All I have to add is that given the chance, I’d love to be able to relive my 20s with the wisdom and experience I have now in my late 40s.
No, it means that experience isn’t well-defined. Need I live through having my very own drug problem to understand that it isn’t desirable? Need I give birth to a child to understand its pain? Experience is only as useful as the mind being used to decipher it. And it needn’t be a personal experience to be informative.
Some of us refer to that process as our childhood.
Not all of us are average.
I’m not seeing how I’d have reacted substantially different to similar circumstances now than I would have 15 years ago. Either that indicates I haven’t grown, or that my original response was already fairly sound.
That’s a great characterization. I bet most 20-somethings at least occasionally think of how they would have done things differently/better in high school or college if only they had known then what they know now. Not sure why they should think that sort of experience ought to end at some point.
Yeah, but the comparison is a bit strangled. You’re arguing adult reasoning versus child reasoning as being synonymous with adult reasoning versus adult reasoning.
It’s expected that in the process of becoming an adult, we’ll make missteps. After all, that is precisely why we spend so much to educate our young. If it takes someone an addition 20 some odd years to get there, I’m not seeing as how that’s an advocacy for age implying wisdom. Some of reach that ability at a far younger age and those types are generally frowned upon by the so-called wise.
I admire intellect and sagacity wherever it’s found; I put no stock into the argument that age → wisdom because it has within it the fallacy that merely existing for some set duration of time requires growth. The ability to gain this so-called life experience is related to how fast one wants to gain it, and one’s ability to process the data. You don’t get bonus points, in my view, from being a generation behind the power curve.
It’s like the argument being made that a college degree necessarily implies “smart”. It doesn’t. All it literally means is that someone sat in a certain number of places for a set period of time and did the least amount required to get it. A degree, like age, is no more an indicator of mental ability or knowledge than its absence indicates the lack thereof.
I remember once reading an article in GQ written by some famous person’s son. I cant remember who the guy was, but the article was about dealing with his dad's end of life as he lost his health and mental faculties and eventually died. One of his points was how hard it was do deal with at 35 - when he had a young family of his own and was still establishing his career, instead of at 50 with the kids at college and well set professionally. I, at 21 and dealing with my own father's failing health and inexplicable refusal to help improve his own predicament in any way, could only dream of postponing the whole thing 14 years until I wasnt completely alone, in school full time, working nearly full time, and trying to start a business. Even now I can`t imagine how freaking easy it must be when you’re fifty. (kidding, I’m sure it’s very difficult even then).
So I really like baby boomers and enjoy their perspective on life but my only objection is when certain older people refuse to give me “credit” for having experienced things younger than most. If you made it to 35 without doing much to start your career, or buy a home, or cope with a parent’s failing health (my dad’s still alive but not in good health), that’s fine by me. Just don’t act like it’s incomprehensible that someone in their 20s could have. For what it’s worth, I’m not married and have no kids and I don`t think I’ve ever suggested I have any idea whatsoever what that’s like or how to be successful with either.
Since I whined about the one and only objection I have to baby boomers I should add that generally speaking i think that years of experience make a huge difference. Especially professionally; everyone working for me is quite experienced. We’ve already got one guy with no experience and a bunch of ideas so I see no reason to surround myself with others. This is one tech startup without any 20 something assholes rolling around on roller skates playing video games at work.
I was going to post something similar, but you nailed it in one. Beautiful.
Get off my lawn.
I’m not sure that anyone is suggesting that “merely existing” for a longer time makes an older individual “wiser” than a younger. But if you do not consider yourself to possess greater experience at age 40 than you had at age 20, I suggest that you were either unusually gifted and obtained unusually broad experience in your youth, or you’ve been spectacularly wasting your 20s and 30s.
Think of so many other activities that you become better at the more you do them (provided, of course, that you desire to improve and are wiling to learn from your previous experiences). Why should “being an adult” be any different?
I came in here to say the same thing.
I know plenty of people who have lived the same year over and over, and are essentially “stuck” - they’re as immature (foolish, impulsive, naive, or just plain :smack:) as they were decades ago. Their age confers nothing, so their advice comes with no wisdom and is essentially useless.
I also know people who, in a sense, still “live” in the time when THEY were young. So they may have gained decades’ of experience - all the good stuff other posters have mentioned above - but they try to apply it in a context that simply no longer exists. Nostalgia is one thing, but living as though this was still the society we had in the early 50s … well, it just doesn’t work well.
I think whether or not experience is important also depends on what kind of business you’re in. In the library world, an “experienced” librarian is someone who’s too set in their ways to realize things can be done a different way or that certain things have a place in the library. You would be amazed at the number of librarians (who are thought of as the guardians against censorship) will refuse to purchase says rap CDs or horror movies because they’re inappropriate for the collection.
To be a good library, you have to have adaptibility, and I have plenty of colleagues you think that in that regard, experienced librarians won’t be as useful as someone fresh out of library school.
I do take your point, but it misconstrues mine I think. Living longer gives one more opportunities to do things, but it doesn’t imply that anyone has done so. I am constantly learning. I am smarter now than I was yesterday. But it doesn’t mean I’m more intelligent (capacity to learn) than I was. Nor does it mean I’m any wiser (able to use the knowledge in a better way). I don’t think it’s unusual that by age 20, many people have a great degree of wisdom about how best to use what knowledge they have. Knowing more things tomorrow isn’t going to necessitate that the decisions I make will be any better.
Now, there are, to be sure, many exceptions, but those exclusively deal with fact intensive decisions which can’t be wisely made but for the receipt of new information. Like, should I pick x treatment over y treatment for something. Until more tests are done and the data are collected, the wise choice is not to act hastily and wait for the data. But this topic is about experience in life.
I find it hard to imagine that there are people who learned sometime between 20 and 40 years of life that being hasty is generally unwise if they didn’t learn that between 0 and 20 years. Indeed, I would suggest that shows in such a person a sub-normal intellect because despite all the examples in life where rash decisions were made with bad results, it took them twice as long to learn it as it took the people I know. Or, it would show in them a willful fashion to resist knowledge. That’s unlikely to be cured by the mere accumulation of new information since those types of people have an immunity from such.
The amount of time one does something doesn’t improve their ability to do it well. The adage isn’t practice makes perfect; it’s practice makes permanent. For the experience to be meaningfully used, as I said earlier, the person will have to want that. If they want that in the first instance, I see little reason why they wouldn’t achieve it before their 40th year of life, unless, as I said, they’re just slow on the uptake. And people who are slow on the uptake, in general, aren’t sought out for their counsel anyway.
I think it boils down to a person’s willingness to learn and experience. No one would suggest that a cloistered nun is somehow more “experienced” overall at age 60 than 25, would they? No, because such a life isn’t about that. It’s anathema to that
Of course, that’s an isolated kind of thing, but then again, this is a hard topic to talk about in the abstract because irrespective of the position, there will be many counter-examples.
Of course, with that proviso. But my earlier position implied that as a necessary condition.
Me, too.
One thing I do think age gives you is an appreciation of how quickly time passes. We often hear young people demanding some sort of change “RIGHT NOW!”, but, with the perspective of half a century, we can see that taking five or even ten years to find a sustainable solution might well be the better course. Five or ten years, or even twenty, pass waaay faster than a 20 year old can possibly conceive.
Correction: a stupid 20 year old. I also know a lot of old people who want things right now. It would seem that they haven’t yet learned, after so much time, the lesson you decry all 20 year olds haven’t learned. Some learn it at a young age, some never.
She said that Time is Unfair
To a woman her age
Now that wisdom has come
Everything else fades.
Basic Answer: Yes. Assuming that you’ve actually done things in your life.
No, any 20 year old. How could they be expected to understand what a short time 20 years really is, when to them, it’s all the time there’s ever been?
Personally, I’m inclined to think that any 40ish person who is so very invested in how smart they were at 20 probably hasn’t grown much at all.
Whoa. Collective Soul reference. Awesome.
I’ve learned;
Try it
Calm Down
Wait a minute
and “if you say so”
I love this here argument from incredulity. How can I understand a lightyear when I’ve only ever traveled a small fraction of it? Just because you couldn’t at 20 doesn’t mean the rest of us cannot.
When has it been the case that 20 years is the sum total of all time? Or did you mean that they’ve known? It’s reasonably simple to figure out: I’ve lived 20 years. 40 years would be an equal amount of time in my future. I think that by the time one has reached age 20, one has figured out that time can appear to pass slower or faster based on various circumstances. This isn’t exactly super secret knowledge it takes an additional 20 years of experience to work through.
I think there’s a lot of underestimation of the ability of people to think. It sounds almost like being 20 years old is some baseline level of stupid people point to or something.
You’re disregarding the difference between intellectually grasping a concept, and really *understanding *it. That’s okay, it’s a distinction usually lost on immature minds.
When I was 20, I thought like you did.
When I was 25, I had a 19-yr-old assistant in my shop. He was exactly like me at 20, and god DAMN but I was a know it all brat back then.
Just sayin’. :D:cool:
No one is saying that 20-yr-olds are not intelligent, or that you are average in every way, or whatever–what we’re saying is that on average a 40 year-old has had either double the amount of potential learning experiences as a 20-year-old (if all years are equally valuable) or something like ten times as many (if only adult years really count for adult learning and adult thinking processes). Not that all of them HAVE, certainly, but that the potential is simply greater because of the greater time step involved.
Let’s face it, too–on average, you ARE average. You are better at some things and worse at some, unless you are actually Harrison Bergeron or Clark Kent.
Zeriel, age 29 (and three quarters! :p)