Older but wiser?

With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.

Oscar Wilde

Like many baby boomers, I sometimes forget people's names and other important bits of information. Sometimes I can't find a word that's been in my vocabulary for decades. These lapses are often temporary but very annoying. It's a sign of age. (I am 77 years old.)

We often make fun of these incidents and consol ourselves with the knowledge that we may be old but we are much wiser than we were in our younger days. We have years and years of experience behind us and over the years we've learned a thing or two that we never understood when we were listening to the Beatles on the radio. We've lived through the Cuban Missile crisis, the war in Viet Nam, the assassination of two Kennedys and Martin Luther King, and a host of cultural changes. We've lived in several different countries and we've raised children. All of these experiences have made us wiser, or so we think.

But is it true? Are we really wiser than we were 50 years ago? I checked the internet to see if there was any data to support the claim and found two interesting articles. The first is an essay, Older and Wiser?, by Christine Overall in The Philosophers' Magazine and the second is an article in this month's Current Opinion in Psychology: (February, 2024) Wisdom and aging.

The answer is, maybe. It depends on how you define wisdom¹ and it also depends on the person. As a general rule, it's not true that old people are wiser than younger people. It's certainly true that the general public doesn't think that wisdom comes automatically with age (OK, Boomer!). However, well-educated people are more likely to become wiser as they age if they have had lots of life experiences.

Here's how it's explained in the second article.

While everyone accumulates life experiences over time, however, not all of us become particularly wise. How people reflect on life experiences and what they take away from them may be more crucial for the development of wisdom than the experiences themselves. In an early conceptual account of how wisdom develops, Baltes and Smith [13] argued that the development of wisdom (defined as expertise in the fundamental issues of human life) is fostered by three broad factors: general person factors such as openness, intelligence, or creativity; expertise-specific factors such as life experience, mentorship, and motivation; and experiential contexts that facilitate learning about life such as parenthood, mentorship roles, or specific historical contexts. In other words, certain types of experiences are particularly likely to make us wiser, and person variables influence what we take away from those experiences.

This makes a lot of sense to me. It explains why some old people aren't very wise; it's because they aren't very intelligent and they have lived their entire lives in one particular environment. It accounts for Donald Trump.

Contrast this with a smart person who has had a rich and varied life. For example, imagine some intelligent person who was trained to work on nuclear submarines, was a peanut farmer, governor, president, diplomat, and construction worker. They are bound to be wise when they grow old.

I don't know whether I'm wise or whether my boomer friends are wise. I do know that most of us have experienced a lot of things that are foreign to younger people. We've been through the death of our parents and the birth of our grandchildren. We voted in enough elections to be able tell the difference between hype and reality. We've experienced enough real social change and failed attempts at social change to be realistic about the future. This probably explains why so many people think that older people become more conservative. That's not true, according to the data, but what is true is that when you get older you realize that radical solutions don't often work so you have to move slowly to make changes.

Ageism is a real thing these days. Like most other "-isms," it's a stereotype that can't be applied to everybody. Some people in their 70s and 80s really are wiser even if they forget words from time to time. Others aren't wiser. It's wise to learn the difference.

---

1. The article in Current Opinion in Psychology has an extensive discussion of the various forms of wisdom.