How we see the world as we get older
I was reading a book by Wilhelm Röpke the other day. Röpke was a German economist and is best known as one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. His socioeconomic model combines a free-market capitalist economic system alongside social policies and enough regulation to establish both fair competition within the market and generally a welfare state.
Röpke's thinking was the bedrock for the German Wirtschaftswunder after World War II.
So, Röpke could have been a happy man when he wrote his last major work in 1958 (he died in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1966, aged 66). Germany's social market economy was more or less well-established, and prosperity increased with each passing year.
But his book “Jenseits von Angebot und Nachfrage” (“Beyond supply and demand”) is anything but optimistic. “Röpke castigates the social trend towards materialism and secularism,” the excellent economist and journalist Karen Horn wrote some years ago. Röpke accused the Germans of subjecting everything they did to economic calculations and losing the spiritual source of values. And since the social market economy is based on moral values, this market economy was in danger, according to Röpke's thinking.
More than 60 years later, Germany's social market economy still exists. People here live in greater prosperity than ever before.
Röpke was wrong in his pessimism.
Why did he think like that? Did his pessimism have anything to do with his age? Do people become more pessimistic as they age?
When reading economic literature, I sometimes have this impression. That the work becomes more pessimistic with the age of the author. It's my impression.
If that's true, why could that be?
Three reasons would explain such a development:
- (Wom) Man's view of the world is formed in their youth, perhaps up to the end of their third decade. Then the conceptions of the world are consolidated. But the world keeps turning. Societies and views change. And sometimes the changing world doesn't match the opinions one has developed years ago (here is a very recent prominent example). The world then seems out of joint, and pessimism about the future grows.
- The individual experience often becomes more negative with age. We get sick more often; we become aware of the limited lifespan. Since we find it difficult to separate the individual perspective from that of society, we might tend to have a more negative attitude towards society when we are older.
- We tend to glorify the past. Everything was better in the good old days. This is often a false but necessary glorification. Because humans are survivors. We flatter ourselves, making ourselves bigger and more beautiful than we are. Life is better this way. That's why we also glorify the past. Every time we retell it, it becomes a little more beautiful. As a result, the further behind it is, the better it is. Childhood was more carefree, holidays sunnier, and there was more to buy for the same money. There is a word for this way of thinking: Retromania.
So there are reasons why people become more pessimistic as they age. Of course, this is not compelling. There is a counterbalance: life experience. It enables us to deal better with present-day situations so that our well-being improves.
For example, when we have to decide about whether or not to accept a new job. When we are older, we will make this decision with a lot of experiences of the past. Simply because we have experienced the situation before. We often make better decisions as a result. And we also may experience these decisions more relaxed as we get older. Because experience teaches us that no matter how we decide, the world will not end - it didn't happen in the past; it won't be today.
Get happy: It's not to say that we generally become more pessimistic as we get older. And by the way: Also in general, pessimism is not bad. “There is a lot of power in pessimism,” the Philosopher Alain de Botton has written. Pessimism makes us change things (so it doesn't get that bad). And pessimism helps us to have a more relaxed view of the world, de Botton argues. Here is why. Optimists have high expectations for the future. If the expectations don’t meet, people may get disappointed. De Botton: “We would be better off if a pessimistic attitude to life dampened inflated expectations and hopes in the first place and we adopted this attitude into our everyday lives.”
So, pessimism can lower expectations. Maybe that's a pretty good attitude towards ageing. Don't become undemanding, but become more mindful and content with what life realistically offers! If I understood Röpke correctly, he would have liked that idea too.
Onwards,
Johannes Eber