The Daily Stoic

The old joke--which dates back to the 1870s--is that if you’re not a liberal when you’re young you have no heart, but if you’re still a liberal when you’re older, you have no brain. Now we can put any partisan beliefs aside and see how this is at least partly true. When you’re young, it’s easy to believe in the inherent goodness of the world because you haven’t actually experienced any of it yet. You are naive. It’s easy to think that everything should be very simple and always fair in that phase of your life. But as you get older, you realize that the world is more complicated, and in fact that there is often a lot of wisdom and necessity in the mas morium--the way of your elders. A settling into a kind of conservatism as you age and experience life is reasonable and probably smart. However, it’s should be obvious that remark is also totally and completely wrong. Yes, it’s easy to believe in ideals when you are young, and yes it’s harder to maintain that idealism when you are older, but that is sort of the p