Sunday, June 16, 2024

How Age Matters

In practically every conversation I have with my contemporaries, the issue of age comes up. It’s unavoidable. — the lines on our faces, the color of our hair (assuming we still have some) and the shuffle in our step won’t let us forget about it.

But most elderly people I know don’t complain about their age; time has brought its benefits, including more free time, a relaxed pace and a better perspective on the past.

We can more easily let go of the mistakes and grudges of the past and there seems little point in holding on to resentments. I never hear any of my friends talk about wanting revenge, for example.

These are among the reasons it is especially strange for people of our vintage to see how the age of the major party presidential candidates is discussed as if there is some sort of equivalency between the two of them. Biological age is one thing but here I am talking about emotional age.

Biden may have only a couple calendar years on Trump but he is far more mature emotionally. As Jill Biden says, he makes a good president “not in spite of his age but because of it.” Along with Biden’s age comes emotional intelligence and wisdom. 

By contrast, consider Trump.  Psychology Today published an in-depth psychological  assessment of Trump back in 2017 that remains fundamentally true today. It concluded that his emotional age at that point as essentially that of a four-year-old, to wit:

“The core Trump dissonance is that he’s an elderly man who possesses the outward appearance and trappings of adulthood—and who occupies the public role we most strongly associate with adulthood—but who is on the inside predominantly infantile.

“(H)e exhibits a characteristic inability to see much beyond his own ego preoccupations. He appears to have no real friendships, habitually belittles those he sees as weak while denying any weakness of his own, and is perennially insecure, desperate to bolster his ratings, numbers, and stats by bending the facts to assuage his fears; he has little demonstrated capacity to joyfully laugh at himself (or laugh at all), and has professed to being uninterested in self-reflection and insight; the only problem he seems genuinely interested in (and truly capable of) solving is the chronic threat of his own waning relevance, and his guiding moral principle is that whatever works to make him ‘win’ is the right thing to do.

“In truth, we don’t know what about Trump’s life experience has prevented him from achieving maturity. Yet that developmental failure appears—ironically or tragically, depending on your sensibilities—to be at the core of both his unique attraction and the singular danger he poses.”

Again, at the time of the article, Trump’s emotional age was reckoned to be roughly four.

And I reckon he’s regressed since then.

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