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, quiet reflection.
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 don’t. That’s just how it works. In comparison, 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. The speed of this new technology is destroying our patience and raising our expectations. Anything that requires sustained attention can feel frustratingly slow.
Things that once took time to digest can now be consumed 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 movie is one thing. But real wisdom cannot be reduced to nine minutes, no matter how good technology gets. Real learning requires confusion and repetition. For example, in surgical training doctors are trained to see one, do one, teach one. Meaning that the best way to learn is to see, do, and teach, with each providing its own learning advantage. Not sure about you, but I don’t want my surgeon watching a nine-minute YouTube video instead of seeing, doing and teaching a procedure a few thousand times.
Traveling between New York and San Francisco 100 years ago was arduous. Using the Lincoln Highway, the journey typically lasted around 19 days by automobile. But once the transcontinental railroad was completed that trip was reduced to three days. Our expectations were rewired overnight. 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. Faster communication. Faster feedback. Faster entertainment. Faster, faster, faster. But wisdom isn’t fast. Wisdom is slow. It develops through long, patient experiential living. By wandering through the wasteland. By watching outcomes unfold. By accumulating life experiences that force us to reconsider what we thought we understood.
Ironically, we all respect wisdom in others. But for ourselves we prefer the summary. We want the important life lesson, but we want it to be distilled into a tweet, an Instagram Reel or a quick TikTok video. Preferably one that can be digested before the traffic light turns green. As if modern wisdom has a shortcut, a CliffsNotes or Happy Meal version. But wisdom has never worked that way. Wisdom is 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.
The ancient Stoics treated wisdom not as an achievement but as 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, praying, 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.
I want to hear from you. Where do you find wisdom today? Email me at [email protected] I promise you’ll hear back from me cause, you know, I’m a real person.
