time served

Does age equal wisdom? Does the amount of time one has served on this earth indicative of how wise a person is? We always see the archetypical wise old man in movies and read about him in books but is it a fair assumption that someone who is older is necessarily wiser? Growing up we are taught to be respectful of the elderly because they are older and wiser than we are. For the most part I have always assumed that this was true. Now, I am not here to tell anyone that they do not have to respect the elderly. My question has little to do with whether we should respect those who are older and much to do with how much wiser they really are. Wisdom is defined as the power or faculty of forming a sound judgment in any matter. How does one come to acquire this power of forming sound judgments? I suppose the only logical answer is through experience. Subsequently, the more experience one accrues, the more wisdom is attained right? That only seems logical. However, it seems that there should be a little more to it than that.

Let's say that wisdom is gained through what is learned from experience. The simple truth is that people do not always learn the right lesson from a given experience. One of several things happens when people experience a hardship: a) they learn why said event happened and take reasonable steps to prevent it from happening again, b) they form a knee-jerk reaction to the adverse circumstance and grossly overcompensate for their error often putting other people at odds with them as a result, and c) they learn nothing from it and are doomed to find themselves in the same hole they started in. So, to say that age/experience equals wisdom is questionable to say the least.

I'm not really sure where I am going with this except to say that I have been thinking a lot about people. I know a lot of older people who are incredibly foolish and make irrational and unwise decisions on a regular basis. I also know some younger people who have more wisdom in their little finger than many people obtain in a lifetime. I suppose that you could argue that this observation is based on my youthful perspective and lacks wisdom. I don't really have an argument for that. I just feel that everyone should have to earn the respect that they receive and the fact that they have lived a long time without dying doesn't seem like a good enough reason to respect someone to me.