Because I’m over 60, this toy boy chatbot is too young to help me. That doesn’t mean I can’t still ask my older, wiser self for guidance. For me, a burning question is: “With the time I have left, how best can I continue to make a contribution and help others?”
It seems like the search for wisdom remains a constant throughout life. It’s just the questions that change.
Inherent in all these conversations is the assumption that older equals wiser. Austrian psychologist Judith Gluck, however, claims the statistical relationship between wisdom and chronological age is not strong.
“Accumulated life experience is an important foundation for wisdom, but not all highly wise individuals are old, and many old individuals are not particularly wise,” she says.
I concur. The key to attaining wisdom is not simply how much you’ve lived – it’s what types of experiences you’ve had, and how well you’ve juiced them.
To elaborate, not all experience is the same. Developing wisdom requires you to have tasted the full range of life’s flavours, including the sweet and sour. We learn best from our stumbles.
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As Franklin D. Roosevelt purportedly said: “Smooth sailing never made a skilled sailor.”
Critical also is the ability to grow from this wide range of experiences. Those who don’t, or can’t, frequently get scolded with: “You should’ve known better”.
Learning from experience entails stepping back from the day-to-day bustle of life, observing, reflecting and drawing conclusions about how life works. Essentially, seeing the forest, not just the trees.
Elkhonon Goldberg, a neuroscientist and the author of The Wisdom Paradox, believes that learning involves the development over time of “cognitive templates” based on pattern recognition. This is via our neocortex, the part of the brain organised around groups of neurons called pattern recognisers.
What form does the resultant wisdom take beyond snappy aphorisms like “absence makes the heart grow fonder” or “never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake”?
In the 1980s, a research effort called the Berlin Wisdom Project tried to answer this. Co-founder Ursula Staudinger distinguished between “general wisdom” – understanding how the world functions from an observer’s point of view – and “personal wisdom”, which entails insight and knowing yourself.
Imagine you lead a team working on a time-sensitive project. Your “general wisdom” guides you in best managing your people (who requires flattery, who needs clear direction, and who can be left alone). It helps you know when to be democratic in decision-making, versus when to lay down the law. Put simply, “general wisdom” tells you what works and what doesn’t.
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Your “personal wisdom”, however, operates at a different level. It helps to identify, for example, what triggers your “hot buttons” in order to maintain perspective and avoid getting stressed.
As much as we might have multiple questions to ask our older selves, is there a limit to how much wisdom we want? I ask Ricky whether she would query the MIT chatbot about how her life turns out. “Not at all. That would kill the fun.”
Pretty wise … even for a 24-year-old!
Peter Quarry is a retired psychologist and writer.
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