Why does growing become harder in adulthood?

8.1 Why doesn't getting older automatically deepen our understanding?

Age has one wonderfully convenient feature: it increases automatically. No application, no exam, no annual report on improvements in your understanding. When the time comes, the number goes up. Your official documents are very diligent about this. Understanding offers no equivalent service. Being 40 does not mean every important judgment has caught up to 40. Some answers may remain at 30, 25, or earlier: a remark heard in childhood, a deep hurt in youth, a particularly successful choice at one stage of life. They can keep working for years. Age records elapsed time, not the number of updates to a person's recognition system. We readily put two things together: living longer and seeing more clearly. They often occur together, but they are not the same thing.

Experience accumulates; understanding does not automatically follow

Living longer brings more experiences: work, relationships, successes, failures. They have value. Yet something having happened does not mean it changed us. Someone may work in the same field for years, becoming more proficient, judging faster, and handling procedures more smoothly, while the basic way they see their industry, clients, and environment remains untouched. Another person may experience no more events, but periodically use new outcomes to ask what they got right, what no longer holds, and what they had missed. Years later, the difference is more than the number of stories they can tell. They understand differently. Experiences accumulate, but what we learn from them does not automatically improve. An event happened; growth asks a further question: What did it change? If nothing changed, we may simply have acquired another story.

I have known two kinds of people with 10 years in sales. One quickly tells a new client, “I know this situation,” and repeatedly applies what worked before. The other also draws on experience, but whenever an outcome differs markedly from expectations, looks back: What was different this time? Years later, both can say they have worked for 10 years. One may simply have become increasingly fluent in the answers from year one. The other's answers may have been revised many times by reality. The time is equal; the number of updates may be entirely different.