Take a seat.
More than sixty years ago, a professor addressing a first-year psychology class of some three hundred students made an observation that has stayed with me ever since. He was speaking about the work of Erik Erikson — the developmental psychologist whose research into the stages of human life remains among the most influential in the field.
Almost in passing, he remarked that people past seventy were well worth listening to because they intuitively knew things — things that could only be known through a long experience of life. He said it without sentimentality. He said it as a fact.
Erikson had arrived at something similar through decades of careful research. His framework of eight psychosocial stages placed later life at the pinnacle rather than the periphery of human development. The final stage — which he called “Ego Integrity versus Despair” — described the challenge of later life as one of integration: bringing together the whole of a lived experience into something coherent and meaningful.
Those who achieved it, he argued, possessed a form of wisdom that was not available to the young regardless of their intelligence or education. It could only be earned. It could only come from having lived.
That idea ran against the current of a culture that prizes the quick mind over the seasoned one, the data point over the lived experience, the algorithm over the instinct. The older I have become, the more certain I am that both Erikson and that professor were right — and that all of the research since, looked at carefully, continues to agree with them.
The conventional view of emotion and reason places them in opposition. Reason is steady, reliable, and trustworthy. Emotion is volatile, subjective, and to be managed. We are encouraged from an early age to keep feeling in its place and to let thinking lead.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio spent much of his career dismantling that assumption. Studying patients with damage to the emotional centres of the brain, he found something unexpected: they did not become more rational. They became unable to decide at all. Presented with choices — even simple ones — they could analyse endlessly but could not conclude.
The emotional signal that marks one option as preferable to another, that tells the body this is the right direction, was gone. Without it, reason spun without traction.
His conclusion was that emotion is not the enemy of good decision-making. It is its necessary foundation. Every decision a human being makes is, at its root, an emotional one. Reason provides the analysis; emotion provides resolution.
This is not a licence for impulsiveness. It is something more interesting than that. It is an argument that emotional capacity — the ability to recognise, interpret, and act on feeling with accuracy and wisdom — is one of the most important forms of intelligence a person can develop. And it is a form of intelligence that only develops over time.
What we call intuition in later life is not mysticism. It is not a sixth sense or a gift distributed unevenly at birth. It is the distillation of decades of emotional experience into something that operates faster than conscious thought.
The older person who walks into a room and knows within moments that something is wrong, or who meets someone and senses immediately whether they can be trusted, is not guessing. They are drawing on an emotional archive built across a lifetime — pattern recognition that operates below the level of awareness, shaped by thousands of encounters, outcomes, and corrections.
Given the similarities, we are left to wonder whether the emotional intelligence, accumulated by humans over decades, is all that different from the “Artificial Intelligence” a machine can now acquire when it views, and draw on, vast quantities of data in a shorter time.
The researcher Gary Klein, who spent years studying how experts make decisions under pressure, found that experienced practitioners rarely analyse their way to a conclusion as the textbooks suggest.
They recognise a pattern without realising it. Something in the situation matches something in memory, and they know what to do. That knowing is emotional intelligence in its most refined form — and it is precisely what Erikson meant when he spoke of the wisdom that later life, at its best, produces.
This has particular meaning for those in later life, and for those watching later life approach.
If you are already there, you may recognise what is being described — the sense that you sometimes know things without being entirely able to explain how. That is not a failure of articulation. It is the operation of something real. The culture may not have given you a framework to value it, but the framework exists, and serious researchers have spent entire careers establishing it. What you carry is worth more than you may have been led to believe.
If you are approaching later life, this is worth holding on to: the emotional intelligence you are building now — through every difficult relationship navigated, every loss absorbed, every decision made and learned from — is accumulating into something. It will not feel like accumulation. It will feel like living. The professor was right. Erikson was right. There is a point at which living a lengthy life brings a form of knowing that no younger person, however clever, can shortcut.
That is no small thing. In a culture that worships novelty and speed, it may be one of the most undervalued things there is.
Jack Lack’s Listening Chair is always here, as is your welcome.
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