Wisdom shouldn't be something relegated only to philosophers in white togas. Wisdom is essential to living a meaningful, moral, and joyed filled life on the day to day.

Just this last week, I had a dilemma over whether I should pursue a girl I'm romantically interested in. Here's the problem: she's in one of my small Cornell classes and recently had a falling out with one of my close friends. But she's maddingly attractive, super kind, and curious, and I'm fairly sure not a serial killer.

Asking her on a date could offend my friend and make things awkward in class if she says no. But, I could also be missing out on a fantastic relationship that could grow both of us over time.

In situations like these, I like to ask my 70-year-old white-bearded wizard self what they would do.

What's the wise choice here?

I call problems like these "wisdom-related questions" because you can't easily reason through them. Wisdom-related problems tend to get more complex as you think about them. And they're everywhere.

Is it okay to consume from a great (high quality) artist, creative, or entrepreneur if they aren't good people? Which relationships should we prioritize fostering? What goals should we work on that might give meaning, happiness, and growth? Should I play Balder's Gate 3 or Minecraft? Okay, that last one probably does not work, but you get the point.

Why Is Wisdom Important?

Imagine you're the lead developer at a game studio, and you've just created No Man's Sky.

You're creative, intelligent, and have all the technical skills to build a vast, procedurally generated universe with billions of planets to explore. Sounds like a gamer's dream, right? But without wisdom guiding you, you overpromise, underdeliver, and launch a game that leaves players feeling like they've jumped into a space as vast as an ocean but as deep as a puddle. The backlash is fierce, your game gets meme'd into oblivion, and you spend the next few years trying to regain the trust of your fans.

Unfortunately, this is a true story, and I was one of those disappointed gamers in 2016. Thankfully, my game file was glitching, so I never played more than two hours and got to refund my $60.

No Man's Sky is a perfect example of how intelligence, creativity, and power, without wisdom, just make you more effective at making the world a worse place.

Each individual skill, quality, or thing is a single colored and textured thread in a tapestry, and wisdom is the master thread that weaves them all together.

We need wisdom more than ever, yet, we live in a society that undervalues it. The political climate is extremely polarized. Climate change looms over the horizon. The internet has simultaneously connected and disconnected us more than ever. Many feel a lack of meaning in their lives but don't know how to create it.

The issue is people don't find wisdom practical. We don't understand it. So many other skills reward us better in the short term.

In this article, I want to attempt to fight these problems by connecting everything I have learned about wisdom. Is it wise to try to do so in some random blog post? I guess that's for you to decide.

What Is Wisdom?

We all know wise people, whether dead or alive.

We hear wisdom and think Socrates, Lao Tzu, The Buddha! But here's the harder question: why are they wise?

Wisdom is notoriously hard to define, like trying to explain what actually is in a Pop-Tart. The problem is wisdom is highly contextual. So, any theory of wisdom can't thoroughly describe what a wise decision looks like, only the qualities, skills, and aspects that make up wisdom.

What is considered wise changes based on the culture you're in. Ancient Greeks, psychological theories, notions of wisdom between East and West, and modern folk conceptions all differ in their definitions of wisdom.

The definition of wisdom I have come to is a conglomeration of all of these different conceptions. Defining wisdom won't fix the problems mentioned before. But to tread into new depths, you must first put on your diving gear. A definition of wisdom is our diving gear. Without further ado, here it is:

Wisdom is the ability to use:

1. Cognitive, reflective, and affective skills^[1]
2. To properly value, prioritize, and act
3. Balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests^[2]
4. For the common human good
5. Keeping context in mind^[3]
6. Over the short and long term
7. While following an ecology of practices^[4]
8. Involving a fundamental shift in relevance realization^[4:1]
9. Balancing Western and Eastern notions of Enlightenment

Or, more simply, in one sentence: wisdom is proper valuing, prioritizing, and acting, balancing differing views and contexts for the common human good.

Woooohhhh. That's a doozy. Like a great Christmas present, let's unwrap some of those terms above so we can begin to grapple with what wisdom is.

1. Wisdom is the ability to use cognitive, reflective, and affective skills... Let's break down what each of those are:

Cognitive Skills Of Wisdom

• Knowledge and Experience: Broad understanding across disciplines and diverse life experiences—like not microwaving a metal bowl. Guilty.
• Critical Thinking: grasp and ability to apply rational thinking processes (logic, game theory, systems thinking, probability, Bayesian reasoning, ability to separate correlation from causation).
• Intellectual/Creative Aptitude: Quick learning (adaptive intelligence), creative, and open to new experience.

Reflective Skills Of Wisdom

• Self-Awareness: Awareness and a hunger to understand one's feelings, thoughts, biases, and behaviors.
• Perspective-Taking: Ability to step into the shoes of others, without stealing them of course.
• Epistemic Humility: Recognizing knowledge gaps and willingness to change beliefs.

Affective Skills Of Wisdom

• Benevolence: Caring for the welfare of others.
• Emotional Regulation: Recognizing and managing oneself and others' emotions positively.
• Positive Mindset: Optimism balanced with realism; motivation to improve the world.
• Intuition and Self-Discipline: Instinctive understanding of wise actions coupled with the ability to act on them even when you don't have motivation.

2. To properly value, prioritize, and act...

Proper valuing involves grounding your values in ethical, experiential, and contextual foundations. In my case, I value my health, relationships, wisdom, open-mindedness, curiosity, and zest above all else (of course, I value more than this depending on the context, but these are the main ones). These values affect what I prioritize throughout my life and act upon.

Wisdom involves turning these priorities into action. At the end of the day, you can think wisely and talk wisely, but what's the point if you can't translate this into behavior?

3. Balancing intrapersonal, interpersonal, and extrapersonal interests…

Intrapersonal interests are your own interests. Interpersonal interests are the interests of others. Extrapersonal interests encompass broader societal, environmental, or universal issues.

Wisdom is a balancing of all of them, which is why I'll walk everywhere at Cornell to fight climate change but then drive a few blocks to get ice cream in my hometown. Got to balance it out ye know?

4. For the common human good.

Common human good is hard to define. But one thing I'm almost certain of is it can't be entirely relative. If it was, we could ascribe wisdom to the acts of Hitler and other atrocities of history.

I define the common human good in relation to principles of good defined across history like:

• Kindness
• Justice
• Care And Empathy
• Fairness
• The Social Contract
• The Golden Rule

Of course, many of these principles are up for interpretation but keeping these in mind the acts of Hitler would certainly not be ascribed as wise--yay!

5. Keeping context in mind…

In Spain, taking a siesta—a short nap after lunch—is considered wise and culturally ingrained. It's seen as a way to recharge and boost productivity for the rest of the day.

Now, imagine someone trying to introduce the siesta tradition in a bustling New York City office. Picture an employee bringing in a fold-out cot, setting it up right next to their desk, and announcing, "Alright, everyone, it's siesta time!"

Clearly, wisdom must be grounded in the context. As the saying goes, "When in Rome, do as the Romans do."

6. Over the short and long term…

Having a donut while going out to Crispy Crème with my friends once might be wise to show values of flexibility and looseness. But eating a donut every single day is a recipe for diabetes. Wisdom requires balancing the short with the long term.

7. While following an ecology of practices…

One practice, one philosophy, or one religion is never enough to fully become wise. Each of them has its benefits and drawbacks. The path to wisdom, therefore, is not in mastering one but in integrating many practices together in a way that brings out their strengths and diminishes their weaknesses.

8. Involving a fundamental shift in relevance realization...

You are constantly confronted with vastly more information than you can handle--grocery shopping, driving in traffic, or what video game to play as a distraction from your problems. Some information is--pay attention to my word choice--relevant, some not. If you were to consciously decide what was relevant and not all the time, you would essentially be committing cognitive suicide; it's too overwhelming. Your unconscious and conscious must work together to realize relevance—relevance realization.

In many ways, what is relevant is the ultimate question of life because there is always an infinite amount of things we could put our attention towards. Relevance realization is the process through which organisms realize relevance.

Wise people fundamentally adapt their relevance realization to be prone to fighting self-deception, experiencing insight, and working toward the wise life. This doesn't just take place at the level of propositional knowledge, it takes place at a wise persons very way of being. Wise people are wise to their very core.

This is why applying the concepts from this article is so important (as we will get to soon). Thinking about wisdom is one thing, but wisdom requires changing you to the bone.

9. Balancing Eastern and Western notions of Enlightenment...

In general Eastern notions of Enlightenment tend to prioritize experience and feeling asking questions such as: how can we stop the eternal cycle of desire? What is our true self? How can we live in accordance with nature and others harmoniously? If we were looking at reality through a window, Eastern notions of enlightenment focus less on finding deeper "facts" about reality outside the window and more on the distortionary nature of the window itself.

In contrast, Western notions of enlightenment tend to prioritize reason and science asking questions such as: how can we find deeper truths about reality? How can we become more rational? How can we use technology to further humanity? Western enlightenment doesn't involve just knowing a large amount about the world, but being able to change your opinions when sufficient evidence refutes them. If we were looking at reality through a window, Western notions of enlightenment focus less on the window itself, and more on the things we see through the window.

Wise people are able to integrate Eastern and Western notions of enlightenment together to check and balance each other. They understand wisdom resides not in dogmatically following one, but in integrating the best aspects of both (which I talk more about how to do in my article here).

I know that was a lot. I hope you're beginning to see how wisdom isn't one thing. Fundamentally, it's a meta-thing, a conglomeration of many different qualities, skills, and things that only together make up wisdom.

How Do We Build Wisdom?

All this talk about wisdom is great, but if we can't translate it into action, what's the point?

We're like an obese doctor who tells their patients to eat their vegetables (and, of course, apples) but who then goes home and engorges themselves on ramen noodles and ice cream.

As mentioned earlier, I can't give you prescriptive facts about how to be wise. Following advice dogmatically is a classic quality of foolishness. Instead, building wisdom is all about building an ecology of practices that check and balance each other. Here are those practices.

The meta-wisdom triforce is this: Experience. Reflect. Iterate.

Part of this comes on the day-to-day, but I personally like to make the process more conscious through conversation, and daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly review and reflection.

As you experience and reflect more and more, you'll uncover your values. But the work isn't done there. As you change, your values change. It's a never-ending, beautiful cycle.

Become curious and open-minded. Value learning for learning's sake. Question everything—especially the most obvious things. Question even this article. Be open to changing your most deeply entrenched beliefs.

Get mass experience. Don't consume a small information diet, like only self-improvement. Vary it. Consume academic papers, pop science, fiction, cinema, anything you can get your hands on. Study eastern and western conceptions of wisdom, as well as from a multitude of philosophical and spiritual traditions and teachers.

Involve others in your wisdom journey. Surround yourself with people who get you to think differently, not those who affirm everything you believe.

Study wise people. Those you know and people long dead like Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, Lao Tzu, and more. Study fools. Learn from others mistakes so you don't have to make them yourselves.

Look for self-deception in others first. After all, it's much more fun to judge other people than to look at your own messy life. Then, try and spot self-deception in yourself.

It starts with yourself. In The Great Learning Confucius states that if you want to love on a worldwide level, you first have to love your own state; if you want to love your own state, you first have to love your own family; if you want to love your own family, you first have to love yourself. Self-love, is the root to building love in the world^[5].

Build your cognitive, reflective, and affective skills. You shouldn't try to do all of these at once. My suggestion is to pick one or two and focus on building those. Then, integrate more practices into your life as feels natural.

I wish I could tell you if you applied everything in this article, you would become wise, and float into the air, glowing like The Buddha of the modern era. But I would be lying. The reality is, wise people often don't feel wise because they are constantly questioning the wisdom of their choices. But that's the very thing that makes them wise.

So, do I have a definitive answer to whether to pursue my crush? Well, I have an answer. But certainly not a definitive one. And that's okay. Wisdom isn't some destination to reach, it's an ideal to aspire to.

References

1. Ardelt, M. (2003). Empirical assessment of a three-dimensional wisdom scale. Research on Aging, 25(3), 275–324. https://doi.org/10.1177/0164027503025003004 ↩︎
2. Sternberg, R.J. (1998) A balance theory of wisdom. Review of General Psychology, 2, 347-365. ↩︎
3. Baltes, P. B., & Staudinger, U. M. (2000). Wisdom: A metaheuristic (pragmatic) to orchestrate mind and virtue toward excellence. American Psychologist, 55(1), 122–136. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.122 ↩︎
4. Vervaeke, J. (2019). Awakening from the meaning crisis. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54l8_ewcOlY ↩︎ ↩︎
5. Confucius., & Leys, S. (1997). The Analects of Confucius. New York, W.W. Norton. ↩︎