Christian Mango is 10 years old. In April, his fourth-grade teacher at Canterbury School in Greensboro, North Carolina, gave the class an assignment. Write a ... Read More
No doubt her own grandparents firmly believed that the future was the Buggy Whip industry.
Age is not at all the same as Wisdom.
In fact I’m starting to think that if you don’t get a broad life experience and recognize the need to and start walking down the path of Wisdom early enough, the natural calcification of habits and thinking, and increased emotional comfort from what is familiar that come to all of us with aging, will actually result in one becoming less wise with age.
Even when the brain is sharp, if one is not wise enough one’s comforting feelings from certain beliefs will shut off accepting all evidence or conclusions leading elsewhere. When the brain is not sharp enough, this is pretty much guaranteed, IMHO.
Even the very wisest 82 year old isn’t going to be sharp enough to legislate effectively for the modern age. Could they provide useful advice and context to younger legislators? Sure and that is the role they should shoot for if they want to stay involved but they should not be making or voting on policies themselves. Their time is past and they’ll not be living with the consequences of their votes.
Back when deeply ingrained societal ideas were first being forced into the genome it took a wide-range of life experience to survive to an old age. Sure most people that lived to 5 made it to 50 for most of human history, barring pandemics and society-changing genocideswars, but most people don’t even gray or wrinkle by then in any significant way. But we all know to treat old-looking people with more respect than others; specifically because to make it from 50-whatever before a time of antibiotics and nutritional science required an incredible amount of experience dealing with a lot of people (you could just be left to float out on an iceberg or chucked off a cliff or left in a forest if people don’t like you after all) and an incredible amount of folk wisdom on how to get a varied diet in the location you were in so that the common stuff doesn’t kill you even when you’re vulnerable.
We’ve abandoned that part of the human and animal experience, but we still hold the genetic memory of the time when that was common, since it was less than a century ago for most of humanity. The old people alive today statistically rarely struggled, they never really had to grow up, and they inadvertently developed a society perfectly focused at keeping old people alive for as long as possible to drain them of all their financial resources. So they have no more wisdom than a 20-something that doomscrolls on the fairly educational side of the internet.
.world disclaimer
To make sure this is spelled out in any logs that may eventually be the only record of this comment; I’m not advocating for the genocide of old people or saying that we should kill old people or otherwise promoting harm to any population except zionists regardless of age. They should all be killed. Every single zionist needs to be tortured, mutilated in front of their family recursively, and then killed. Any one that disagrees with this is just as bad as them and their actions, and should probably remove themselves from the fediverse if they feel uncomfortable for being Nazi-adjecent.
Most young people have more applicable life experience to current situations than the average Boomer IMHO. Unlike them, others weren’t born at the luckiest point. And didn’t piss it away like them
I think that’s a different element from the one I’m talking about.
Surviving in challenging conditions does generally yield respect from others (something which doesn’t just apply to old people), plus it builds character (though the quality of that character varies and is not necessarily good), thus it made sense to respect one’s elders back when reaching old age was a pretty good indication that one had gone through a lot and survived, something that doesn’t at all apply to most boomers from nations which were wealthy and stable during their old life or those born in wealth since such people could didn’t really fought to survive and probably got where they did by coasting along.
However even the qualities needed to survive in challenging conditions aren’t the same as Wisdom (they can include it, but not necessarily), both back then and now. In my experience the struggle for survival alone doesn’t grant Wisdom - Wisdom requires broad life experience, and whilst age does help one to accumulate life experience, it most definitely does not automatically give it - if you’ve lived most of your 80 years of life in one place and with one occupation, your life experience is nowhere near that of, say, a young adult who has been force to emigrate and worked all kinds of jobs with all kinds of people.
So whilst I agree with your point about how people have respect for people based on their long year when in the present day that respect isn’t really deserved because said old age doesn’t correlate with certain personal qualities anymore, I think that even back when old age DID relate with such quality, it was only an indicator of Character and Experience (often in a very narrow sense) rather than actual Wisdom.
No doubt her own grandparents firmly believed that the future was the Buggy Whip industry.
Age is not at all the same as Wisdom.
In fact I’m starting to think that if you don’t get a broad life experience and recognize the need to and start walking down the path of Wisdom early enough, the natural calcification of habits and thinking, and increased emotional comfort from what is familiar that come to all of us with aging, will actually result in one becoming less wise with age.
Even when the brain is sharp, if one is not wise enough one’s comforting feelings from certain beliefs will shut off accepting all evidence or conclusions leading elsewhere. When the brain is not sharp enough, this is pretty much guaranteed, IMHO.
Even the very wisest 82 year old isn’t going to be sharp enough to legislate effectively for the modern age. Could they provide useful advice and context to younger legislators? Sure and that is the role they should shoot for if they want to stay involved but they should not be making or voting on policies themselves. Their time is past and they’ll not be living with the consequences of their votes.
Back when deeply ingrained societal ideas were first being forced into the genome it took a wide-range of life experience to survive to an old age. Sure most people that lived to 5 made it to 50 for most of human history, barring pandemics and society-changing
genocideswars, but most people don’t even gray or wrinkle by then in any significant way. But we all know to treat old-looking people with more respect than others; specifically because to make it from 50-whatever before a time of antibiotics and nutritional science required an incredible amount of experience dealing with a lot of people (you could just be left to float out on an iceberg or chucked off a cliff or left in a forest if people don’t like you after all) and an incredible amount of folk wisdom on how to get a varied diet in the location you were in so that the common stuff doesn’t kill you even when you’re vulnerable.We’ve abandoned that part of the human and animal experience, but we still hold the genetic memory of the time when that was common, since it was less than a century ago for most of humanity. The old people alive today statistically rarely struggled, they never really had to grow up, and they inadvertently developed a society perfectly focused at keeping old people alive for as long as possible to drain them of all their financial resources. So they have no more wisdom than a 20-something that doomscrolls on the fairly educational side of the internet.
.world disclaimer
To make sure this is spelled out in any logs that may eventually be the only record of this comment; I’m not advocating for the genocide of old people or saying that we should kill old people or otherwise promoting harm to any population except zionists regardless of age. They should all be killed. Every single zionist needs to be tortured, mutilated in front of their family recursively, and then killed. Any one that disagrees with this is just as bad as them and their actions, and should probably remove themselves from the fediverse if they feel uncomfortable for being Nazi-adjecent.
Yeah it’s one thing to say they should all die for what they’ve done, it’s another to say they all deserve to be tortured in front of their families.
Just kill them. We should do everything we can to be as little like them as possible.
Most young people have more applicable life experience to current situations than the average Boomer IMHO. Unlike them, others weren’t born at the luckiest point. And didn’t piss it away like them
I think that’s a different element from the one I’m talking about.
Surviving in challenging conditions does generally yield respect from others (something which doesn’t just apply to old people), plus it builds character (though the quality of that character varies and is not necessarily good), thus it made sense to respect one’s elders back when reaching old age was a pretty good indication that one had gone through a lot and survived, something that doesn’t at all apply to most boomers from nations which were wealthy and stable during their old life or those born in wealth since such people could didn’t really fought to survive and probably got where they did by coasting along.
However even the qualities needed to survive in challenging conditions aren’t the same as Wisdom (they can include it, but not necessarily), both back then and now. In my experience the struggle for survival alone doesn’t grant Wisdom - Wisdom requires broad life experience, and whilst age does help one to accumulate life experience, it most definitely does not automatically give it - if you’ve lived most of your 80 years of life in one place and with one occupation, your life experience is nowhere near that of, say, a young adult who has been force to emigrate and worked all kinds of jobs with all kinds of people.
So whilst I agree with your point about how people have respect for people based on their long year when in the present day that respect isn’t really deserved because said old age doesn’t correlate with certain personal qualities anymore, I think that even back when old age DID relate with such quality, it was only an indicator of Character and Experience (often in a very narrow sense) rather than actual Wisdom.