Old Age and Wisdom

Last November I celebrated my 80^th Birthday.   I am old enough to remember:

• Memory was something you lost with age
• A program was a TV show
• A cursor used profanity
• A web was a spider’s home
• A mouse pad was where a mouse lived
• A hard drive was a long trip on the road
• And if you had a 3 inch floppy
• . . . You just hoped nobody ever found out!!

Using the famous riddle posed to Oedipus by the Sphinx: “What goes on four feet in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening? ” I can safely say after buying a cane I am now in the evening of my life.

When I first started to read, Science Fiction novels were my favourite books. Then I would suddenly switch to another topic and maniacally read about it.  Living in Bath reading all the Jane Austin novels was one manic period.  During 1963 in my gap year, I had a Russian phase where I read the 4 great Dostoyevsky novels and Tolstoy’s War & Peace and Anna Karenina.  Then in 1976 I, Claudius was a hit series on TV which caused a classic Greek/Roman phase.  One Socratic dialogue I distinctly remember was Cicero’s “On Old Age”.  If you have not done so it is worth reading.  It is a short piece (1 hour) and excellent prose.

Cicero defines four reasons why old age appears to be unhappy: 1) It withdraws us from active pursuits; 2) It makes the body weaker; 3) It deprives us of physical pleasures; and 4) It is not far removed from death.

Cicero then makes four replies:

1. The prudence and wisdom that accompanies aging more than compensates for declining physical vigour.
2. Don’t yearn for the physical vigour of a young man … any more than in my youth I yearned for the vigour of a bull or an elephant. Use whatever you have: that is the right way. Do whatever is to be done in proportion as you have the strength to do it
3. Eating and drinking still give sensual pleasure and he finds that he enjoys meals with friends even more than he did as a youth. But to the extent that old age detracts from enjoying such pleasures, this is mostly beneficial. As older people have little longing for sensual pleasures not only is no cause for reproach, but rather is ground for the highest praise.
4. When the young die I am reminded of a strong flame extinguished by a torrent; but when old men die it is as if a fire had gone out without the use of force and of its own accord, after the fuel had been consumed; and, just as apples when they are green are with difficulty plucked from the tree, but when ripe and mellow fall of themselves, so, with the young, death comes as a result of force, while with the old it is the result of ripeness. To me, indeed, the thought of this “ripeness” for death is so pleasant, that the nearer I approach death the more I feel like one who is in sight of land at last and is about to anchor in his home port after a long voyage.

Remembering I had read On Old Age started me on new quest what books or articles should I read to gain wisdom.  Synchronicity kicked in and there was an interesting article in The Australian “Time of your Life” (18/2/25) where the author asked a dozen seniors (80+) what advice they would give to their younger self.  Here are some gems from the article:

• ‘Never raise your voice except at a ball game’.
• ‘Treat your body as a house you have to live in for another 70 years.’
• Tell your partner you love them every night before you fall asleep.
• Always remind yourself that your track record for getting through bad days is perfect.
• Regret from inaction is always more painful than regret from action.

The author noted no-one mentioned money.  He then discusses how much money you need to happy in old age.  In Australia the goal has largely been to own your own house. My own view is that you should set yourself a target of being in the top 1%.  According to Knight Frank the number for Australians is A$7.27 million of Net Assets.

I am not the first person to ask what is wisdom.  Starting with Socrates it is a question that has been asked again and again.  Another article in The Australian Academic wisdom lost in pursuit of anger and avarice (8-9 February 2025) provided the famous example of  John Stuart Mill,  the pre-eminent English-speaking philosopher and political economist of the 19th century –  also a hugely influential progressive reformer, a leading political advocate for the rights of women and the disenfranchised.

There’s a riveting moment in Mill’s autobiography when he’s looking back at his early adulthood. He had spent his life since the age of three being educated by his father in how to be, in his words, “a reformer of the world”. That was how he, like many young idealists, planned to spend the rest of his life.  But Mill was trained for it from birth, like some kind of professional tennis champion. Then, at about the age of 20, “it occurred to me to put the question directly to myself, ‘Suppose that all your objects in life were realised; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant; would this be a great joy and happiness to you?’ And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, ‘No!’ At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down.”

This was serious. Mill suffered a genuine mental health crisis, a nervous breakdown. What was the meaning of his life, if not to “realise these objects”? Once you have solved all the problems of materiality and society, once we are all relatively (equally?) healthy, free and prosperous, once science, economics, industry, medicine, social reform, universal justice, and of course these wonderful AIs, have all done their jobs, once civilisation has delivered all those things … then what? What is the final purpose of it all? What’s the real point, the “end”, of being alive and human?

I actually believe in my life time we in Australia actually reached that point.  The four planks were Rule of Law, Presumption of Innocence, Democracy, and Freedom of Speech.  The realisation that Science and Technology is never settled and that using the principles of Scepticism and Empiricism the West achieved breakthrough on breakthrough and clearly demonstrated ‘The West is Best.”  despite the continual bleatings of the wokerati about colonial guilt.   The graph below demonstrates how dramatic the improvement has been.  Note how China has stalled because it lacks Democracy and Freedom of Speech.

Mill’s own answer was to read poetry – specifically, the poems of his older contemporary William Wordsworth.   I am not a poetry reader so I asked myself is there a book?

My first attempt was Gilead , a novel by Marilynne Robinson, published in 2004. It won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award.  Gilead is the story of a Protestant pastor, the Reverend John Ames, who, in the midwestern town of Gilead of about 1950 or so, writes to his then seven-year-old son. The pastor is 80 and dying and the letter is intended to be read when his son has reached adulthood.  The pastor had a lot of naps, prayed a lot, and his main jobs were to produce and give the Sunday Sermon.  He also would have been the town’s pseudo-psychotherapist.

The reviews by readers are very favourable but I confess I found the book very difficult to read.   I would read 10 pages and go to sleep.  And I cannot remember one item of advice to his son except to read the Bible.

However I now have found another book to read: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Tolstoy.  Considered to be one of the finest examples of a novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of a high-court judge in 19th-century Russia and his sufferings and death from a terminal illness.  Sounds perfect and is now the next book on my list to read.

Summing up my current view is that wisdom has best been summed up by Jack Nicholson’s famous quote from The Bucket List:

“Three things to remember when you get older: never pass up a bathroom, never waste a hard-on, and never trust a fart.”

To that I would add the Italian proverb that once you reach 80, you stop counting birthdays and glasses of wine.