The cultural framing of late-life compassion tends to attribute it to a particular kind of internal softening. The older person, in this framing, has become gentler. They have, by some combination of mellowing and wisdom, lost the sharpness that characterized their earlier years. The compassion that they now display is, by this reading, the visible feature of a personality that has, in some general sense, softened with age.
This framing is, on close examination, not quite accurate. The older people who are visibly more compassionate than they used to be have not, in most cases, softened in any general way. They have, more accurately, accumulated enough decades of being judgmental about things that did not, on examination, deserve their energy to finally arrive at a particular structural understanding. The understanding is that some of what looks like other people’s bad behavior may be shaped by private suffering they have not been told about. The compassion that follows from this understanding is not a softening. It is, more accurately, a recalibration of how the older person interprets the behavior of the people around them, based on accumulated evidence about what tends to be underneath such behavior when one eventually finds out.
What the older person has actually accumulated
It is worth being precise about what kind of evidence accumulates across decades to produce this recalibration, because the recalibration does not happen abstractly. It happens through a particular kind of repeated experience that, by the seventh or eighth decade, has built up enough instances to constitute a reliable pattern.
The pattern involves, in most cases, the following experience. The older person, at some earlier point in their life, encountered another person whose behavior they found objectionable. The colleague who was being unreasonable. The friend who was being cold. The neighbor who was being difficult. The relative who was, by every external measure, behaving badly. The older person, in the original moment, formed a judgment about the behavior. The judgment was, at the time, the natural response to the behavior as it appeared.
What happened next, in many of these cases, was that the older person eventually learned, by some later channel, what had been actually going on in the other person’s life at the time of the objectionable behavior. The colleague had been dealing with a sick child. The friend had been quietly going through a divorce nobody had been told about. The neighbor had been struggling with a financial situation that the wider neighborhood had no access to. The relative had been, on close examination, going through a serious low period that nobody had fully registered at the time. The information arrived, in most cases, years after the original judgment had been formed. The information rendered the original judgment, in some real way, inaccurate.
The older person, by the time they have reached their late sixties or seventies, has accumulated dozens of these episodes. Each episode follows roughly the same structure. A behavior was encountered. A judgment was formed. The actual context was eventually learned. The judgment, in light of the context, turned out to have been miscalibrated. The pattern, repeated dozens of times across decades, eventually produces, in the older person’s apparatus, a particular kind of structural caution about the original step of judgment-formation. The caution is not, in itself, softness. The caution is, more accurately, the rational response of a system that has, by accumulated evidence, learned that its initial readings of other people’s behavior have, in most cases, been operating on incomplete information.
The structural recalibration this produces
The recalibration that follows is not, in any romantic sense, the development of unconditional compassion. The older person is not, in most cases, suddenly capable of finding every behavior charitable in real time. The recalibration is, more modestly, the small ongoing internal habit of withholding the original judgment slightly longer than the apparatus used to withhold it. The withholding is not, in itself, dramatic. The withholding produces, however, a small window in which the apparatus, instead of immediately classifying the behavior as bad, asks a particular question. The question is some version of: “what would the behavior I am currently observing look like if I knew the person was, in fact, in private suffering I have not yet been told about?”
The question is, in most cases, the structural pivot. The asking of the question produces, by long internal practice, a tentative answer. The tentative answer is, in many cases, an alternative interpretation of the behavior that the original judgment had not been considering. The alternative interpretation may not be correct. The alternative interpretation is, however, available, where in earlier decades it was not. The availability of the alternative is what most of late-life compassion structurally consists of.
This is, on examination, consistent with what the wider research literature has found. A longitudinal study following six samples of human development found that empathy increases with age, particularly after forty, and that the increase is not, in most cases, attributable to any simple softening of personality. The increase is, more accurately, associated with accumulated life experience and the changes in motivation and goals that come with it. The older person is, in some real way, operating from a different evidence base than the younger version of themselves was. The different evidence base produces different default interpretations of the same behaviors.
Why this is not, in itself, virtue
I want to be careful not to overstate the moral content of what I am describing. The recalibration the older person has performed is not, in any clean sense, the result of having become a better person. The recalibration is, more accurately, the structural result of having spent enough years operating with miscalibrated judgments to have eventually noticed that the miscalibration was systematic.
This is, in some ways, deflationary about the compassion the older person now displays. The compassion is real. The compassion is also, on close examination, less a feature of the older person’s character than a feature of their information set. The older person knows things, by accumulated experience, that the younger version of themselves did not know. The knowing is what produces the apparent softness. The softness is not, in any deep sense, internal. The softness is, more accurately, the visible feature of operating with a more complete evidence base about what tends to be true of the people one is observing.
This framing is, in some real way, more useful than the framing that classifies late-life compassion as a kind of spiritual achievement. The spiritual-achievement framing tends to suggest that the compassion is only available to those who have done particular kinds of internal work. The accumulated-evidence framing suggests, more modestly, that the compassion is available to anyone who is willing to take seriously the fact that most of the other people they are encountering are, in some statistical sense, currently dealing with something that is not, on the surface, visible. The taking-seriously does not require any particular spiritual achievement. The taking-seriously requires only the willingness to update one’s interpretive defaults in light of the accumulated evidence that most adults are, at most given moments, carrying some private weight that they have not, by the conventions of adult life, found a way to share.
What can be learned from this, before reaching late life
The implication of this framing is, on examination, encouraging for adults who are not yet in their seventies. The recalibration that produces late-life compassion does not, in most cases, require waiting for late life to occur. The recalibration is available, more modestly, to anyone who is willing to take seriously the possibility that some difficult behavior is operating in a context the observer does not have access to.
The taking-seriously is, on close examination, a small piece of internal discipline that can be practiced at any age. The practice involves, when one observes a behavior that one is about to judge negatively, the deliberate pause in which one asks the question the older person has, by long accumulated evidence, learned to ask automatically. The question is what the behavior would look like if the person performing it were, in fact, in some form of private suffering that the observer had not been told about. The asking of the question does not require knowing the answer. The asking, by itself, produces the small window in which an alternative interpretation can be considered. The consideration is, in some real way, what compassion structurally is.
What the older person has, that the younger version does not yet have, is the accumulated evidence that the question is, in most cases, worth asking. The younger version is still gathering the evidence. The younger version is, accordingly, still operating on more confident defaults. The defaults will, by accumulated evidence, eventually soften. The softening can also, more deliberately, be hastened, by anyone willing to start asking the question before they have, on their own, accumulated the dozens of episodes that would otherwise produce the recalibration in due course.
The compassion is not, in this framing, the achievement of a special kind of person. The compassion is, more accurately, the structural result of an information set that includes the possibility that other people’s private suffering may be part of a context the surface appearance does not reveal. The older person knows this by accumulated evidence. The younger person can know it by taking seriously what the older person has learned. The knowing produces the compassion. The compassion is, accordingly, available earlier than the cultural register tends to suggest. The only thing required is the willingness to update one’s defaults in light of what most adults are, in most cases, actually carrying. The willingness is, on close examination, what most of the visible kindness in late life is, in fact, structurally built on top of.
