I've met plenty of those up in age that can adapt and learn new technologies. There is no impairment from age, at least for most people until their 70s, that re

I've met plenty of those up in age that can adapt and learn new technologies. There is no impairment from age, at least for most people until their 70s, that really stops them from learning new things or adapting to change. I've worked with a music instructor in his 60s who runs his own website and actively learns new web tech just because he thinks its cool, as an anecdotal recent example. Its in the same cultural structure as the general anti-intellectualism movement. The older you are, the more memories and experiences you have, the more sunk cost you have in the skills you already acquired and the more resentful you are to have to acknowledge their obsolescence. It becomes really easy to just say no when you have some amassed capital to having to adapt to changing in-demand skills. That is what the entire argument Trump made regarding coal miners has been - obsoleted workers who don't want to change and a president who promised them to make the world stop changing for them. In practice there is legitimate ageism, especially in startup culture. But there are super strong parallels between ageism and sexism - there is the structural and the intentional. With each: Explicit Sexism: Radical Tumblr feminists, "Incels", "Women belong in the kitchen", actively choosing to not hire an equally skilled person because they are a certain gender, or actively and intentionally paying someone less because of their gender for the same job. Explicit Ageism: Old people can't learn new tricks, "millennials are ruining X", not hiring someone due to just age. Structural Sexism: Women going into less in-demand or lower paying careers, leading to the average woman making less money per hour spent working than the average man. Structural Ageism: Wanting to pay less for a job, regardless of skill, thus discriminating against those with lots of experience (ie, older people). The former are just obviously evil, the later are consequences of the way we prioritize our society. Getting rid of the former are generally easy because you can just denounce sexists and ageists. Getting rid of the later requires whole cultures to shift, which is much harder to do. But ageism isn't that unique among most other discriminations by physical characteristics. Humanity runs the gamut on ways to make other peoples lives worse due to circumstances beyond their control.