Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Addison is warning against a particular kind of self-sabotage: the cultivated pose of being too serious, too refined, too "knowing" to laugh. The line lands because it frames wisdom not as an achievement but as a risk factor. Get "too wise" and you may start treating laughter as beneath you - a childish reflex, a social indulgence, evidence you haven't fully metabolized the bleakness of reality. Addison flips that logic. If laughter is one of life's great pleasures, then outgrowing it isn't maturity; it's a loss.

The intent is quietly polemical. As a key voice of early 18th-century English periodical culture (The Spectator), Addison wrote for an ascendant polite public trying to manage manners, taste, and status. In that world, "wit" was currency, but so was restraint; the wrong kind of mirth could mark you as vulgar. His sentence threads the needle: it defends laughter while implying a hierarchy of laughter worth having. Not drunken guffawing, but a humane, social intelligence that keeps ego from hardening into superiority.

The subtext is a critique of performative intellect. The person who refuses to laugh often isn't deeper; they're defending an identity - the enlightened skeptic, the disenchanted adult. Addison suggests real wisdom includes the capacity for delight and the humility to be moved. Laughter becomes a moral barometer: if your brilliance costs you joy, your brilliance is suspect.