Title: The Wisdom of the Aged - A new Perspective of Elderly People
Headings: The Wisdom of the Aged
The Wisdom of the Aged
A Cultural Phenomenon
VIDEO: The Wisdom of the Aged
The Elderly Seen Across Cultures
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Content: Many cultures celebrate aging and place high value to the elderly, which is not the case of Western cultures because youth is fetishized and physical signs of human aging tend to be regarded with distaste. The opposite happens in Greece, where the cultural stigma around aging and death is absent from their culture. Instead, old age is honored and celebrated, and elders are an integral part of the family as a whole. It has been proven that wisdom and old age go hand in hand, and it has been scientifically documented that wisdom comes from a balance of activity in brain regions, with life experience. Younger people benefit a lot from learning from the elders, and caring for them can be an enriching experience when seen from the perspective of other cultures. Dr. Monika Ardelt, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Florida, have begun to study whether older really is wiser. In surveys of people in nursing homes and hospices, she found out that wisdom was positively related to their sense of well-being, even after the researchers controlled for factors like physical health, financial status and social engagement. The frailer or closer to death people became, the greater the role wisdom played in their feelings of well-being. Ancient Romans made use of their elderly and had faith in their wisdom and experience, quoting Cicero: “ For there is assuredly nothing dearer to a man than wisdom, and though age takes away all else, it undoubtedly brings us that. “