Age and Experience

I wrote a similar thread about this before but I wonder if age is just a number when it comes to experience?

Well, experience takes time to gather, so age is required to some extent, though there are a great many people who have lived long and done little...

Maybe. It just seems that most people do not have any experiences in most fields, trials, etc.

Well, that's my point. It is entirely possible to be old and have little experience of life, but there is a limit to how young one can be and have experience, due to the time required to gather that experience.

I see your point. use to think that most old people were wise sages who pretty knew a lot of things but I learned that isn't necessarily true.

Yeah, one of the big life lessons is that no one knows everything or has all the answers. Even the best, the wisest, the most compassionate and insightful only have some answers. Plus they're very likely to believe that they have the right answers on a bunch of issues where they really don't, and how sure someone is that they have the right answers or that they no the truth has absolutely no correlation with how likely they are to be right. (Heck, I'm sometimes tempted to agree with the Yeats line "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity" and say that how sure someone is that they have the right answer is inverse to their chances of actually being right.)

Truth is none of us really knows it all or knows what we're doing, we're mostly just stumbling through things as best we can and trying to make some tiny bit of sense out of things as we go along.

And experience is always a subjective thing. People can live in the same place and experience very different worlds based on who they are and what they're going through. Are they 90 and lived all their life with a silver spoon in their mouth, or a homeless 20 year old who ran away from home after enduring abuse? A man or a woman, an ethnic minority vs the majority, an immigrant vs a nativist, etc. All those people can stand right next each other on the same street but be living in effectively a different world, and be shaped by that experience to fit in well in their own environment while being a terrible misfit in another.

So everyone's experiences, regardless of how seemingly vast, deep, rich, or learned, is worth taking with a grain of salt and accepting or admiring without question. (Sorry if I turned to pontificating there, I think I'm developing a bad habit of doing that as I get older. )

edited 25th Sep '15 8:41:40 PM by TheWanderer

That is a lot to think about.