Aging & Wisdom Quote by Daniel Goleman

A comforting idea dressed up as observation: that time itself quietly upgrades our emotional software. Coming from Daniel Goleman, the journalist-turned-guru who helped brand "emotional intelligence" as a mainstream virtue, the line isn’t just descriptive; it’s normative. It reassures readers that maturity is not only about achievements or status but about becoming easier to live with. That’s a powerful cultural offer in an era where adult life often looks like prolonged adolescence with better credit.

The specific intent is to naturalize emotional intelligence as developmental, not elitist. If EI grows with age, then it’s accessible, improvable, and socially desirable - a trait you can cultivate rather than a personality lottery you either win or lose. It also quietly shifts the moral baseline: with age comes responsibility for your impact. If you’re still emotionally clumsy at 45, the subtext suggests you’ve missed assignments life keeps handing out.

The phrase "tend to" does heavy lifting. It inoculates against obvious counterexamples (plenty of older people are meaner, more rigid, or simply more practiced at their own defenses) while preserving the optimism that practice, feedback, and consequences shape us. Goleman’s larger context matters: the 1990s workplace and self-help ecosystems were hungry for traits that sounded scientific but felt human - empathy, self-control, social skill - as correctives to IQ worship and corporate brutality. This sentence works because it flatters the reader’s future self while implying a gentle threat: grow up, or you’ll be the one out of step with the social world that increasingly rewards emotional competence.