The answer, usually, is no. Wisdom is a quality that defies easy definition but psychologists who study aging have found that some of its components – judgment, emotional regulation – do improve with age in most people, consciously or not. Of course there is a subset of people out there who are sitting in their rocking chairs, spewing hate, but my guess is that these people weren’t very pleasant to begin with, … The reality is that the data are fairly convincing that people as they get older become more positive and less self-absorbed.
