Dancing with Uncertainty

Bringing out the Wisdom — Week 3

I’m three weeks in now. It’s nothing significant really. However, as I’ve started to synthesize more of my research, things are beginning to make sense. I am seeing patterns in what experts told me and the experiments I have been doing.

My concern is though, I’m not sure whether my theories on what wisdom is and how people gain it, show some understanding of the topic or a complete misunderstanding. Having theories after just three weeks makes me wonder. Is there something about wisdom that I’m ignoring completely? Are these theories just the result of oversimplification?

I’m not sure whether having theories on wisdom after three weeks shows some understanding of the topic or a complete misunderstanding.

Maybe it’s my attempt to rationalize wisdom that makes me completely oversee an irrational part of wisdom. It could be that my attempt to understand and explain makes me lose some of the emotional richness that makes wisdom what it is. Perhaps wisdom is something that cannot be fully explained or shouldn’t tried to be. My attempt to domesticate wisdom could be contradicting with the nature of what it is.

Maybe my attempt to domesticate wisdom is contradicting with the nature of what it is.

Possibly my doubts come from a believe that my topic is seemingly large, because it’s what other people keep telling me. In reality though, maybe my topic isn’t larger than any other topic. Something seemingly simple as glass of water could be as complex as wisdom. How gravity pulls the water down. How the sun causes reflections in the glass. How the water molecules move around. It just depends on how far you zoom in. You could easily study a glass of water for years, and still not fully comprehend what’s happening. The perception of complexity is just a result of your perspective, right?

Studying something seemingly simple as glass of water could be as complex as wisdom. It just depends on your perspective.

Maybe my uncertainty at this moment is just the result of me getting a little wiser, having intensively studied wise people. Wise people understand the limits of their knowledge. However, seemingly contradictory, people who think they are wise, usually aren’t.

Anyways, this uncertainty doesn’t mean I can’t work with what I have now. It doesn’t mean I should sit in a corner and cry. I can dance with the uncertainty. Tease it a little, see where it goes and then eventually regain control.

I can dance with this uncertainty. Tease it a little, see where it goes and then eventually regain control.

One of the most exciting things I did this week was talking to Charles Cassidy, who is the creator of evidencebasedwisdom.com, a website that collects resources about wisdom research. To me, Charles was exactly the right person at the right moment to talk to. He gave me a really good overview of the current state of wisdom research, which has really helped me during my synthesis. Besides that, he said something about my project really encouraged me:

Using design in the field of wisdom sounds really exciting. I haven’t really thought that far ahead but it does sound like the next stage. Now the science is a bit more robust and solid, taking it out to people in their daily lives seems to be a natural extension.

Charles Cassidy, evidencebasedwisdom.com

Another thing I did this week was organizing a workshop. I read out dilemmas and asked the participants to articulate what would be the wisest thing to to in that situation. For example:

“You get to spend time with the person that is being accused of shooting your best friend. What would be the wisest thing to do?”

One of the dilemmas that the participants faced.

This method is actually very similar to how Baltes measured levels of wisdom that informed the Berlin Wisdom Model, which is one of the first attempts to measure wisdom, in the 90s. However, unlike how Baltes approached it, I encouraged discussion amongst the participants, after they had individually pitched what would be the wisest thing to do according to them.

I found it quite surprising that people had quite a similar view on what would be the wisest thing to do. In many cases, they would try to better understand the situation and the people involved while avoiding being judgemental or acting driven by impulsive emotions.

Another insight I gained through my workshop, was that the participants repeatedly told me that what they considered to be the wisest thing to do and what they would actually do would be quite different. For example, when confronted with the dilemma from above, people admitted they would probably show anger towards the suspect or they would try to totally isolate themselves from the situation. This wasn’t what they considered to be the wisest thing to do, which was to engage in a dialogue before accusing the suspect.

There is a gap between what we know is the wisest thing to do and what we actually do.

To me, this seems to touch upon the core of what it means to be wise. I think that the way wise people act aligns with what they know is the wisest thing to do. Trying to bridge this gap could be an interesting design opportunity.

The Wisdom Gain Contraction
A seemingly big contradiction that arose this week is that some people need to travel the world to experience different cultures and meet all sorts of people to get wiser. On the contrary, others can isolate themselves for years and get wiser staying in the same place, without meeting anybody or experiencing cultures.

To understand this, I’ve been researching traumas, as they appear to increase the likeliness of getting wiser according to science. A particular trauma that seemed to really change people’s lives are near death experiences. Why?

I think that even though we all know that we will die, most of us don’t believe it. People around us die, but still deep inside of us we don’t believe it. Until suddenly it hits us. During a near death experience we get proof that we can die too. This makes us internalize the fact we will die.

Only when we get a near death experience, we really internalize the fact we will die and start to live accordingly.

The people that I researched completely changed their lives after the traumatic event. In other words, what they knew would be the wisest thing to do with their lives, and what they actually did suddenly started to align.

I think this principle could explain why for example some people need to travel to Japan and meet Japanese people to truly internalize that Japanese people have emotions which aren’t different from their own. While other people can draw these conclusions by reflecting on their existing knowledge. They know for a fact that Japan exist, people live there, and that all people have emotions. Thus they can empathize with Japanese people without actually needing to travel there.

By isolating ourselves, we are stimulated to internalize knowledge because we start digging into what we already know.

Based on this, I think that most of the knowledge that drives wisdom is already inside of us. However, only when we truly internalize it, we will act accordingly. I think this happens when we reflect, usually when we take a moment for ourselves.

Wiser people don’t necessary know more than other people, but they know the deeper meaning of what everybody else knows.

This theory sheds some light on the debate whether old people are wiser than young people. I think that in theory you could become wise with some basic knowledge, having experienced a range of emotions and taking time for reflection. This wouldn’t have to require a lifetime of experiences, but can be achieved at quite a young age.

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