Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Member-only story

Modern Oligarchy? Maybe.

8 min readApr 15, 2025

--

Photo by Craig Zdanowicz on Unsplash

If I were a younger man, I might worry more while scanning the headlines. In a past life, perhaps during other social upheavals, I might have taken a bold, outspoken, activistic approach to protesting what I see as wrong.

Heck, a part of me also revolts emotionally against the endless wrongs taking place globally. But now that I’m in my early sixties, I have learned enough about myself to know that the only way I can change anything I dislike around me is by changing how I see it.

Wisdom is one of the primary benefits of age. Wisdom is acquired. You can’t buy it. It comes through experience and surfing countless waves of emotion, including the emotional tsunamis that wreck us, tear us to pieces, and allow us to be renewed on a different shore.

Wisdom teaches us to see ourselves and the world differently. In that, we learn to stop sweating the small stuff. In the end, it’s all small stuff.

But all of this requires understanding one thing about everything we see in the headlines these days: the word oligarchy is being used to manipulate us into further fear and division.

We must resist that by learning that the world has and always will be this way because humans are here to learn…

--

--

Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age
Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

Published in Crow’s Feet: Life As We Age

“The longer I live, the more beautiful life becomes.” (Frank Lloyd Wright) Non-fiction pieces, personal essays and occasional poems that explore how we feel about how we age and offer tips for getting the most out of life.

Clifford Jones
Clifford Jones

Written by Clifford Jones

Author, visual artist, and family man. Discover the art of life; everyone is an artist. Follow me for inspiring stories about clarity, purpose, and prosperity.

No responses yet