Ageism is a thing of the West

A few days ago I was having breakfast in a hotel when what I suppose was a group from the German Imserso showed up.

There was something strange about that scene: everyone present, with their toast and their coffee, was more or less the same age.

I imagined that they were retirees who shared a trip and for a moment it was extremely depressing to think that retiring from working life means having to be with those who were born on the same dates as us again.

Just like in school or college.

The scene in question is the most common but it seemed strange to me, just as strange as the common rooms of nursing homes or the tables where dominoes are played in senior centers.

What does not fit, what denotes an organization that goes beyond the natural inertia of life,

It is precisely age segregation.

That in these places adults, for being the ones who accumulate more years in this world, are almost forced to get together with others from their fifth to have a social life.

This compartmentalization is, in fact, an artifice very typical of Western capitalist societies.

Being outside the production chain seems to automatically lead to an age ghetto.

It is in our latitudes where the obsession to classify, delimit, define, catalog and establish the different life stages reaches its peak.

As if spaces of coexistence could not exist, as if we could only be with our contemporaries.

I try to think of the words referring to this topic that I know in my mother tongue, Rif, and I can't find even a tenth of those compiled by María Moliner under the meaning of “age”.

And that in the dictionary neither

, nor generation x, nor

nor

.

Intergenerational miscegenation, present in many traditional societies, is more interesting and less claustrophobic.

I don't imagine that when I get old my prize for a long life of work is to be only with other old people.

I want, as now, spread different points of view.

I will want to recharge batteries with the electrifying energy of young people in the same way that I have been close to those who know more because they have lived longer since I was little.

I want to receive gratefully the memory that you want to transmit to me and transfer mine to whoever may be interested so that the intangible legacy of the experience does not sadly languish in hotels out of season.

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