SUNDAY, 28 SEPTEMBER 2025

I wasn’t quite arrogant enough to think that I knew everything when I was a young man, but I certainly thought I knew a lot more than I did. My knowledge at the time was far from deep or broad enough to recognise the gaping hole of my ignorance. I don’t think I was unusual; this is often true of the young western male, certainly in the UK, and is probably worse among those who are perceived as academically gifted and therefore get an unrealistic sense of their own erudition from being one of the smarty-pants at their little local school. In contrast, from my years of teaching Asian students, I get the impression there is a much more modest attitude among the young in cultures where old age is still largely respected, particularly those which are based on Confucian roots, although this is probably changing as American culture spreads its youth-obsessed tentacles across the globe .

Now that I’m in my seventies, though, I sometimes feel as if I know almost nothing at all. Clearly, this isn’t true in terms of pure information: I’ve had a lifetime to take in loads of facts and to immerse myself in whole new fields of interest, even if the knowledge available is expanding far more quickly than my ability to encompass it. But when it comes to knowing about life, and the ancient philosophical question of how to live a good life, I’m paralysed by doubt. Moral issues which I found simple when I was twenty now confuse me; beliefs about how to make the world a better place are scattered like confetti in my wake; I inhabit a spiritual no-man’s-land in terms of my broader metaphysics. So have I found wisdom in old age? Not on your nelly.

What is wisdom anyway? Is it just a myth, especially the idea that it blossoms with age? The word conjures pictures of a guru in a lotus position floating above the tribulations of life in the misty upper realms of meditation. Or to use a somewhat less exotic image, the grandparent calmly explaining that it’ll all come out in the wash. It seems inevitable that we will gain a greater sense of perspective as we go through life and learn that problems which seemed devastating at the time will eventually slot into the past and take on a less dramatic long-term significance, or even get totally forgotten. Also, as we age, we no longer see ourselves as immortal in the way that most of us do when we are young, so life ceases to be an arrow that we shoot into the future but turns into more of a travel bag in which we store our memories knowing that at some point soon there won’t be any more new ones. Perhaps wisdom is an attitude rather than something we know, an approach to life rather than an intellectual cognisance.

In my experience, we tend to go in one of two directions as the wrinkles start to criss-cross our face: either the beliefs of our youth begin to fray at the edges and then sometimes collapse completely or they harden into rock-hard certainties that we’ll cling on to for the rest of our lives. Even though my own life has broadly followed the former path, I want to make clear that I’m not claiming that it’s superior because it makes us open-minded and more tolerant, and therefore wiser; it can equally render us unprincipled, lacking in conviction, and willing to make compromises that we would never have entertained when we were young. Both paths have their virtues and their vices.

There seems a natural link between the experiences in our life and the way our attitudes change; if we leave the place where we grew up and live in a lot of different places and have a host of varied experiences, it seems logical that we’ll display a broader outlook, while if we stay in our birthplace for all of our lives, our views are almost sure to become ever more firmly fixed over time. This may partly explain the current polarisation in a lot of the developed world, as an ageing population which feels its culture threatened comes up against an internationalised, often younger, class of people who are much more open to difference. People on my side of this cultural fence, however, should be careful not to fall prey to an automatic assumption that those on the other side are simply hidebound and bigoted while we are commendably liberal and open. What may look like tolerance on our part can easily become a shallow relativism that assumes without much thought that everyone’s truth is equal, and hides our lack of any deeper values and convictions.

Life is certainly becoming more difficult for older people in many ways as the pace of change, and particularly technological change, gets ever faster. I only have to remember my sister, eight years older than me, who never touched a computer in her life, and whose facility with her smartphone was limited to pushing the button to receive a call and accessing her contact list to ring one of a handful of names. Things that had been simple, like going to the post office to collect her pension, were suddenly difficult and involved a direct debit to her bank and having to use an ATM. How she would have coped with online banking or downloading an app on her phone so that she could pay for her goods at the supermarket as the world goes rapidly cashless, I have no idea. And, as my ex-work colleague, Sasha, would confirm from trying to teach her dullard student the basics of a program, I’m hardly a wizard myself at this shiny new world. I often find it irritating at best, and totally perplexing at worst, and if I didn’t teach online and need to use it and therefore also didn’t learn about it from my students, I would soon end up as bewildered and as helpless as my sister.

So whereas the elderly were once seen as people you turned to for advice because of their greater experience in life, they are often now more like children who need to be taught how to read and write and dress themselves so that they can manage the basic tasks of a technocratic world. They are also much more numerous, so they have lost their rarity value as keepers of the local culture. When I was a child, there were very few old people in my street, so those who had reached the age of sixty-five or seventy were a vital link to the past, able to remember the first world war and what the local community had looked like at the time, and outline all of the changes that had taken place since then. In contrast, old people now are often seen as a nuisance, a lumpen mass cluttering up public transport by using their free bus passes or slowing down the checkout because they take a little more time to locate the cash in their purse and then peer down at the coins in their palms and slowly, painstakingly count them out. And in my local supermarket they always have a handful of little bits of paper giving a discount of three cents each which the technology of the cashier inevitably fails to recognise.

More serious than these minor irritations is that the elderly are now a drain on the economy. Almost every government in the developed world is facing a point in the near future when the amount of money available for pensions will run out: for example, the UK government’s Actuary Department has predicted that the UK State Pension Fund may run dry by 2033. The age at which pensions begin to be paid will probably continue to rise, but this will only shift the problem to a different place since many of these older people will not be healthy enough to work and, unless the UK government is willing to see thousands of the elderly living and dying on its streets, these people will still need to be helped out in order to survive. Nor can we reasonably expect a man whose only experience is manual work to continue doing this once he is elderly, or suddenly retrain to master the skills that would enable him to work in other sectors. And when even those in white-collar jobs will probably struggle to get work in an AI world where finding enough jobs for the young and fit may prove impossible, few will employ the elderly who are more prone to falling sick and likely to do the work at a slower pace.

In their turn, however, the generations below them may feel little sympathy for these pensioners getting money from the state while they are forced to work a set of gigs on zero-hour contracts merely to survive from week to week, especially since many of these senior citizens will be living in big empty houses while their own family has to squeeze into an overpriced rented two-bedroomed flat. When they need an appointment at the local medical centre, they may have to wait for a week because the elderly have booked them all, while their family credit is removed at the same time as state pensions rise at a guaranteed level. And then there are the senior citizens who are comfortably off, living on the generous occupational pensions of an earlier age which bring them in more money than the mix of zero-hour gigs of the poor sap whose job is delivering pizza. Of course, many pensioners suffer lives that are a million miles away from this luxury, having to choose between eating and heating, but the sight of the well-dressed, affluent elderly piling out of a coach on their Saga holiday cannot endear them to the younger poor who feel that we Boomers have stripped the world of all its goodies and left them with almost nothing. It’s not our wisdom which will be our most obvious attribute in their eyes, but our selfishness.

So there is often little space for wisdom in this divided, unhappy modern world, and although there is still a kind of official homage to the idea of the wisdom of age, a lot of this is just fluff, something we feel we should say but in our hearts we no longer believe. I don’t want to be overly cynical, but how much we value other people is often related to how much they have to offer us, and except for a baby-sitting service, I’m not sure that the elderly have much. Also, in an age when we are drowning in a superfluity of information, while the need for wisdom might in reality be greater than ever, our perception of this need may well have decreased. It is what and how much data we have that matters nowadays, or perhaps to be more precise it is our access to this data rather than our possession of it, as machines take over more and more of the tasks we perform and increasingly remove our need to actually think. So perhaps we don’t see our need for wisdom becoming greater, for what is the use of wisdom in a world where decisions, even existential ones, are no longer taken by people but by algorithms and AI? Even if wisdom isn’t a myth and some people can genuinely offer it, it will have no practical effect in this automated, technologised world where human agency is being replaced by machines, so many will question its relevance and usefulness.

Plus contact between different generations is reducing all the time in this glossy new utopia of enshittification that gleams like bling. Whereas the biggest determiner of who we socialised with was once occupation, social class and/or geographical proximity, the largest by far in an online world must be the social media we use. So generations gather in their online tribes with little contact between each other and the wisdom of the old, if it exists, will fail to reach younger generations, and even if it could, we elderly would not be able to provide the knowledge that they want or are interested in. The sadness of this is that there is an epidemic of loneliness among the aged as they live alone in those big houses from which their children have flown the nest and their partners have passed on. Meanwhile, teenagers suffer from their own, hugely different problems of social ostracism and cyberbullying, and the spirit-sapping pressure to look beautiful or buff. Some wisdom could be shared here, I feel, which might help the young to see beyond their online adolescent milieu and its tacky, commercialised values which benefit only big business, while presenting an opportunity to attenuate some of the crushing isolation of the old and forgotten and left behind.

Another problem, I feel, is that older people are selling themselves short these days. Our society is so obsessed with youth and surface beauty that older people are copying the young in the hope that a few strands of their glitter rub off on them. Seventy is the new fifty, we are told, (as long as you’ve got a decent pension and good health), and people definitely seem to me to look a lot younger than they did in photos of the past, when people being photographed seemed more interested in appearing dignified than in looking funky. But that has all changed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, so when they see senior citizens in baseball caps worn backwards and baggy pants in lurid colours, it’s hardly surprising that respect among the young for them is declining, especially in the west. (When I lived in Korea, in contrast, if I got on a subway train a host of younger people would shoot up out of their seat and offer it to me, and I was only in my fifties at the time.) When old people ape the young, they send a subliminal message that the freshness of youth is something much more valuable than the ripeness of age. They are aiding and abetting the diminution of their own status.

Ultimately I would argue that the concept of wisdom presumes a world with a sense of long-term values that can be passed down through the generations and has little relevance in a world based on crass materialism and the mindless pursuit of what we consider to be progress. Calculating probabilities makes sense in such a world, and making judgment calls based on these, but wisdom is much more than either of these things. Going back to the ancient Greeks, it is about how to lead a good life, and no amount of technological wizardry or science-inspired gadgetry can begin to answer that question. It is the comfort of kindness combined with common sense: a hand around the shoulder of someone who needs it and a finger that wipes a tear from someone’s eye. But it is not merely this show of sympathy or sentiment; it’s also knowing when to show tough love and when to just hug silently. How can this be learned in a virtual world which needs emojis to make us certain that our message gets across?