“The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything, and the young know everything.” - Oscar Wilde

Is Oscar on to something here, or is he just being cynical? After all, he died at age 46, that suspicious age.

The Young

When we are young, we don’t know what we don’t know. When we don’t know something, does it even exist? In our early years on the planet, it would be natural to have a cognitive bias when assessing ourselves. There is an understandable lack of accurate self-awareness. Our youthful arrogance and ignorance are really about feeling that we are the centre of the universe.

Our ego is inflated to the max. We are likely to arrive at inaccurate conclusions about our world due primarily to the small sample size of experiences we have had to date. The danger of knowing everything is that it shuts down new information. We need to transition from this phase to become healthy adults.

“The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.” - George Bernard Shaw

The Middle-Aged

Our transition comes, according to Wilde’s wild theory, in middle age. "Middle-aged" is a nebulous term but suffice it to say that we are no longer in our youthful, all-knowing phase of development. According to Wilde, we have graduated to cynicism.

Through more life experience, we may have lost some of our youthful idealism. We may have come to the realization that it can be difficult to affect change. Also, it is much easier to find like-minded people who are cynical than it is to find optimists. Knowing you are not alone in your cynicism makes it easier to voice it to others.

There is a certain synergy to cynicism that can become a contagion. Being actively involved in their work life, middle-aged adults are more likely to witness the more contentious and polarized nature of the world.

Studies by Almada (1991) and others have found that cynicism is significantly associated with coronary death and total mortality. ¹  H.G. Wells said, “Cynicism is humour in ill health.” Wells seems to echo some of the research into early heart disease and the associated early mortality rates of the middle aged.

Older People

Having lived through years of cynicism, either from self or others, older people appear to be ready to start believing in something again. Research has shown that older people, 65 plus for example, are four times more likely to share fake news. Nadia Brashier, a Harvard researcher in cognitive psychology, has found that older adults are seven times more likely than younger adults to engage in fake news and conspiracy theories. ²

Brashier did not find this belief to be about cognitive decline, increased conservatism, or gullibility. She found the more likely reason to be the increasingly smaller social networks older people have, or what she calls “weak ties” in her work. Brashier also found that older people only share information they agree with. This information can span the spectrum from bad to good.

“The independence once represented by the car has been replaced by cell phones and social networks, which are now at the forefront of people's expression of freedom and access. Once a symbol of 'coming of age,' many drivers are waiting longer to get their licenses.” - John Zimmer

Coming of Age

Oscar Wilde has some interesting points to his theory, especially considering that he died in 1900. His observations from the last century may still have some merit. However, we need to be a little suspicious and maybe even cynical of creating categories and profiling people.

Most of our past profiling of groups of people has been found to be inaccurate and has been eradicated through enculturation and acculturation. We are moving targets, constantly changing, and profiling groups of people seems to be an attempt to simplify our need to avoid complexity.

Enculturation and Acculturation

Enculturation is the process by which an individual adopts the behaviour patterns of the culture in which he or she is immersed. This involves learning the values, beliefs, norms, and expectations of one's current environment.

Acculturation is often defined as the array of psychological changes that occur when members of a minority group adapt to a mainstream group. This involves similar learnings about values, beliefs, norms, and expectations in a new environment.

Wilde and others were not cognizant of all these extraneous factors because they were not part of mainstream thinking in the 19^th century. Maybe we just need to recognize that simplistic labelling will always suffer from the complexities of change.

Simplexity, a fairly recent theory, is a concept that simple things can be more complicated than they seem, and complex things can be made simple. ³  In theory, this is another example of how we are trying to make our complex modern world less complicated.

This idea runs into trouble when senior citizens are trying to cope with modern technology, especially when trying to understand complicated technical instructional manuals to apps that they may not even know exist.  Maybe the technocrats need to be aware that our awareness changes through the ages.

References

^{1-Almada, S.J., Zonderman, A.B., Shekelle, R.B., Dyer, A.R., Daviglus, M.L., Costa Jr., P.T., & Stamler, J. (1991). Neuroticism and cynicism and risk of death in middle-aged men: the Western Electric Study. Psychosomatic Medicine, Mar-Apr; 53: pp.165-175.}

^{2-Brashier, N.M., & Schacter, D.L. (2020). Aging in an Era of Fake News. Association for Psychological Science, Volume 29, Issue 3, May 19, 2020.}

^{3-Kluger, J. (2007).  Simplexity: The Simple Rules of a Complex World.  John Murray Publisher, 256 pages.}