Aging & Wisdom Quote by Logan P. Smith

Logan Pearsall Smith sketches a generational divide with the cool compression of an aphorist: certainty as a late-life luxury, confusion as youth’s default weather. The line works because it refuses the sentimental script that paints youth as radiant possibility and age as decline. Instead, Smith flips the moral lighting. The “old” aren’t wise in a lofty sense; they’re simply done negotiating with themselves. Want becomes narrower, sharper, more practicable. It’s not enlightenment so much as triage.

“Young” land in a harsher register: not merely uncertain, but “sad and bewildered.” That pairing is surgical. Bewilderment is cognitive overload; sadness is the emotional tax of having too many doors and no map. Smith’s subtext is that modern life (even in his early 20th-century milieu of shifting class structures, industrial pace, and fraying certainties) manufactures choice faster than it manufactures meaning. Youth are not failing; they are responding normally to an environment that demands self-invention without supplying stable templates.

There’s also a sly, faintly cynical implication about the old: knowing what you want might come from having fewer options, fewer illusions, and less time. Desire becomes coherent when the future shrinks. The quote’s sting is its suggestion that clarity isn’t a triumph of character so much as a byproduct of constraint. Read now, in an era of infinite feeds and delayed adulthood, it still lands: bewilderment isn’t a phase to outgrow; it’s the price of living in a culture that keeps multiplying selves.