[carlosjobim]

Why not? Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age. Getting those depends on doing it, not just waiting on time passing by. I'm much older than the article author, but it would be foolish of me to think that I couldn't learn things from 20 year olds – including important and profound teachings and advice.

[the_af]

I would say experience is correlated with age. You need to live to gain experience. Someone in their 20s simply hasn't lived long enough to be giving life lessons.

(Give or take some extraordinary exceptions of people who accumulate a lot of hard-earned experience very early in their lives; but the general rule applies).

[carlosjobim]

You need to do things to gain experience. Doing time is not enough. A 20 year old can in many cases have done and experienced much more already in life than some 40 year olds. The large majority of today's mass population have identical lives that are staked out for them from the cradle to the grave, and it is true that most only gain experience by accidents which accumulate over the years. But many people live real lives already from a young age, and have the experience which that gives.

[the_af]

The implication goes the other way: someone who has done a lot of things and learned many lessons has lived a longer time. Not that people who have lived longer necessarily drew valuable lessons.

It's less likely that a 20 year old has done as many things, faced as many challenges, and drawn as many lessons, as someone who doubles them in age. They simply haven't lived long enough to be able to tell if their lessons validate or generalize well.

Even the perspective of someone who has most of their life ahead vs someone who has a few decades more is wildly different. Someone with most of their lives ahead can course-correct more easily. Someone who hasn't had their mid-life crisis yet, etc, etc -- you get the idea.

[carlosjobim]

What kind of knowledge can you get from old age that you cannot get from experience?

[the_af]

Didn't I address this in my first paragraph?

How can you get enough experience without living long enough to accrue said experience? How can your perspective on things change if not enough time passed for perspective changes?

To get back to your initial claim:

> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.

This is what I disagree with. Experience and maturity are very dependent on age. While some people have a lot of experience and maturity early on, this is rare.

Also, some people don't get wiser with age, but that's a different proposition. I'm not claiming old people are necessarily wise.

[carlosjobim]

What you're arguing is that they are correlated with age, not dependent. If they are dependent on age, then I have to ask what kind of knowledge you can get from old age which you cannot get from experience?

[hadlock]

There's not a lot of 20 year olds who have made a single mistake that rolled back multiple years of work, almost instantly. When that happens to you for the first time, it is very humbling; and may take months or years to understand and learn from what happened. We all have things to learn from others, but proportionally there are very few self help authors under the age of 40.

[michaelcampbell]

> Experience and maturity is not very dependent on age.

Mostly only in edge cases.