Aging & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Addison

Youth, Addison suggests, is not morally superior so much as metabolically faster. “Young men soon give, and soon forget, affronts” captures a hot-blooded economy: insult is a quick currency, spent impulsively and then dismissed as yesterday’s heat. The line flatters youth with a kind of amnesty - not innocence, exactly, but a short attention span that keeps resentments from calcifying. The sting is that the same speed that makes young men volatile also makes them curiously unaccountable.

Then comes the turn: “old age is slow in both.” The symmetry is the point. Addison isn’t simply contrasting temperaments; he’s diagramming how time changes the physics of social life. Older people, he implies, ration conflict because the stakes feel higher and the energy cost is real. But once an offense lands, it lingers. Memory becomes an archive, not a stream. That slowness reads as prudence and as peril: fewer fights, longer feuds.

As a writer shaped by the essay culture of early 18th-century England - the coffeehouse public sphere, the cultivation of “polite” manners, the Protestant emphasis on self-command - Addison is doing moral journalism. He’s coaching a rising middle-class audience on managing reputation, anger, and sociability. The subtext is almost political: a stable society depends less on never taking offense than on having the ability to let it go. Youth provides that by accident; age must learn it on purpose.