageism, or am I a victim of my expectations?