Wisdom used to be something we expected to grow into, something that was earned through years of trial and error—years of confusion and uncertainty.
Wisdom belonged to gray-bearded philosophers, theologians and grandparents. People who spent decades trying and failing and learning and trying again. Wisdom implied time. It implied mistakes. It implied a life of careful reflection.
The “Short Cut” to Wisdom
Ironically we all respect wisdom. But we want the summary, the shortcut, the important life lesson distilled into a tweet, an Instagram Reel or a quick TikTok video that can be digested before the traffic light turns green. As if modern wisdom has a shortcut, a CliffsNotes version for life. But wisdom has never worked that way. It’s earned, not digested. And that takes work, hard work. Patient, repetitive effort applied over a long horizon. The kind of effort our culture is being trained to avoid.
Things that once took years to learn can now be digested in seconds. Take, for example, the three-hour and 14 minute movie Titanic. Modern AI tools allow you to watch the movie on YouTube in nine minutes.
A long movie is one thing. But real wisdom cannot be reduced to nine minutes, no matter how good the technology gets.
Confusion and Repetition
The problem is that most meaningful parts of life don’t work that way. Real learning requires confusion and repetition. In surgical training doctors are trained to see one, do one, teach one. Meaning that the best way to learn a surgical procedure is to see, do, and teach, with each providing its own learning opportunity. Not sure about you, but I don’t want my surgeon watching a YouTube video instead of seeing, doing and teaching a procedure a few thousand times.
Ironically, our new Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) platforms (ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, Gemini, etc.) offer immediate answers to any question in the world in about five seconds. Answers are (mostly) correct. (For example, how does nuclear fusion differ from nuclear fission? Answer: here).
The Speed of Expectation
This new technology is destroying our patience and raising our expectations. I often get frustrated with ChatGPT when it gives the wrong answer to a research question. I end up typing in ALL CAPS when it doesn’t do what I ask. You know, because yelling at a computer always makes things work better. I often fail to appreciate the years and years that programmers spent teaching those AI platforms to think. It didn’t happen overnight.
The process of writing and re-writing this column six times involved long stretches of quiet contemplation. Sometimes words come easily and other times, well, they just don’t. But when our daily diet consists of endless quick dopamine hits of information and stimulation, anything that requires sustained attention can feel frustratingly slow (it did).
Traveling between New York and San Francisco in 1926 was arduous. Using the Lincoln Highway, the journey typically lasted around 19 days. But once the transcontinental railroad was completed that trip was reduced to three days. Our expectations were totally rewired to expect or demand a three-day trip.
Today we demand that an airplane traveling at 36,000 feet and 600 mph, stream a basketball game in real time, for free, with no buffering. Something that just a few years ago would have been preposterous to demand. Preposterous— like demanding 100% accuracy from a brand new AI research tool.
Faster communication. Faster feedback. Faster entertainment. Faster, faster, faster. But wisdom isn’t fast. Wisdom is slow. It develops through long, patient experiential living. Through wandering in the wasteland. Through watching outcomes unfold. Through the steady accumulation of experiences that force us to reconsider what we thought we understood.
Wisdom is a Practice, Not a Destination
The ancient Stoics treated wisdom not as an achievement but as a practice. Something you work at daily. Something that grows slowly through reflection, discipline, and the quiet resolve to act with justice, courage, and temperance.
This is why real wisdom almost always looks ordinary from the outside. It develops through routines that seem unimpressive in the moment: reading, reflecting, meditating, and discerning. All things that require time and investment.
The tension isn’t that we’ve stopped admiring wisdom—it’s that we’ve stopped admiring the road that leads to it. Wisdom still grows the same way it always has—through confusion, repetition, patience, and reflection, one slow season at a time.
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