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Over the past 10 years, I’ve been on a quest for wisdom. I didn’t take the conventional routes of finding a guru, reading self-help books, or listening to motivational speakers. Instead, I decided to ask the oldest Americans about their advice for living on a range of topics, from choosing a career to raising children, to avoiding regrets, to how to age gracefully and well. Currently, this project focuses on older people’s advice for love, relationships, and marriage.
In 2011, when I published a book on 1,200 older people’s advice for living (30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans), I got a very important question from a viewer of the PBS Newshour, which covered the book. This college professor from New England emailed me that the book “makes the assumption that the young have more to learn from the old than the other way around.” He went on, “How does Mr. Pillemer know that the elderly ‘are the truest experts on living well through hard times?’”
It was an excellent question. And it got me thinking. I’ll offer my answer here, and I’d like to hear what readers have to say.
America is ambivalent about the wisdom of older people, if popular culture is any guide. On the one hand, we are provided with buffoonish images of older people, such as Grandpa Simpson (famous quote: “I always get the blame around here! Who threw a cane at the TV? Who fell into the china hutch? Who got their dentures stuck in the toilet?”), or Frank Costanza, George’s churlish father on Seinfeld (famous quote: “Hoochie Mama!”).
Stacked on the other side of the scale are the “sages"—characters ranging from Yoda to Dumbledore to those played by actor Morgan Freeman who in film after film plays the wise elder and moral compass for those around him. Despite such confused images, younger Americans seem at least open to the idea of older people as potential repositories of wisdom.
Still young people are right to ask: Why should it interest me and what can I gain from hearing older people’s advice about how to live my life? Let me offer three reasons why the wisdom of older Americans can be a uniquely important source of guidance—why they could be called “experts” on living well through hard times:
1. Listening to the advice of older people has promoted well-being and even survival for millennia.
Over the 1.5 million years of human existence, it is only for around the past 150 years that most people have gone to anyone other than local elders for solutions to life’s problems. Anthropologists tell us that in prehistoric times, the accumulated wisdom of older people was a key to human survival. Not only did the old (and especially grandmothers) improve the survival chances of their grandchildren by caring for them and finding them food; they also were the source of tried and tested experience, the true “elders” to whom group members would go in time of crisis. Later on, in agricultural societies, the family elder was often the only one who knew how his clan’s property should be farmed or how to handle drought or pest infestation. Without that elder’s knowledge starvation could ensue. So consulting older people is really a “natural” thing for humans to do.
2. America’s elders are a unique and extraordinary generation.
People in their seventies and beyond have lived through experiences many of us today can only imagine. Their lives have often included what psychologist Juan Pascual-Leone has termed “ultimate limit situations.” As he eloquently puts it, these are situations that “cannot be undone and are nonetheless faced with consciousness and resolve.” Situations like illness, aging, failure, oppression, loss, crushing poverty, and war. It is precisely these situations that lead to wisdom. America’s elders have more of this kind of wisdom more than the rest of us because on average they have been through many more ultimate limit situations. They have survived them, absorbed them, and gained invaluable experience. This unique perspective is a valuable lens through which younger people can view their own lives.
3. Elders offer an alternative to conventional wisdom.
There’s a paradox here: This point is simultaneously why we should seek out elder wisdom and also why younger people may not pay attention. From our surveys of 1,200 elders about their lessons for living, we found that their perspectives often shake up conventional wisdom.
Conventional wisdom is what everybody knows—what the members of a society learn while they are growing up. Conventional wisdom offers up images of the good life and reinforces the values of the culture. It ultimately becomes the basis of our identity and self-esteem. And it’s very hard to see beyond conventional wisdom, even if it makes us live smaller and less happy lives.
I found that the elders often rejected what has become conventional wisdom in America and pointed to an alternative. This alternative wisdom defies a single categorization—sometimes it’s what we think of as “liberal” (elders endorse religious tolerance, for example, and reject materialistic worldviews) and sometimes “conservative” (such as proposing that marriage should always be seen as a lifelong commitment). But it is in this challenge to the conventional world-view that the true value of their wisdom lies. The elders lead us to examine our assumptions and make more conscious decisions about our own scripts for happiness.
In the end, I come down on the side that the accumulated wisdom of older people—our “experts” on living—can serve as a helpful guide for us. They bring experiential knowledge of just about every problem a human being can go through. People from their teens to middle age will find that the roadmap for life elders provide can help them take a new look at their own situations and choose new ways of living that will make them happier.
We just have to be willing to ask and listen.
Follow me on Twitter @karlpillemer for daily updates on elder wisdom, love and marriage, and aging and visit the Legacy Project on Facebook.
