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WORDS FROM THE WOULD-BE WISE
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Why aren't true wisemen
valued by today's young?
By GERALD NACHMAN
of TheColumnists.com
The main, perhaps only, perk of getting older is being
able to flaunt your wisdom. Of course, the downside is that nobody
who needs my wisdom listens to anyone my age.
If a teenager could give me 10 minutes a day, he would realize
how extremely wise I am. But one of life’s little ironies,
or God’s impractical jokes, is that, just about the time
you’ve pretty well got a handle on life’s major problems,
you’re just about dead.
This is a good reason to hope for reincarnation, but even if
you’re reincarnated, you probably have to start off stupid
all over again. That must be part of the deal. God may be forgiving
but He ain’t dumb. If you were born wise, you wouldn’t
need God.
Luckily for my friends and family, I have a surprising amount
of wisdom, and if nobody cares to benefit from it, well, that’s
their tough luck. True, few people actually seek me out for my
sage advice, and even those who do merely want to hear their
own wisdom confirmed. What they really want is a willing stooge.
You can always tell a stooge-seeker, because, after patiently
hearing you deliver your boring ideas, he or she will say, very
thoughtfully and respectfully, “Well, you may have a point”
--even if it’s not the one they had in mind, or one worth
heeding.
Kathy, 30 years my junior, often will ask, in mock-earnestness,
“Jerry, can I ask your advice on something?”
This is just a ploy, I now realize, to get my attention for her
own lengthy theorizing, but I still fall for it and say, “Why,
yes, my child, what is it?”
She then unravels at great length what’s troubling her,
and--while I am in the middle of the first carefully considered
sentence of my response--she replies quickly, “I don’t
agree at all,” and rattles on for another 20 minutes with
her own answer, which interests her far more than mine. Kathy
doesn’t want a counselor, she just wants my ear, a friendly
sounding-board, one who will kindly keep his big wise middle-age
yap shut.
Another friend, Alice, is a bit of a know-it-all, who, despite
my having experienced 20 more years of living (no small number
in the life-wisdom field), regularly dismisses my answers to
her problems as if she were clearly the older and wiser of the
two. “Well-l-l, you might be right,” Alice will reluctantly
concede, with just a hint of condescension, as if it clearly
would be a fluke if I knew what I was talking about.
So dispensing great wisdom is a fool’s game, and nobody
should get into it if they haven’t got a thick skin. When
you fail to dispense the advice someone wants to hear, you will
be accused of (a) total idiocy (“You just don’t understanding
the situation,”) (b) disloyalty (“Why are you taking
their side?”), or (c) reverse ageism (“You’re
too old to grasp all the implications”). They want a guru
their own age, a wrinkled 30-year-old.
There are no real defenses to these random attacks, and most
of them just get you deeper into hot water, especially any version
of the popular and easily disparaged I-Was-Young-Once-Myself
argument. You may have been young once, a teenager will admit,
but “Things were so different back in your day”-- i.e.,
the `60s, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people lived in
trees.
So you can pretty well forget about dispensing wisdom to children
or anyone much younger than you. I would instead wisely advise
you to focus on people older than yourself. I find that people
my age and older love to swap hard-won wisdom. You say, “Ya
know, I find that the older I get the more I realize [fill in
middle-age truism],” and the other wise person will reply,
on cue, “Boy, ain’t it the truth!” --or its contemporary
version, “Hey, tell me about it!”
If youth is wasted on the young, then wisdom is squandered on
the middle-aged, but at least they’re polite enough to agree
with me. There’s nothing more annoying than a younger person
seeking the truth who doesn’t recognize great wisdom when
he hears it.
©2005 by Gerald Nachman. The Nachman caricature is ©2000
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA. This
column first posted on Feb. 7, 2005.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Gerald Nachman. To send
an email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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