I Got Fired for Saying “Yippee.” Ageism Loves Silence

At 55, Loren Greiff was put on a performance improvement plan for writing the word “yippee” in an email to a hiring manager. She quit the following Monday — and only afterward saw the shape of the months before it: the canceled one-on-ones, the meetings she no longer led, the work credited to someone else.

In this TEDx talk she argues that ageism runs on a trade older professionals are quietly coached into making — visibility for safety — and that her own silence kept the cycle turning. “We don’t age out by living longer,” she says. “We age out by living smaller.”