Monday, May 19, 2014

At what age do we acquire wisdom?

On page 5 of the Weekend FT one finds the obituary of Stephen Sutton (1994-2014) who achieved fame in the UK by dying gracefully and publically at age 19. His Facebook and Twitter campaign raised £2.6 mn. (For what? The article does not say.) He is quoted as telling a group of wealth managers: "I do not know how long I've got left to live, but one of the reasons for that is because I haven't asked. That's because I don't see the point of measuring life in terms of time any more. I would rather measure it in terms of what I've actually achieved." Michel de Montaigne wrote something similar at a fairly young age, in his thirties: “Wherever your life ends, it is all there. The advantage of living is not measured by length, but by use; some men have lived long, and lived little; attend to it while you are in it. It lies in your will, not in the number of years, for you to have lived enough.”

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