How long can you live without wisdom?

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Wisdom is, like intelligence, reason, and hustle, a state of mind. It’s characterized by not letting your emotions rule your decision-making. Intelligence is characterized by disregarding emotion, in this disregard, intelligent people often wind up making decisions that are way more emotional than they think.

For example, an intelligent person might spend days contemplating an appliance purchase, weighing all the features and benefits, shopping around different stores, whereas a wise person knows that while they can save a few bucks, their priorities lie elsewhere.

In the example, the intelligent person thinks he is making a rational decision to spend a whole bunch of time studying and deciding, the wise person looks at that and sees only mismatched priorities. I’m oversimplifying this for illustration purposes.

This disregarding of emotion is crucial to accomplish intellectual feats, it’s simply not possible to come to a logical conclusion if your emotional mind is constantly intruding. Not realizing that it will intrude anyway if you keep ignoring it is the hallmark of the intelligent but not wise person. The wise person can turn their rational brain off once in awhile and get to know their emotions.

Now that we’ve defined our terms, let’s answer the question.

The question asks about survival. Humans are social animals, and nobody likes to see someone die. So there’s a social defense against these sorts of mistakes. If a human sees another human in a dangerous situation caused by a lack of wisdom, chances are they would pull them out of it.

Humans are also prevented from harming themselves by their minds, and wisdom is a mental trait. Wisdom is a higher mental function, like intelligence. Below wisdom lie the baser functions like emotion, and basic reasoning. It’s the baser functions that provide safety, not the higher. Even people with severe mental illnesses such as psychosis or schizophrenia have basic mental functions that keep them from making critical life-ending mistakes.

It’s safe to say that you can live your entire life without much in the way of higher mental faculties at all. Animals manage to do it, and we’re animals.

History is rife with examples of unwise behavior causing death. Humans have a social safety net that will eventually catch you if you fall. You have to fall again out of the net, and then out of the next net that catches you, and again and again, until you finally exhaust all the varied things humans put in the way of this very thing happening.

But that social net wasn’t always so robust. Human life used to be much more unforgiving. The answer at some point would have been, “until you ran your mouth off to the wrong person.”

I’m glad we don’t live in those times. These are way more interesting.