What is the difference between ageism and gerontophobia?
Ageism to me is discrimination against the elderly. Gerontophobia is fear of the population being overwhelmed by the elderly. So in a sense they are very closely related, but gerontophobia is even more irrational than ageism in general. At the moment aging is a big problem for society- in the sense that elderly people are frail, dependent and they consume a lot of economic resources, as well of course the fact that aging causes a lot of suffering on both the part of the person whose aging and on the part of their loved ones. So these are reasons why ageism is a hard nut to crack. Why people in one sense feel sorry for the elderly, so we’re happy to have things like the state pension fund, but on the other hand we feel that they often get in the way. So, at a subtler level there is a lot of ageism. Gerontophobia is sort of the sharp end of that- it’s the fear that the problem of the elderly so to speak, will get even worse as time goes on. So my work is really focused on eliminating the
