In a way, you do get wiser as you get older just from experiencing the world more and solidifying yourself. Unfortunately, this also sets some people in their ways so much that they refuse to learn anymore. If something contradicts what they "know" then they will refuse to even consider the idea of it.
It's different for everyone, and some people just adapt to aging better than others.
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Some get smarter and/or wiser.
Others don't, they just get more sophisticated from decades of practice but still have the maturity of teenagers (or worse). Still, their experience does give them an edge over many teens and young adults, even the ones ironically more mature (and even wiser) than such an adult.
Others do get dumber for a variety of reasons, from learning inappropriate lessons (for example, instead of learning to be wary from a bad person or incident they become delusionally paranoid certain the experience will repeat itself at every opportunity), failure to exercise the brain (the "go through the motions" and the brain, being a muscle, weakens and thus they become dumber than they were when they exercised their brain more in youth), a lifetime of drugs (meant to include alcohol) can also do it, and of course all sorts of physical accidents and maladies that can afflict the brain.
In some cases this can be reversed, like an old woman once shared to me how brain dead she got watching TV all the time but once she turned it off and started exercising her brain then she got smarter. (Just to be clear, it wasn't the TV itself that made her dumber, it was her not using her brain as she vegged in front of it and just "working on automatic" in going through her motions.) One man (40s, IIRC) undergoing brain scans for something was found to have a brain that got stronger after he took a job as a cab driver and had to learn new routes.
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We definitely get wiser as we get older. There's no substitute for experience, and that only comes with time.
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Someone once told me that, as you get older, you need to read a lot more.
Apparently reading keeps your brain active and keeps you from running off into "stupid".
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Some young persons have more smarts and wisdom than most elder people. Even more experience, because we experience things that our progenitors never had to.
I'd say that you learn more of what you are exposed to and taught, rather than just in general because you happen to age.
A saying goes;
"A wiseman is ever the fool, as only a fool believes he's wise"
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Do People Really Get Wiser?
