An American baby born in 2025 has a better-than-even chance of living to age 95. Today’s average American 65-year-old can expect to live another 18.5 years, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

These dramatic statistics, cited by economist Andrew J. Scott in his book The Longevity Imperative, underlie his theme about a new way to approach aging: not as a societal burden, but as an opportunity.

The book’s subtitle, How to Build a Healthier and More Productive Society to Support Our Longer Lives, emphasizes the need for our workplaces and other institutions to maximize longer lifespans.

Having more time on this Earth than originally planned enthuses few. Many people don’t look forward to the last quarter of life because they fear they will become too ill, frail, and/or broke to enjoy it.

Some will suffer that fate. But if others have the chance to keep working, many of them might find themselves not only happier, but rewarded for their contributions and hard-earned wisdom.

Since President Lyndon Johnson signed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act into law in 1967, the sole paradigm for examining older worker employment opportunities has been “protection” for their status. That means the federal government (and most state governments) reserved the right to step in and stop managers and co-workers from intentionally discriminating against a worker because of his age.

While the statutory scheme prohibits hiring decisions based on age, for the past 58 years lawyers have had little success prosecuting companies in failure-to-hire cases. Algorithms allow recruiters to easily ferret out an applicant’s age (despite, for example, careful omissions of graduation dates on a resume), thereby allowing them to freely ignore applicants over 50 and suffer no repercussions.

What’s the reasoning behind this prejudice? 1) The fear that hiring older workers in positions of power and responsibility will discourage younger, more ambitious, and highly creative types from working there. 2) The fear that hiring people in their 50s, 60s, and 70s will deplete workplace “energy” that clients seek. 3) The fear that older workers cost too much in HR time, medical insurance costs, and accommodation requests.

Even without considering that the bulk of applicants 60 and older are more than willing to consider, or actually prefer, part-time work, the “cost defense” doesn’t hold water.

Take the example of an active 65-year-old grandmother applying for a job also sought by a married woman, 29, with one child. Both applicants have similar college degrees, but the grandmother has 40 years of relevant experience, and the 29-year-old has eight years.

It’s likely that the millennial insures her partner on her employer-sponsored health insurance, will have another baby during the next five years and take advantage of employer-guaranteed paid maternity leave, and will seek time off to care for a family member during the next decade and preserve her position upon return, as mandated by the Family and Medical Leave Act.

The notion of deliberately hiring older workers instead of carefully avoiding discrimination claims is indeed radical.

How about the healthy grandmother? Assume she and her partner are receiving Social Security benefits along with IRA distributions sufficient to fund their lifestyle. While statistics show that the grandmother might be more likely than the millennial to fall ill, all other things being equal, the grandmother is a better bet from a strict cost-benefit analysis.

The notion of deliberately hiring older workers instead of carefully avoiding discrimination claims is indeed radical. People are terrified of aging, and our culture profits from that terror.

In a recent story in The Atlantic, journalist Jennifer Senior looked at the gap between “how old you feel” physically vs. “how old you feel in your head.” Most people believe their subjective age to be 20% younger than their actual age.

“Feeling old” generally describes a person’s aches and pains, but “internal age”—how old you think you are—describes the age-related lens through which you view the world. Viewing yourself as younger is, as Senior wrote, a form of “optimism, not denialism.”

If you view yourself as younger, you “still see yourself as useful,” which gives you an “enduring sense of agency.” Moreover, if you believe that aging itself is valuable, you’ll feel even more useful.

What could be a more compelling reason to hire a qualified applicant who is loud and proud about their age because they know how useful their experience is to an employer?