1) Optimal tradeoffs between “irresponsible” pleasure-seeking and experimental behavior vs. sober and “responsible” behavior will change over the life course. This can be solely because of time — changes in the amount of time left to live (and thus recover from mistakes), the amount of time and effort already invested in the current path one is on. It can also be due to changes in experience and physical health over life. An old person is not necessarily an expert in how a risky but pleasurable experience *feels* to a young, vigorous person who is not already jaded to the pleasure involved.

2) Big life course decisions have a lot at stake, and individual personality differences are quite significant in deciding which course is best. It is quite plausible that the extra benefits from the older person’s experience do not outweigh the individual differences, and people are simply right to be suspicious of blindly following the advice of others in these matters.

3) Well-known cognitive biases lead people to overvalue their own decisions regardless of whether these really turned out to be the right ones. An older person’s advice may simply be their defensive post facto rationalizations for their own choices. Not always, but certainly sometimes.

I want to tease apart two different (but compatible) possibilities:

A. Even if optimum level of idealism were constant over the lifespan, we might still expect that evolution would have made us such that we start out idealistic and end up more cynical (if experience inevitably increases insight and insight inevitably increases cynicism).

B. Optimal level of idealism changes over the lifespan, because the young need to attact allies while the old instead need to make the most of the allies they already have.

You claim B. I don’t know whether you also believe A. If A were true, then it might be harder to determine empirically whether B also holds, because one could explain the greater idealism of the young, and their frequent failure to listen to their elders, by appeal to A.

B might be well be true, but one could think of some possible factors that would favor more idealism in the old. For example, if the old are more involved in tribal-level politics, they might have more need to signal idealism about such politics.

One might also think that the interests of the young would be more selfish, being concerned with their own health, reproduction, and social advancement, while the old might have more interest in the welfare of their children, grandchildren, clan, and tribe in general. If an old woman sacrifices herself for her relatives or the community, does this not count as idealism? Or if an old man devotes himself to some communal project or ideal so as to create a great legacy, is not that idealism too? Is there any data on whether these things are done more by the young or the old?

Cheers,

David Rotor

It might have been Churchill or someone else who said something like, “Anyone who is not an idealist when he is young is a scoundrel, but anyone who is not a cynic when he is old is a fool”. There seems to be some truth to this. Also, we feel that we need to protect young children from exposure to obscenity, violence, and grit and horror in general, but less so with older children and adults.

If insight gradually replaces innocence over the lifespan, what is the explanation of this? Is it simply inevitable that insight increases with experience, so that we must start out too naive and end up too jaded, spending only a brief time at the optimum point in passing? Or does the optimum tradeoff point change with age, and if so why?