Wisdom is derived from experience

Wisdom comes from having a had a wide variety of different experiences, not simply from getting older. Moving countries, changing occupations, pursuing side-projects, studying across fields/domains and lots of curiosity are all green flags for a person being wise.

Wisdom is distilled learning. We need to a lot of learning to be wise. Learning, in turn, comes from experience. It is often assumed that experience comes with age, and hence, that wise people tend to be old (or vice versa). I don't think that's quite true. In my view wisdom only correlates with age.

Some people accumulate wisdom very slowly, while others seem to develop it far faster. Why? Because it's possible to live essentially the same day/month/year many times, and thus live similar experiences over and over again. Many people do. This is one reason why repetitive times in our lives, like months revising for exams or years trapped in a boring job, feel like a blur. We just lived the same day over and over again.

Seneca makes essentially this point in On the Shortness of Life:

So you must not think a man has lived long because he has white hair and wrinkles: he has not lived long, just existed long. For suppose you should think that a man had had a long voyage who had been caught in a ranging storm as he left harbour, and carried hither and thither and driven round and round in a circle by the rage of opposing winds? He did not have a long voyage, just a long tossing about.

Another way to think about this is that while Fast feedback loops are important, varied feedback loops are important too. If we try the same thing over and over again, we should expect to receive broadly the same results.^[1] We're unlikely to learn something new that way. As such, to become wise, we should also aim to get a wide variety of life experience.

I've observed that people who I consider to be wise have often moved countries,^[2] changed occupations, pursued eclectic side-projects, studied in multiple fields or cultivated curiosity. These things tend to expose them to all sorts of new and different experiences. I think it's those new experiences that ultimately give rise to wisdom.^[3]

Lastly, it's worth pointing out that if we want to learn and become wise, then we also have to pay attention. Exposure to an experience is not the same as experiencing that experience. For this reason, second-hand experiences from books, videos, podcasts etc. tend to be less valuable.^[4] It's the hurly-burly of day-to-day life which has the potential to teach us the most. There's little point visiting a new country if you spend the whole time reading in your hotel room (or worse, on social media). To learn from experiences, we must be "present" enough to actually live them.^[5]