1. We stop going to school. While in school you have knowledge crammed into your head for 4-8 hours per day. After most people graduate they just stop reading altogether because they have no motivation to teach themselves new information. Most people resent and resist the knowledge they’re being taught when they are in school. So after graduation they’re more than happy to plot down in front of the TV for the next 60 years and let their mind turn to mush and forget everything they had learned in school anyway.
2. Even if people did want to learn, they’re too busy to. Between working 8-12 hours a day, cultivating (or enduring) a marriage, raising children and doing household chores most people don’t have the spare time or energy to learn new things. They certainly can’t devote 4-8 hours of structured, uninterrupted learning like they did when they were in school. There’s not much you can do about this, but even though there’s a good excuse for it the fact remains…most people don’t learn after graduation.
3. We assume the education we did receive proves we know everything (or at least as much as they need to know). In theory this shouldn’t be true. You’d think that people who went to 4-8 years of college would have a lifelong passion for learning, but the more people with higher education degrees you meet the more you’ll find out this generally isn’t the case. Instead, the higher of a degree they get the more conceited they get about how much they know. The more conceited they get the less motivation they have to learn more. So they spend the rest of their lives congratulating themselves for their past educational accomplishments and cease achieving new educational accomplishments while forgetting most of what they learned in the past.
4. This is more true (but not exclusively) for people who didn’t get to go to college for 6-8 years: We gave up. There’s an old saying that goes something like this: “Anyone who isn’t a democrat by the age of 20 doesn’t have a heart. Anyone who isn’t a republican by the age of 50 doesn’t have a brain.” Young people tend to be enthusiastic, hungry idealists…and for good reason. They have the world in front of them. They were raised on idealistic, go-getting propaganda, and they really do have a chance to change the world.
Adults respect this in theory, but when they have to be around young people they find it nauseating. That’s because adults had the same bright dreams when they were kids, and when they got out into the real world they got a painful wake up call from the cold hard facts of life. Then, once they learned their place they sat down and shut up.
There’s something to be said for being realistic, but accepting the world as it is and just hunkering down and scraping by, taking care of you and your own like a hardened prison inmate whose mastered the jailhouse rules to not getting shanked is a recipe for a life unlived and unmastered in the long run. But that’s the system most adults live by.
5. This is true for both people who have college degrees and people who don’t: We think that our rank makes us wise and right. The purest example of this is military officers. Aside from politicians no group of people in the world are more delusional about their self-worth than military officers. Why do they think they’re so great? Because they have an arbitrary, man-made rank that tells them they’re God. And once you’re God you believe you can do no wrong. So you don’t listen to shit, and you have no motivation to improve yourself since there’s nowhere to go once you’ve reached the top. The same is true to a lesser extent to most people who get put into some kind of supervisory position in this world that holds some kind of man-made rank.
6. We assume that the mere fact that we’re older makes us wiser. This was more true in the past when adults could beat children, and children didn’t have the television and the internet to show them what adults are really like when they’re not around children. Have you ever heard an adult tell a child to respect their elders? Why do children need to respect their elders? Because they’re the elders, that’s why. That’s a bold faced lie told to children to coerce them into submission, and any adult who believes that being older than someone else makes them better is a fool.
Even though the concept of respectable elders isn’t as institutionalized as it used to be people still tend to get the more cocky the older they get, but the more conceited they get the less motivation they have to improve their mind. Granted, you do learn lessons as you experience more of life, but all the people who weren’t smart enough to be born earlier are going to learn those same life lessons eventually. So getting old isn’t really anything to brag about.
7. Similar to #6 is that we tend to assume that getting married, having kids and working at a job makes us wiser. Again, yes, you do learn a lot about life by experiencing these trials. But those lessons are on par for what you should learn in life. Great. You can do what you’re supposed to. What do you want? A trophy? A cookie?
Assuming that doing the bare minimum in life makes you an expert on life is foolish and shows how little you know about life. More importantly though, it causes you to stop pushing yourself to learn more once you’ve just reached par for the course.
8. We’ve had more time to convince ourselves of our beliefs. Childhood is defined by our quest to understand the world around you, yourselves, why you’re here and what you’re supposed to do now that you’re here. By the end of childhood we’ve all amassed a head full of answers and explanations, and a lot of those answers are wrong. Even if they were all right, our understanding of life is still incomplete. But people get the answers they’re comfortable with and repeat those answers to themselves over and over again until they can’t see anything else outside their tiny misshapen reality. Then they spend the rest of their life defending their answers and becoming more close minded.
9. Similar to #8 is that we’ve had more time to surround ourselves with sources that confirm our biases. We make friends who believe the same things we do. We watch television shows that are slanted to our point of view. We read news sources that cater to the spin we want to hear. The few nonfiction books that the average person reads are written by authors who just tell their audience what they want to hear. After a lifetime of confirmation bias we inevitably convince ourselves with concrete certainty that our group and our beliefs are God’s chosen elite and all the outsiders are ignorant, evil people.
10. We’ve invested our pride and our very identity in our tiny reality. This is tragic because growth requires change, but in order for adults to change they have to admit that their tiny world view is either wrong or incomplete. Pride alone won’t let them do this, and even if they were willing to lay their pride aside- their identity is their reality, and their reality is their identity. Changing would be tantamount to suicide, and even though it would benefit them more in the long run most people are too afraid to walk through the darkness to reach the light. They would rather live with a comfortable lie.
While not every old person is wise, I’ve learned some of my most valued knowledge from my elders. When I want to really become knowledgeable on a subject, I seek out someone with years of experience. My advisor during my undergrad was a professor with decades of experience, my ski instructor mentor has been skiing for the past 50 years, my dog’s veterinarian has been practicing since the early 70s. I love spending time and talking with each one of these people; each has experience and wisdom far greater than mine.
Heck, you’re an example yourself. I love reading your articles because, again, each contains wisdom and insight far better than my own. Yes, some old people are idiots, but many are not, and I think it’s wrong to discount them. In my experience, though, it’s pretty easy to tell the wheat from the chaff.