Ageism is the stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination against people on the basis of their age. Ageism is widespread and an insidious practice which has harmful effects on the health of older adults. For older people, ageism is an everyday challenge. Overlooked for employment, restricted from social services and stereotyped in the media, ageism marginalises and excludes older people in their communities. Ageism is everywhere, yet it is the most socially “normalized” of any prejudice, and is not widely countered – like racism or sexism. These attitudes lead to the marginalisation of older people within our communities and have negative impacts on their health and well-being.

That’s a quote from the World Health organization on ageism.

I’m John Fanning and this is the Create with John Fanning podcast.

How’s it goin out there. Hope all is well.

This is Episode 13 of my series of episodes on Imagination and creativity, based around my book Create.

Last time I spoke about courage, trolls and human Walls, but today I want to talk about ageism and retirement.

For decades, I used to always read a writer’s bio first, even before the first line of their book. I was obsessed with age. What age was she when she got her first novel published? What age was she when she got her second one out there? The nearer she was to my age, the more relieved I became.

Why? Because I, along with so many young people, are obsessed with this Wall of age, and early achievement. I used to see myself as a failure because I hadn’t published a novel earlier.

This is the culture we live in. You’re supposed to come out with something wonderful in our twenties, when we’ve barely experienced life.

This can have really bad side effects. I’ve seen many writers who had early success and never had another thing published. There were many different reasons for this. Trying to reproduce the same thing which made them successful then being called derivative. Not being able to write another book for over ten years because of the pressure they felt to “perform” the same way again.

As a young writer I was a somewhat bitter individual. I’m not too sure I’d like to have a conversation with that young man. He was fun but he hated a lot of things. He was an angry “intellectual” railing at everyone who’d sold out. Back then, I had no idea about story. I just did what I thought I was supposed to be doing. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and got angrier the older I got, especially the more I saw badly written books getting published.

Now, I am so grateful that my earlier novels were never published. Why? They lacked story. They lacked craft. They lacked emotional intelligence. This is not to say young writers aren’t valuable. There are many wonderful books published by people in their twenties, but now I’m glad it didn’t happen for me, because it’s allowed me to grow, and so allowed my writing to evolve in private, not in public, where oftentimes you are punished for not putting something wonderful out into the world first time out, and every time after that. It’s like a film editor friend of mine once said to me.

“I don’t mind if this movie is a failure, John. The spotlight is on the director, not the editor. I have the time to grow. A director has to hit it every time out the door, and most directors can’t sustain that.”

That friend is a very successful film editor now,