In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
I always had unwavering respect for the elderly, thinking they all had such abundant life experiences that their worldviews, understandings of life, and wisdom should be incomparably deeper, more profound, and more insightful than mines.
But then I started working a part-time job at a gas station and realized that, no, people live such repetitive lifestyles that their wisdom becomes stagnant after they hit 40. And then they decline. No, not because of their brains aging, but because most of them only communicate in the echo chamber that is their small hometown and narrow social network, and because they get all of their information from the news channel which is more often than not opinionated.
I don’t know why I’m rambling about this, but I won’t stop.
Some time ago, I watched a self-improvement video that advised leaving your hometown to pursue growth. I was skeptical because I thought: “a literal whole town should have enough space to grow and enough different people to meet to be able to learn; this guy is arguing so intently on why you should leave your hometown, but I think he is blinded by his own life experiences-- I believe that towns are big enough that they cannot be said to be restraining, he is simply blaming his prior lack of growth on his hometown”.
But now I think I underestimated the cultural echo chamber that a town can be (especially a small one).
People are too comfortable in their hometowns.
This isn’t to say that leaving your hometown will turn you into a wise meditator, but what it will do is put you in a foreign environment which will stimulate growth, and it will force you to adapt to new ways of thinking if you don’t want to be miserable.
All of this may or may not be completely wrong and merely a product of me tying together a bunch of wrong conclusions that I came to because I spent too much time thinking in my own head without looking for other perspectives and inputs. I’m this skeptical of myself even though this is a very obvious and self-explanatory subject because I have seen too many others do it.
That’s a pretty good take. Generalizing doesn’t help when we all have a chance to get the “stupid” genes at birth or get intellectually stuck at any moment of our lives.
Meh, lets not.
In my experience, older people have to make conscious effort to maintain critical thinking and reasoning and not start lazily regurgitating settled, memorized opinions they’ve come rely on as absolutes, intead of allowing those beliefs to be subject to fresh challenges from novel perspectives that may change those opinions. Many do make that effort, and many do not. To paraphrase my favorite fictional character, if you refuse to change your mind, then you will die stupid.
Individuals are individuals of course though. I’m of the opinion that, on an individual basis, beyond the age of around 12, age is an extremely poor metric to estimate someone’s intellect, wisdom, and insight. I’m in my mid 30s and have a master’s degree in psychology with a 3.9 GPA. I recognize that there are 18 year olds that dwarf me intellectually, and more commonly 80 year olds who’ve lived lives devoid of reflection, who will die defending their long dead pappy’s narrative about how the world works with anger rather than reason, solely because that’s what they were told to believe. I have pity for that type, but very little patience.
Removed by mod
I always had unwavering respect for the elderly, thinking they all had such abundant life experiences that their worldviews, understandings of life, and wisdom should be incomparably deeper, more profound, and more insightful than mines.
But then I started working a part-time job at a gas station and realized that, no, people live such repetitive lifestyles that their wisdom becomes stagnant after they hit 40. And then they decline. No, not because of their brains aging, but because most of them only communicate in the echo chamber that is their small hometown and narrow social network, and because they get all of their information from the news channel which is more often than not opinionated.
I don’t know why I’m rambling about this, but I won’t stop.
Some time ago, I watched a self-improvement video that advised leaving your hometown to pursue growth. I was skeptical because I thought: “a literal whole town should have enough space to grow and enough different people to meet to be able to learn; this guy is arguing so intently on why you should leave your hometown, but I think he is blinded by his own life experiences-- I believe that towns are big enough that they cannot be said to be restraining, he is simply blaming his prior lack of growth on his hometown”.
But now I think I underestimated the cultural echo chamber that a town can be (especially a small one).
People are too comfortable in their hometowns.
This isn’t to say that leaving your hometown will turn you into a wise meditator, but what it will do is put you in a foreign environment which will stimulate growth, and it will force you to adapt to new ways of thinking if you don’t want to be miserable.
All of this may or may not be completely wrong and merely a product of me tying together a bunch of wrong conclusions that I came to because I spent too much time thinking in my own head without looking for other perspectives and inputs. I’m this skeptical of myself even though this is a very obvious and self-explanatory subject because I have seen too many others do it.
That’s a pretty good take. Generalizing doesn’t help when we all have a chance to get the “stupid” genes at birth or get intellectually stuck at any moment of our lives.
everyone under 40 still acts like a college kid tbf