Wise words on the language (and process) of aging

Define Aging

As anyone who works in healthy aging knows, the public agenda around aging seems to focus on decline, illness and burden. These negative stereotypes create prejudice against older people, are generally untrue and almost entirely unfair. After all, we are all old, it’s just that some of us haven't got there yet.

The very definition of aging seems to be ‘the process during which structural and functional changes accumulate in an organism as a result of the passage of time; these changes manifest as a decline from the organism's peak fertility and physiological functions until death’. Bit grim.

I have two problems with this definition, the first is that it is based on a measurement against some mythical peak function that almost all of us were unaware we were actually experiencing at the time, or have the need or desire to measure all future performance against. No one is denying the reality that with age comes decline, but until the point where you are incapable of doing something measuring performance, peak or otherwise, is not really an important consideration. This interpretation is doubly dangerous as it perpetuates the myth that by being older and past peak function you are somehow less, in some way inferior.

The Benefits of Aging

My second problem is that it ignores all other aspects of aging beyond simple physiological decline. There are clear and tangible assets associated with aging, not just debits. It doesn’t take too much digging to discover that older people are more likely to have increased spending power and savings, commit less crime and have fewer car crashes, provide more unpaid care and offer financial support to their families, volunteer and donate more to charities, and most importantly, have the highest average reported levels of happiness, satisfaction and a sense of well-being.

May I propose an alternative definition of aging, “the process during which experience and knowledge accumulate in an organism as a result of the passage of time; these changes manifest in an improvement from the organism's trough of ignorance and idiocy until later life”. Much more chirpy.

Acquiring Wisdom

The language of aging is all around us, terms such as ‘young creative talent’ and ‘wise old owl’ seem thoroughly ingrained in our psyche, and while younger people do not have a monopoly on creativity or energy, does age correlate with wisdom? Maybe unsurprisingly, there is little clear evidence for this assertion, in fact, it is hard to find any universally agreed definition for wisdom or a theory of how it is acquired.

For me, wisdom is derived from three main components; knowledge, understanding and application. Sound knowledge involves both personal experience and the detailed study of a particular subject, neither being sufficient on their own to be truly knowledgeable. Personal experience of events is powerful but limited to your own existence, and study can provide a breadth of knowledge but no context to evaluate it all against. Turning your knowledge into understanding requires a certain amount of intellect, but more importantly the time and inclination to reflect on that knowledge and analyze it. And lastly, some imagination or creative thinking is involved to apply previous knowledge and understanding to new situations in order to act wisely.

It would seem logical that the more time you have to accumulate knowledge, to analyze and translate it, the greater chance there is of acquiring wisdom and acting wisely. The question should not be, is time correlated with wisdom, but rather, how much time is required to be considered wise.

That is absolutely not to say that older people are wiser than younger people, or that having reached a certain age you have wisdom thrust upon you, but simply the more time you spend on this planet, the more knowledge you have the opportunity to gain and reflect on.

Ultimately, there is no line you can cross to become wise, it is an endless process of distilling knowledge to become wiser. Much like being old, there is no true definition of old other than 15 years older than you are yourself, we are all simply becoming older, some of us wiser, some of us not so much, some of us frail, some of us not so much.

As I frequently do, I defer to the recognized wisdom of someone else, in this case Oscar Wilde who famously wrote; “with age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone.” How true.

Colum Menzies Lowe is the Director of the Design Age Institute at the Royal College of Art in London, England.