Whenever people attempt to describe wisdom they jump to techniques, spiritual paths, or whatever manifestations of wisdom they know of, which gives rise to non-explanations such as "wisdom is about being a good Buddhist", or being a good Christian, or being a good meditator or whatnot. These do not answer the question at its heart because they merely point your attention to the doctrines of Buddhism, or Christianity, or various techniques or beliefs, but what exactly makes those practices valuable?
It is clear that not everyone lives skilfully. We can harm those around us and ourselves, not out of any genuine tradeoff of conflict—what the best tragedies are made of—but simply because we are confused, hurt and do not know how to deal with our problems very well. As a result, "wisdom" is an attempt to point to what "living well" looks like.
The problem which many people have observed over the past millenia is that if you rigidly codify what "living well" is supposed to look like, you do not create loving people and harmonious collectives, but rather idolatry, the worship of fixed forms, whether they are ideas, images, or in our times, models of Reality and objects.
From this important caveat, I can see many isolated aspects of wisdom, but it is difficult for me to articulate what exactly is at its core. I would say for instance that some important aspects of wisdom include:
§1. A deep commitment to not delude yourself, realizing that most people believe they understand Reality, the society they live in, and themselves, but that nothing could be further the truth. We all live in a sort of echo chamber which tends to affirm what we believe in for a while, especially in our times, and as such, nothing can be taken for granted.
We might not have access to the Ultimate Truth(TM), but we can certainly tell when we are bullshitting ourselves when we spend time in silence and reflect on what is important. A good life is not merely one which "doesn't have bad", which probably is an unrealistic goal to have anyway, but it is a good start to be able to spot lies, narratives, assumptions, heuristics and facts, even if one does not believe in hard truths. 1
§2. The understanding of what is important and what is not. After all, what could be more important than importance itself? The fools, the opposite of wise people, have no sense of priority whatsoever. They see the new popular thing which everyone goes for and feel compelled to go for it as well, not because it aligns with any of their values or principles, but simply out of the momentum of the crowd. They are not internally grounded, they are like leaves blown by the constantly changing winds of their culture.
The fools also have no sense of limits and their own mortality, of which they are in constant denial of. This is a major reason for why their priorities are so chaotic, because they implicitly think they will live forever, and are consistently surprised when death knocks at their door. "Can you believe he died! What a surprise!"
This is why being in touch with one's death is a common aspect of many spiritual practices—one of the reasons why occultism is so often associated with skulls and other spooky stuff is that occultists are prompted to keep a reminder of their own death—because it is amazingly clarifying as to what matters and what doesn't. Small worries and inconveniences are immediately washed away when you get in touch with your own death.
§3. The reason why the fool does not keep death in his awareness is because fundamentally he is not interested in Reality. He wants to live forever, and in general have things work out for him, even if it means he has to argue with Reality instead of changing himself. He, as a finite self, wants Reality to obey his whims, which doesn't work of course, which compels him to get more angry, more in denial, which can keep him in a loop until his very death.
The wise knows from first hand that trying to argue with Reality is pointless, and as such prioritizes changing herself instead of the typical denying-complaining-arguing of the fool. There is something very pragmatic about wisdom, because fighting against Reality is a waste of time and energy, but it is not merely pragmatic, because utilitarianism is essentially egoic if it is not aligned with Reality.
The reason why living a life of egotism is a bad idea is not because of this or that moral concept which have been laid over time, but simply because it makes you miserable, disconnected from others around you, and to an important extent the Universe you are a part of. Separation is painful and is experienced in many ways, from the addiction one cannot walk away from, the constant booooredom of the people flooded with distractions, the crippling anxiety and loneliness of modern people, and even the seemingly random ails which afflict one's body. You can only ignore Reality for so long before it comes knocking at your door, which is why wisdom is deeply concerned with aligning with that Reality instead of fighting against it, which includes the fight against yourself.
§4. I wanted to start this list by saying that wisdom is the ability to foresee and not fall into traps. But what are traps exactly? I would describe them as patterns of attention, behavior, thoughts and emotions which keep you stuck in a place which isn't aligned with yourself or Reality.
We have for instance the trap of dogma, of having one's life be dictated by a culture which has become taken for granted—a trap which still very much exists to this day. Or we have the seemingly opposite trap of individualism, which creates the atomization of modern people. There is the trap of constant distraction, or of constant busy-ness, the trap of investing your entire life into something too narrow, or the one of never committing to anything, on and on.
As our environments become more complex and provide us with more opportunities, we also see that there are not only far more traps lying around us, but that they are also far more subtle—in that they work "below" our perception—but that they also come equipped with a sort of intelligence, whether it is the intelligence of other people who benefit from us falling into those traps, or our own ego which maintains itself through blindness and numbness.
It's difficult to articulate what wisdom is, but it's much easier to appreciate it when you see the traps that it avoids. Of course wisdom is not merely about avoiding traps, because in being paranoid about those, one would stop living out of fear, which is perhaps the biggest trap of all. Just as the ability to prioritize is key in life, the ability to see which traps are life-destabilizing and which ones are mere inconveniences is important to live fully, because mistakes are not inherently problematic, only the ones we cannot recover easily from are.
§5. And ultimately, wisdom is about living, as stupid as it sounds. First of all, because being is the deepest form of knowing something. It is one thing to know, it is another to understand, but it is yet another thing to embody a lesson, which is to say, metabolizing it in one's life. This is why life experience is so crucial, because knowledge has an ephemereal quality, which is why it is so easy to acquire and share, but this also means that the lessons aren't anywhere near as visceral as when you experience them first-hand. To know about jealousy or insecurity is one thing, but to feel it burning in your belly and clenching your heart is something else entirely.
But of course, living is so important because it is all there is, fundamentally. There is no summary to life, which is why I believe that there isn't a neat way to condense what wisdom is. Whereas narrow forms of intelligence can be measured with things analogous to IQ tests, I don't think that anything similar could measure wisdom besides your entire life. Wisdom can be seen as the ability to deal with your life as a whole, which is not something which can be measured in a closed-off environment such as a test or an institution. 2
We can certainly gesture at what it is, and not all gestures are equally vivid, accurate and helpful, but ultimately we are here to live. This is also why I believe that fiction can be far more truthful to life than non-fiction, even if the latter is factual and the former invented. In fiction, we are interested in specific characters, living in a specific place and setting, who go through specific events which shape them in specific ways. Even if none of them are real, the quality that the story expresses can be far deeper than what we experience in "real" life, which is burdened by power structures and interfaces which shape our interactions with one another and the world at large. Whereas being an employee in a corporate job amounts to wearing a mask and doing things you aren't interested in, the honesty of characters such as the Underground Man is so direct that they feel more alive than "real life" people.
Saying that wisdom is about "living well" is a decent gesture, but I think I would focus moreso on the living fully aspect. Self-help writers and readers are also concerned with "living well", but there is an incredibly hollow ring to how they interpret it, as if they were looking at themselves as being machines which need to be constantly tuned and optimized to achieve better results. As such, they tend to be very dull, almost tedious, which is reflected in their speech which feels as dry as an academic paper, and their almost non-existent life experience.
The truly wise people on the other hand might have some beautiful things to say about life, but much deeper than that is the fact that they are life, which is why we recognize their greatness through their speech, their demeanor, their gaze and their physiognomy. It is almost blasphemous these days to suggest that such aspects could be the sign of greatness—and in many ways even the idea of greatness, the genius, can be seen as an insult—because in our disembodied world, it is seen as a virtue to not focus on appearances but instead focus on ideas.
But whereas ideas are easy to acquire and regurgitate, real character can only be grown through consciously living, which inevitably shapes the rest of your life, including your face, posture, speech and gaze. These are important signals because first of all, they are hard to fake 3, but more importantly because they reflect a much deeper inner world underneath. People who can hold soft attention throughout their day and love the people and things around them have an aura that, let's say, the porn addict, social media scroller, self-help junkie, gym rat or workaholic simply do not have.
Unfortunately, our world does not reward wisdom, conscious living, because it is not interested in consciousness or even Reality for that matter. This is why people who become comfortable in our world also become blind to genuine quality, because not only is it rare, but it becomes more bearable to push real quality away from perception, pretend it doesn't exist, so that the cyphers that surround them feel more tolerable, more "real".
1 Facts are not truths because they are isolated aspects of Reality we gather through our mind, and in practice, we do not care about facts but how they can be embedded in narratives used to make sense of reality. To expand on the first point, "the sky is blue" is a fact provided we have a rough sense of what is sky and what is blue, but what exactly gives us our sense of "blue"? It is not purely our mind, which only deals in relations, which is why defining "blue" in terms of wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum is utterly unsatisfying. We experience "blueness" and then we start building concepts out of those. Truth must necessarily be concerned with conscious experience primarily, because it is the basis of all of our mind-concepts.
2 School measures your competence at various tasks through entirely fabricated tests and curriculums, because this guarantees a certain control over variables. It's difficult to evaluate your ability to problem-solve in real life because different people lead such different lives that their problems are unlikely to ever be similar. Someone could fail because of a lack of technical skill, another because of emotional difficulties, another because of unaddressed social problems which bleed into their work, etc.
Moreover, what determines whether something is addressed "well" depends on the way it fits into your entire life. If I am bad at programming, but have no interest whatsoever in it and can earn a living from other tasks, and am happy in my life, then does it really matter how good I am at solving programming problems?
This is why metrics always have a way of homogenizing and decontextualizing, because that is essentially what they are for!
3 You might straighten yourself for a bit, but it is impossible to do it over an entire day.
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Essayworthy Virtue Maturity Harmony Unfolding Spirituality
2025-08-29