The myth of age and wisdom

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized many things about which I was ignorant or wrong. But there’s one idea—first postulated during my teenage years—for which my conviction has only grown stronger and more substantiated. That idea is that adults—aka “grown-ups”—typically have no idea what they’re doing. I’m increasingly convinced that the idea of age equaling wisdom is utter rubbish.

We generally accept the notion that by accumulating experiences throughout life, we learn from them and become wiser. But I have seen remarkably little evidence for this, and while I’ll grant that age and wisdom may correlate to some degree, I don’t believe there is any clear causation. When I was young, I assumed that my parents and teachers (and adults in general) knew many important things that I did not, and that someday when I was old enough, I too would acquire the secret knowledge that grown-ups possessed which allowed them to successfully and confidently navigate life. But by my high school years I began to suspect that maybe adults weren’t as wise as they made themselves seem, and now that I am an adult myself, with four decades of life behind me, I can say for certain that it was all a hoax. I find that despite my years—despite all my living and learning—I remain adrift in a sea of doubt. What is my purpose? What does it mean to be a good person, or to live a good life? Are my days spent making the world a better place? I have no better answers to these questions today than I did one or two or even three decades ago!

Meanwhile, with regard to most of the adults to whom I once looked for guidance and insight, I’ve long since recognized them as just regular people—not powerful all-knowing wizards but mere men and women hiding behind a curtain, desperately trying to project some illusion of wisdom and understanding. The truth is that most of them are no better or wiser than me, because despite their years they seem to have avoided the most important lesson of all: the recognition that they are ignorant.

Socrates famously said, “I know only one thing: that I know nothing.” The wonderful irony of Socrates is that he was widely reputed to be the wisest man alive—not just by men, but by no less an authority than the Oracle at Delphi!—yet he himself disputed that claim, convinced that he was certain of nothing but his own ignorance. He set out to speak with all the other supposed wise men of Athens, determined to find at least one wiser than him, but instead found only men who thought themselves wise, yet whose speech and actions betrayed their true ignorance. Thus, after a long search, Socrates resigned himself to the accuracy of the Oracle’s proclamation—he was indeed the wisest man in Athens, but only because he was the sole person who truly acknowledged his ignorance! The moral of the story is that the crux of wisdom is realizing how much we don’t know. True wisdom does not crown us with confidence, but instead imposes humility; we do not assume that we have figured things out, but instead remain consistently inquisitive and open to new ideas.

Part of the problem might be our commonly (mis)understood definition of wisdom. One dictionary describes wisdom as “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment.” But I think that most people (including myself until recently) tend to emphasize the experience part and assume that it leads inextricably to knowledge and good judgment; it’s a common belief that experience will always make you more confident in yourself, your ideas, and your decision making. But I’m not sure that’s how it really works.

Indeed, it’s very easy to have experience but not be transformed by it. As David Brooks says when discussing gracious leadership, “It’s not enough to be experienced. The people…we really admire turn experience into graciousness. [They] see their years as humbling agents. They see that, more often than not, the events in our lives are perfectly designed to lay bare our chronic weaknesses and expose some great whopping new ones.” I’ve increasingly found this to be true, and the people who I most trust for advice these days are not the ones who condescendingly wag their finger at me, or bang their fist on the table in emphasis, but the people who gently offer thoughtful suggestions, and pepper their speech with words like “maybe” and phrases like “but I’m not sure.” These are people who recognize their own ignorance, and therefore offer any advice humbly (and often reluctantly).

But on the whole, it seems that most of us still assume that age and experience automatically yield the knowledge and good judgment that are necessary for true wisdom, when in fact we often learn nothing. I’m reminded of a quote from Tom Stoppard’s brilliant play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead: “We cross our bridges when we come to them and burn them behind us, with nothing to show for our progress except a memory of the smell of smoke, and a presumption that once our eyes watered.”

* * * *

I’ve started to seriously consider that maybe we have things totally reversed. Maybe we’re most wise when we are children, and then as we get older we forget much of our original wisdom—or more likely, we have it “taught” out of us. I constantly notice how children have a much purer understanding of concepts like fairness and empathy. Adults always encourage children to be kind and fair and generous, and kids embrace those values and eagerly put them into action, believing in the wisdom of their elders. But then problems arise: the child sees its parent being unkind or unfair or selfish, and they ask why. The adult, unwilling (and usually unable) to admit their own hypocrisy, makes up some sort of explanation for their behavior, crafting elaborate stories as to why it’s ok to speak disparagingly of that particular group (gays or blacks or immigrants or left-/right-wingers), or why it’s ok to insist on humane treatment for dogs while blithely eating factory-farmed pigs and chickens, or why it’s ok to buy the nice new car while ignoring the hungry homeless person on the corner. To most adults, the clarity with which kids see the world is quite disconcerting, and so the young must be fitted with blinders as soon as possible.

Teenagers in particular are given a bad rap, because they are constantly “challenging the system” and pushing back against their elders. Adults like to say that teens are just young and immature, and that they don’t know what the “real world” is like. But I’m inclined to argue that teens actually perceive the world far more objectively than adults do, because they have not yet constructed the elaborate house of lies and half-truths that adults invariably build for themselves. In many ways, the acuity and honesty of teens comes from the fact that they have very little to lose; they have not yet become a part of the machine that swallows up most adults. For many of us “grown-ups,” by the time we are in our thirties, and increasingly more so in subsequent decades, we become part of the system that we once rebelled against. We get jobs and start to make some money; we get promotions and join civic groups and start to achieve some status; and eventually our money and status and “connections” give us an actual degree of power, with which we can shape our society so that it benefits us even more, and bends increasingly towards our own selfish goals.

Of course, we claim that what we are doing is wise, and that the decisions we make are a product of our decades of experience. But I think this is usually bullshit. What we are actually doing is just oiling the machine in which we are now cogs. And this machine often grinds up and spits out the less fortunate, and perpetuates a system riddled with corruption and unfairness. But given our essential human need to tell a story in which we are the “good guys,” we invoke “wisdom” to justify our actions, and we tell our children that someday they will understand. And they will indeed come to think like us someday, but not because they acquire any new wisdom; rather, it will be because they forget their original wisdom and succumb to the convenient lies that are so much more comfortable and reassuring than the challenging demands of honesty and truth.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who sees our predominant social structure as topsy-turvy. In his book Growing Young, Ashley Montagu challenges the view of maturity held by most modern societies, in which childhood—with its associated characteristics—is seen as a temporary and lower stage of development, out of which the child must be “raised” as swiftly as possible. Curiosity and constant asking of questions, open-mindedness and lack of prejudice—these are just some of the many childlike qualities that Montagu sees not as liabilities but rather as humanity’s greatest assets, the source of our amazing success as a species. To him, it is a tragedy that, far too often, what we think of as “rearing” a child only means subjecting them to “distorting socialization processes” which “close his mind and pervert his view of the world.” Montagu laments that:

“Adults only too frequently patronizingly look down upon the childlike qualities of the child, without any understanding of their real meaning…They fail to realize that the child surpasses the adult by the wealth of his possibilities. In a very real sense, infants and children implicitly know a great deal more concerning many aspects of growing than adults; adults, therefore, have more to learn from them about such matters than the latter have to learn from adults.”

I’ve come to agree with Montagu that the key to being a healthy, successful adult is to preserve and protect one’s childlike qualities for as long as one can. In light of this, it’s no surprise that the people who I most trust for wisdom and guidance, however old they might be, still possess an abundance of curiosity, open-mindedness, and even playfulness. They remain eager to learn, even more so than they are to teach, and thus they continue to grow intellectually and emotionally even into old age. They demonstrate humility, openly admitting their failures and using them as valuable teaching tools, and they are never dogmatic because they know that they will surely be wrong about something again tomorrow.

Yet if people with true wisdom display kindness and patience, then it must be admitted that true wisdom is dreadfully lacking in most adults today. It saddens me to see how so many grown-ups react to young people like the environmental activist Greta Thunberg or the gun-control advocates from Stoneman Douglas High School. These kids perceive an unfairness or injustice in the world, and they call out to their elders for help in changing things for the better. And while it’s perfectly fine for adults to disagree with some or all of their arguments, what more often happens is that these young people are met with scorn, if not outright hostility. I have watched so many older people deride and mock these teens, calling them “little monsters” and telling them to “sit down and shut up.” I cannot find an ounce of wisdom in this approach. I think an adult manifesting true wisdom would admire the courage and spirit of these kids even if they disagreed with them, and would make a genuine effort to listen to their concerns and ask questions that would both challenge the children’s assumptions and permit themselves to better understand the issues at hand. A truly wise adult would realize that a healthy society requires growth and change, and that we should not suppress or purge young people’s idealism, but rather harness and guide it by humbly sharing the knowledge and good judgment that we have (hopefully) acquired from our own decades of experience.

But alas, we see how our society’s current attitude toward childlike qualities—which include the willingness to question everything and imagine anything—results in a smothering and repression of that spirit. And because of this, we watch as Greta and the Parkland-shooting survivors—once enthusiastic and hopeful—become angry and close-minded themselves…because that is the behavior their “elders” have modeled for them. And thus the cycle perpetuates for another generation, and wisdom continues to elude us in our adulthood because we have foolishly forgotten the lessons of our childhood.

So please forgive me if I fail to show the proper deference to someone simply because they are above me in years. I’ve learned that aging can be a purely quantitative experience—not necessarily qualitative. And I think that my fullest respect is best reserved for those who cultivate real wisdom—that is, those of any age who remain youthful in heart, open in mind, and humble in spirit.