
Yes, We Get Wiser with Age - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/blog/yes-you-get-wiser-with-age
======
brookside
I am more and more in the HN camp with those viewing the bulk of social
science as...not good science.

> We have been doing a study of about 2000 people from age 21 to 100-plus. We
> look at their physical health, cognitive function, and psychosocial
> functioning. What we find is that physical health declines after middle age,
> which is not a surprise. Cognitive function starts to decline in older age,
> not a surprise. But psycho-social functioning, including wellness, quality
> of life, and happiness progressively improve with age. Older people handle
> stresses better than someone in their 20s and 30s. When you’re young and
> something goes wrong you might be crushed. When you’re old, and something
> goes wrong, you say, “That’s okay. There are other things that will go
> right.”

This is the unroasted scientific nut in an article written with an
overwhelmingly authoritative tone. It sounds like the researchers have an
online form or sent out a survey. To whom? With what specific questions? Or
maybe they are asking in person and older people are more reticent to reveal
to a stranger that they are lonely or unhappy. Does "We have been doing a
study" mean it is still in progress, and if so, why are they reporting the
results already? The answer of course is that an article like this helps
justify the grant money / salaries for the UCSD Center for Healthy Aging.

> When you’re young and something goes wrong you might be crushed. When you’re
> old, and something goes wrong, you say, “That’s okay. There are other things
> that will go right.”

This bit is massive, massive blanket statement to extract from whatever survey
they are conducting. Both the young and old can be equanimous.

Looking at my own grandmother's current life- almost every one of her friends
is dead and she has the more limited mobility and health problems people in
their 80s often have. She definitely tries to act as cheerful as possible
around us, but I know she gets sad. Because having everybody who really
understands you and shared common experiences with you be dead is sad. No
longer being able to ride a bike or have the health to travel is sad. Its de-
humanizing to think that older people somehow don't feel the emotional pain of
these experiences.

------
iamNumber4
Age != Wisdom. Wisdom comes from Experience and living life. If you sit on a
couch all day watching t.v. your experiences do not equal someone who goes out
of the house, builds things, etc...

Wisdom is earned by doing, not by aging.

~~~
jondubois
Doing different things in different situations. Contrasting experiences are
important. In my view, you can't be wise if you haven't experienced the full
spectrum of basic emotions and situations: Major failure, major success,
poverty, wealth, insecurity, confidence, naivety, scepticism, laziness,
ambition, pessimism, optimism, extremely bad luck, extremely good luck...

If your life experiences lean too much in one direction then you will be
biased and not wise.

I think that an average person who had contrasting experiences of moderate
magnitude is probably wiser than someone who mostly got an extreme set of one
kind of experience.

~~~
sametmax
Funnily, that's one of the goals of some meditation technicals (vipassana
comes to mind). Where it will help you to notice when you experience things,
so that you don't blindly go through and gain wisdom from it.

------
ksec
Recently I have been thinking about this; a lot. How do we get wiser, not
smarter or cleverer much quicker then we could go with age.

I dont know if we could quantitatively measure how wise you are. So it is hard
to tell if a person is wise or not. And a lot of times, you dont need to read
1000s of books, have a few DR degree or thesis to be wise. It seems wise and
Intellect dont necessarily have a linear relationship.

A lot of us, might have thought about Time Traveling, like a lot of blog post
telling you "Things I wish i knew" or "Things I could prepared before my
startup or X". You would travel back in time and tell your younger self what
to do now, what to do next, and what Not to do. But nobody came to realize,
your younger self failed to understand why those decision were made, and what
causes those action to be made.

One may wonder, try hard, fail hard and learn. Then you become wiser. But it
doesn't seems to be the case, it seems we don't "click" until we move on to
certain age / stage.

This rhymes with Zen / Buddhism loosely translated to enlightenment or awaken.

~~~
tw1010
Unasked for advice, but maybe use fewer commas in your future writing.

~~~
knrz
I actually quite like their flow ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

------
amelius
When we're young we often do foolish things not because we are fools, but
because we want to explore.

At least, that's how I like to think about it.

~~~
chrisbennet
Yeah, let's go with that. ;-)

------
eximius
This is a strange article that doesn't seem to say much of anything. It almost
seems like it is just a piece written and published to make people feel better
about aging. Even if the premise is true, it is incredibly insubstantial.

I, personally, would expect that wisdom does not come with age, but with
experience and training in how one thinks. That doesn't come with age, it
comes with time. The sooner or later you begin this training, or the harder
you train, greatly effect when or if this wisdom comes. Though, in people who
pursue wisdom, I doubt their pursuit decreases with age.

A final aside, the article's representation of wisdom ("When you’re old, and
something goes wrong, you say, “That’s okay. There are other things that will
go right.”") sounds awfully like apathy, if not careful. I believe wisdom is
more than that.

------
jlebrech
we just get more averse to bad ideas, or have heard it all before.

~~~
criddell
We also learn from our mistakes and the older we are, the more we've made.

When I think back to when I was younger (I'm 47) I realize how simplistic a
lot of my beliefs were. These days I'm far more willing to listen to others
and I make a lot fewer assumptions about why people do the things they do. I
hope the trend continues.

I think that's why I was a little sympathetic to that Google engineer that was
recently fired for his memo arguing against Google policies on diversity.
After I read about what he argued, I actually said to people that he sounds
very young. His recent statements about the positive aspects of the KKK
reinforce that.

~~~
mythrwy
Agreed. It's something like acquiring dimension in thinking.

------
jondubois
Wisdom is the degree to which you accept that you don't understand anything.

~~~
ike_yeah
Out of genuine curiosity for an explanation, that way of thinking seems like a
copout to me.

------
tomelders
Wisdom comes with observation, not age.

~~~
pixl97
Observation takes time, age is a quantified time.

~~~
tomelders
The mere passing of time does not guarantee that observation has happened.

------
ionised
Can't say I agree.

Some of the most narrow-minded and ignorant people I have encountered have
been much older than me.

Age does not necessarily confer wisdom.

I also don't agree with the _you must respect your elders_ adage. Respect to
is something you should apply to everyone until they give you a reason to do
otherwise, but age in and of itself is not a reason to command respect.

------
MaysonL
David Letterman has. Here he is with Howard Stern:
[https://www.howardstern.com/show/2017/8/16/david-
letterman-h...](https://www.howardstern.com/show/2017/8/16/david-letterman-
howard-stern-together-again-all-highlights-interview-audio/)

------
pasbesoin
We get wiser with experience. We get _calmer_ with age (hormonal changes,
among other things).

------
fairview14
> Wisdom is a balance between cognition and emotion.

No.

~~~
fooker
Very profound comment, thank you.

~~~
fairview14
Yes and No are profound indeed, thank you.

------
namelost
> Empirical studies have shown that older people are better than younger ones
> in terms of control over emotion, knowing themselves better, making better
> decisions that require experience, and having more compassion and empathy
> towards others. These are the things I include in wisdom. So are things that
> are components of wisdom that can increase with aging.

How does this explain Brexit?

[https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/docume...](https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/oxmidrr5wh/EUFinalCall_Reweighted.pdf)

    
    
        18-24: 71 remain / 29 leave
        25-49: 54 remain / 36 leave
        50-64: 40 remain / 60 leave
        65+:   36 remain / 64 leave
    

Sure seems like a clear inverse correlation between age and things like
"control over emotion", and "compassion and empathy towards others". I'm going
to suggest that every aspect of the brain degrades as we get older, including
'wisdom'.

~~~
skissane
I think part of the explanation is cultural changes over time. The EU is very
much a symbol of internationalism/globalism, even if localised into a
continental context, while Brexit is a nationalistic rebellion against it.
Nationalism was more popular/accepted in the past (especially so for British
nationalism), so older people tend to be more sympathetic to nationalism, and
hence more likely to support Brexit. Whereas, I think the popular culture is
moving away from nationalism and towards internationalism/globalism instead.
(Not universally – subgroups like the alt right are moving in the other
direction, but they are a minority.) Part of that move is no doubt due to the
Internet, which helps people see themselves as part of one planet by
interacting with people in other countries on a regular basis. Teenagers
watching YouTube are just as likely to watch videos from other countries as
their own (provided they understand the language), which is accelerating the
process of global unification of popular culture which the media and
entertainment industries had already begun. But these sorts of cultural
changes always effect the younger people the most, whereas older people are
more likely to retain cultural outlooks prevalent when they were younger. The
young are naturally a leading indicator of social and cultural change, the old
a trailing indicator of it.

(It is more complicated in that a lot of younger people can be positive about
globalist/internationalist institutions such as the EU and the UN over nation-
states, yet also often quite sympathetic to separatist nationalisms such as
those of Scotland, Catalonia, the Basque country, Kosovo, Palestine,
Kurdistan, Tibet, West Papua, etc. To some extent that seems contradictory,
and the idealist tendency of the young to support the underdog may explain
that contradiction; on the other hand, to support regional nationalisms can be
in a way anti-nationalistic, in that supporting smaller nationalisms against
larger ones (e.g. Scottish nationalism against British nationalism,
Basque/Catalan nationalism against Spanish nationalism) can be seen as
consistent with a broader anti-nationalist outlook–one can foresee a future
for Europe in which the existing nation-states are sucked away simultaneously
in both directions, upward by the growth in power of the EU and downward by
devolutionist and secessionist movements (that are hopeful that the structures
of the EU might make their devolutionist or secessionist projects easier and
more successful.))

~~~
notahacker
I think your "cultural change" explanation is a major factor, but there also
appears to be a strong tendency for the issues the old tend to find themselves
_most_ heavily aligned against the young and most outspoken about to be those
driven heavily by emotional appeal over reason. It isn't superior ability to
separate facts from emotion, use of experience to inform their decisions or
greater compassion that's making older people disproportionately likely to
believe things like Birtherism and creationism, disbelieve things like climate
change and immigrants being net contributors to the economy and find the idea
their offspring might marry outside their race objectionable.

Brexit is far from the best example of this kind of divide, but even there
it's noticeable that the Remain campaign focused its appeal on financial
benefits, respected authorities' opinions and perceived negotiating power for
better international arrangements whilst the Leave campaign talked about
immigrants, authorities being "elites" and linking perceived "control" to
nationhood and borders. (Admittedly the Remain campaign was neither effective
nor targeted at the very youngest, but there was a marked difference in
strategy. And it's also an example of where the older generation weren't so
much clinging to a belief held in their youth as actively changing their mind)

I mean, to give the old their due, they're probably less susceptible to
becoming members of fully-fledged personality cults than the young, and it's
not as if progressive sentiments are invariably driven by reasoned
consideration, but one can't help suspecting that if the old were truly wiser,
their objections to certain cultural changes wouldn't manifest itself in
disproportionate willingness to subscribe to nonsense like Birtherism.

------
paganel
> Empirical studies have shown that older people are better than younger ones
> in terms of control over emotion

Is this a puritan/evangelical thing? What's wrong with displaying emotions?
Why is the ability to control them seen as "better"?

~~~
gadders
Of course it's seen as better. Do you lose your temper and get angry after
every setback or inconvenience?

This is so self-evident I'm surprised it's even discussed.

~~~
paganel
Does "emotion" only equal "angry" and "having a temper"? Is this also a
puritan/evangelical thing? What about displays of love and tenderness?

And even so, the answer to your question is most of the times "yes", at least
in my case, as in I do prefer to spill it out in the heat of the moment
instead of keeping it all inside.

It's not wrong having "emotions" and displaying them, I though that this was
established since back in the Romantics' day (with only a resurgence of
"showing emotions is bad" in the Victorian era).

~~~
gadders
The point wasn't about showing emotions, it was about controlling emotions so
that you have conscious choice over whether to show them or not.

For instance, in certain circumstances anger may be appropriate to be shown,
but in other cases if you show anger it could work against you. Similarly with
humour or any other emotion.

~~~
paganel
I see your point now, thanks. Still personally think that this makes people
more "stiff" and more "false", so to speak, which I personally don't like.
Maybe it's a cultural thing (I live in Eastern Europe, am in my mid-30s now).

~~~
ThomPete
You wouldn't want to live in a society where everything acted on their
emotions only.

~~~
paganel
Yes, I actually want to live in a society where people are a lot more open
when it comes to expressing their emotions and feelings compared to a society
which actively tries to supress them and instead rely on other social tools.

That's actually one of the few reasons why I've still not emigrated yet. The
few countries which I now find economically stable are generally seen as
"cold" when it comes to human interactions and expressing your feelings
(Norway, Germany, Netherlands, Sweden) while the few other options which I
found a lot more similar to my country (I now live in Romania) have been going
through difficult economic times lately (Spain, Italy).

~~~
ThomPete
You are missing the point.

If people acted on their emotion (i.e. mostly controlled by our reptile brain)
it would be a very violent society and quite frankly unsustainable.

