There’s something I’ve been noticing lately about aging and how it plays tricks on us. Not the obvious things—the creaky knees, the way time accelerates—but something quieter and more dangerous: the slow, seductive pull toward certainty.
When we’re young, we don’t know enough to have strong opinions about most things. We’re still learning, still bumping into the world with genuine surprise. Someone older says something contradictory to what we believed last week, and we think, “Oh, interesting.” We revise. We stay open.
But somewhere along the way, we accumulate enough experience that we start to confuse familiarity with understanding. We’ve seen a few relationships fall apart the same way, so we think we understand relationships. We’ve worked in the same industry for twenty years, so we think we understand work. And then—this is the tricky part—we stop asking questions. We start explaining instead.
I catch myself doing this and it startles me every time. There I am, mid-sentence, dispensing wisdom about something I actually know very little about, and I realize I’ve stopped being curious. I’ve become a monument to my own experience instead of a human being still learning.
The stakes feel higher now, too. When you’re young, being wrong is just information. But at a certain age, being wrong feels like evidence that you’re losing it, fading, becoming irrelevant. So we cling harder to what we think we know. We become more defensive. Less playful.
The thing is, the people I know who seem most alive, most genuinely interested in the world, are the ones who’ve somehow managed to stay surprised. They still ask “why?” and “how do you know?” They change their minds about things. They admit confusion without shame. They’re willing to sound stupid in service of actually understanding something.
That’s not the natural path, I don’t think. The natural path is toward calcification, toward the comfort of established positions. You have to actively resist it. You have to choose, over and over again, to stay like a beginner—to hold your convictions lightly enough that new information can actually land.
I don’t have this figured out, not even close. I still find myself locked into patterns and certainties that probably don’t serve me. But I’m thinking about it more now, watching for the moment when explanation replaces genuine curiosity. Because I’d rather be confused and alive than sure and slowly turning to stone.
What if staying relevant isn’t about staying young, but about staying genuinely interested in the people and the world around you?