Thoughts on wisdom

I’ve noticed that wisdom is often overlooked when it’s delivered in the wrong package. Comedy, satire, parables—these forms carry insight, but because they entertain, their deeper truths are easy to dismiss. A joke can highlight an uncomfortable reality, but if I’m laughing, I’m not reflecting. A parable can present a profound lesson, but once I understand it, I often forget it. The moment of realization is temporary. The lesson remains to be learned.

Today, our society commodifies wisdom. Historically, cultures revered the bearers of wisdom—elders, philosophers, shamans, jesters—because their insights emerged from genuine experience, sacrifice, and struggle. Wisdom wasn’t knowledge; it was embodied understanding woven into community life. Now, wisdom is packaged and sold as self-help books, motivational seminars, subscription services, and entertainment. This makes wisdom more accessible and simultaneously dilutes its power by detaching it from lived experience and meaningful sacrifice. Wisdom has become another product, easily consumed but rarely internalized.

Wisdom has to have a cost. I’ve come to see that it isn’t simply absorbed through exposure; it has to be reinforced through experience, through consequences.

I don’t internalize wisdom because I hear it; I internalize it because I live it.

Religions, traditions, and other disciplines try to solve this by giving artificial cost to wisdom. They are designed to make the lesson stick. By attaching it to ritual, sacrifice, and structure, they ensure that people don’t just hear wisdom but feel it. The cost makes it real. But with that cost comes control. What starts well-meaning becomes a way to enforce obedience. That which serves to preserve wisdom can also exploit it. The demand for sacrifice and obedience is used to consolidate power and benefit those who control it. The wisdom remains, but so does the weight of the structure built around it.

It makes me wonder how much of what we internalize is shaped not just by experience, but by the structures that enforce it. If wisdom requires cost to take root, then what happens when that cost is imposed rather than chosen? And if we are shaped by the conditions around us, how much of our own growth is truly ours to claim? I don’t exist separately from the conditions that shaped me, because there is no separation. Everything I do, think, and experience is part of the same process. My thoughts, my actions, even my resistance—they aren’t outside forces acting upon the world; they are the world. The struggle I feel isn’t something separate from me, something to be conquered—it is just as much a part of the movement as letting go. Everything flows together, whether I resist or accept.

I used to think that true wisdom or presence meant distancing myself from outside influence, as if clarity existed in some untouched, pure state. But that idea doesn’t hold up. Resistance isn’t something to be overcome; it’s part of the process itself. Strength doesn’t come from avoiding struggle but from engaging with it in a way that doesn’t break you. The balance isn’t about choosing between resistance or surrender—it’s about adaptation, about knowing when to push and when to move with the current.

I think back to a time I spent in New York, moving through the streets, the constant hum of the city pressing in from all sides. At first, it felt overwhelming—too much noise, too many people, an unrelenting current that never let up. But after a while, something shifted. I wasn’t trying to block it out anymore; I was moving with it. The people around me weren’t distracted or disconnected. They were part of it. They weren’t tuning out the city; they were integrating it. The same movement, the same sound, the same relentless energy that could overwhelm was also what made presence unavoidable. In a small town, walking down an empty street, it’s easy to drift into thought, to disappear into the mind. But in New York, awareness isn’t something you seek—it’s something you’re pulled into. Not in spite of it, but through it.

I think that the idea of letting go is often misunderstood. It isn’t an action, but a shift in perception. I don’t choose to let go in the same way I choose to lift an object. Instead, resistance fades when it is no longer reinforced. This isn’t something that can be forced. The moment I try to stop resisting, I’m still engaging in resistance. The process happens when the conditions allow it.

And resistance itself is part of the natural order. Just as movement and stillness coexist, so do struggle and acceptance. The idea that I must reach a state of complete peace or presence is misguided—I shift between resistance and flow, between presence and distraction. This isn’t failure; it’s simply how things unfold. I’ve been angry before, fully consumed by it, convinced that nothing else existed outside of that feeling. And yet, that same anger is now just a memory, detached from me, like a book on a shelf I haven’t read in years. At the time, it felt permanent. But it wasn’t. It never is.

Everything, no matter how intense, becomes memory. What is unbearable in the present will soon be something I recall rather than experience. This is true of pain, anger, joy—everything that defines a moment eventually exists only as a record. And yet, memory is unreliable. It reshapes itself over time, filtering, distorting, simplifying. If my identity is built on memory, and memory is fluid, then what does that say about identity itself?

This isn’t something mystical. It isn’t a question of transcending reality, but of understanding it. If experience is temporary and memory is malleable, then clinging to any state—whether presence or resistance, suffering or ease—ultimately has no lasting foundation. What matters isn’t eliminating resistance or holding onto clarity, but recognizing the movement between states.

I experience flashes of insight, but insight alone doesn’t create wisdom. I resist, but resistance isn’t separate from the flow of life. I seek presence, but presence isn’t a static achievement—it’s an ongoing process of engagement. Everything moves. Everything becomes memory. What matters isn’t holding on, nor letting go, but understanding.