Ironically, true knowledge works in reverse. When you first enter adulthood in your early twenties, you are bursting with confidence and there is really nothing that you don’t know or can’t figure out by yourself. And then over time–as you gradually grow older and see more and more years receding in your life’s rear-view mirror and theoretically acquire greater and greater “wisdom”–you gradually begin to lose some of that transcendent earlier confidence, piece by piece, as you begin to discover how little you really know. And then by the time you reach late middle age or early old age, you realize gray is the primary color that suffuses almost every solution to a problem and subjectivity unerringly reigns supreme over objectivity in a referendum that isn’t particularly close. True wisdom, you climactically come to recognize, represents the complete opposite of society’s conventional definition and more closely approximates ignorance. True wisdom is coming to terms with how little you actually know relative to this big world we live in and, more importantly, humbly accepting the infinite number of things you will be shielded from learning in just one lifetime.
Fred's Soapbox 