Youth and Wisdom

According to several researchers, wisdom comes via the difficulties we face and the way we learn to conduct ourselves during uncalled for situations. Although sometimes we struggle to understand if hardship, or adversity, lead to wisdom?

Perhaps to a certain extent. Struggles can come at any age. Being born into a difficult environment would mean growing up in the face of adversity and sometimes having to grow up “too early”. Can this be seen as an asset towards gaining wisdom? 

Just by virtue of someone being older certainly doesn’t mean they are wiser. One comes across some of the most emotionally unintelligent and dogmatic people in the older age group. Similarly, we also meet emotionally intelligent individuals who are in their mid teens and earlier. Growing wisdom teeth between the years of 17 and 21 doesn’t have anything to do with it.

Wisdom inherently appears to come with emotional intelligence, and spirituality may be a small part of it.  Although, spirituality has very little to do with age. 

According to this study, “Similar to other components as well as overall wisdom, spirituality is significantly associated with better mental health and well-being, and may add to the predictive utility of the total wisdom score. Spirituality is, however, a weaker contributor to overall wisdom than components like pro-social behaviours and emotional regulation. Longitudinal studies of larger and more diverse samples are needed to explore mediation effects of these constructs on well-being and health.”

Of all the research that has gone into defining what might be wisdom, the basis of achieving this would appear to be :

Knowing your own intrinsic nature.

Gaining knowledge over time. I’m not talking about information. The information we receive is something that must be put into context by our teachers or ourselves to turn that information into what we can call knowledge.

Understanding that there are differences in the personality, spirit and style of most people.

Similarly, there are differences in most cultures.

There are differences in the values of most people. Seeking out those with whom we share our values is of extreme importance while not spurning those who have a different belief system.

Understanding that we are all work in progress and there are no limits to knowledge. It’s all about evolving with time.

Develop good social skills. 

So essentially what we are talking about here is emotional intelligence as related to wisdom. 

 Wisdom does lead to tangible benefits such as having good relationships and social contacts, being able to plan for the future while living and not existing during the present, setting some life goals that are important and not attaching much importance to those things that don’t really matter. 

Many research studies have been able to pinpoint that wisdom begins to happen during childhood, adolescence and when we are young adults and it’s not at all essentially the realm of the old and experienced.

As Paul Baltes the famed psychologist succinctly put it, “Wisdom is expertise in the fundamental pragmatics of life”.

Picture editorial credit: mrtraveler / Shutterstock.com

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