Why Balancing Reason and Wisdom in the Modern Age Matters

“It is difficult to persuade mankind that the love of virtue is the love of themselves.” -Marcus Tullius Cicero

I believe that humanity stands at a critical crossroads. Our obsession with science, technology, and now artificial intelligence is systematically undermining the very essence of what it means to be human. This transformation begins with how we educate our youth—with a definite bias toward scientific rationality. While the Western educational model separated from religious institutions to honor cultural freedom and diversity, it left a void that hasn’t yet been filled, deeply affecting our human experience. Let’s explore how reclaiming virtue, wisdom, and meaning in life can start with understanding why virtue forms the vital foundation of our human development.

1. Recognize the Importance of Virtue

Our current educational system shows a critical imbalance. We start early to develop our left hemisphere, the rational side responsible for controlling language and logic, which enables us to learn to read, write, and recognize numbers. For many years, we continue to develop these skills until we master complex subjects like calculus. But what would happen if we dedicated a parallel, multi-year development plan to our right hemisphere, the intuitive and creative side of the brain? What would mastery look like then?

Although we excel at producing intellectually sophisticated individuals, we paradoxically end up with emotionally fragile ones. The truth is that prioritizing cognitive skills over affective competence has created generations of great problem solvers who struggle to be emotionally fit. Classical education recognized this critical need to balance intellectual growth alongside moral character and virtue. Rather than hoping to be more machine-like, we should first develop our full capacity for virtue.

This shift is possibly a direct result of moving away from teaching virtue, in favor of preparing students for college and the workforce. The educational system, now largely disconnected from any religious or spiritual framework, lacks elements that are vital to our human condition. Currently, the primary focus on understanding our emotions is to control them—with the sole intention of increasing performance in classrooms or workplaces. Unfortunately, this often neglects our fundamental need to experience, understand, and grow from the full range of our emotions.

A robust approach to our emotions is not valued by the system because it is not its intent. And I don’t mean to suggest we should bring back nuns who used to hit my parents with their rulers, nor am I dismissing the value of science. What I’m saying is that without virtue, we have become brittle to the demands of life and are equally missing out on its joys.

What if education took a more balanced approach, honoring both intellectual and moral character development? I believe we need this more than ever—not just for professional success, but for personal growth. By cultivating virtue, we can be better equipped to navigate life’s true challenges. While virtue reminds us that education without a strong moral foundation can lead us astray, it is practical wisdom that helps us  integrate these principles into our daily lives.

2. A Shift to Wisdom

According to Oxford Languages, wisdom is “the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment […].” In this Digital Age, we have been effectively storing knowledge that we can easily prompt, access, and share. However, experience and good judgment aren’t things we can just access—they require personal effort and development. We are so proud of our digital prowess, and yet unaware we’re not growing wiser. To understand how we’ve gradually lost our connection to wisdom, let’s explore where this disconnection may have started. 

During the Industrial Revolution, as cities grew and factories became more widespread, the need for employees rose. As family members left, traditional family values began to transform. Families that once specialized proudly in unique trades and built wealth together through their shared craftsmanship began to fragment. They had been guided by their beliefs and united by their craft.

But as industrialization progressed, more children were inevitably sent to schools, prioritizing academic knowledge over practical skills, and science over traditional family values. Modern society came to demand theory and good grades as the unquestionable path to success, while the traditional family bonds weakened, and the wisdom and guidance that came with it. Despite all this newfound personal independence and technological innovations, we are increasingly lonely. The new knowledge worker is more expendable than ever, and their self-worth reduced to a job title or salary.

This historical shift initiated ripples that have shaped the currents of our present reality. In our digital modern landscape, many are absorbed by technology and overwhelmed by a myriad of social issues. We see adults increasingly living in single-person households as well as declining birth rates, political polarization, ever-evolving gender roles, workforce turnover, and a lack of meaningful relationships. Culturally, we’re ignoring wisdom altogether and we have our elders feeling like ghosts. This is at the heart of what I’m getting at. We should be grateful for scientific and technological progress, but it’s crucial that it grows alongside wisdom. Without this delicate balance, we risk continuing to erode our human connection.

Another interesting observation is the modern tendency to favor innovation and reason over meaningful traditions and faith. We have access to unprecedented knowledge and infinite data analytics—and through the scientific method, we have enabled explosive discovery and produced wonderful modern technology. But we shouldn’t place unwavering trust in whatever the latest research says, nor should we take centuries of accumulated human wisdom for granted while blindly believing that science alone will solve all our problems. We need to remind ourselves that it’s through human wisdom and connection that we can find the strength to overcome our darkest moments and recognize that our most significant decisions in life are the ones where we need to take a leap of faith.

So, in our quest for progress, how can we integrate wisdom back into our lives? We need to understand fundamentally what it means to be human: our emotions, our cultural contexts, and our capacity to lift ourselves and others up. It’s about the freedom to experience happiness and sadness alike, and most importantly, about growing in wisdom and virtue over time. We need to integrate a multi-year progression of virtue, ethics, and wisdom in our schools and in our families. This means praising our children not based on their performance but based on character—are they being patient, kind, and courageous?

To reclaim wisdom today, we must look at how ancient philosophies understood its key relevance. For instance, Aristotle played a crucial role in developing the concept of practical wisdom, or phronesis. In ancient Greek philosophy, phronesis was about the ability to make good judgments and moral character in practical action. I believe we should incorporate this type of wisdom into our educational system. There will always be certain aspects of life we cannot tackle with science alone. Practical wisdom can help us understand when, where, and why, faith, spirituality, or traditional values may be our biggest allies in life.

Aristotle also developed the concept of eudaimonia. While it’s often translated simply as happiness, for him it meant something more profound: well-being, a life well lived alongside virtue. Similarly, the Stoics believed in the importance of virtue to achieve a meaningful life, focusing on four key virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, and justice. They understood that the choices made with virtue lead to a life of fulfillment and happiness. In his Book II of Politics, Aristotle said: “The two principles of education are that the young should be trained in what is useful for life, and in what leads to virtue.” Unfortunately, our educational system does not consider these important concepts, which are not just applicable, but necessary in our lives.

Wisdom is ultimately about understanding that it’s not just about achievements, but about having humility. It’s not just about performing, it’s about the love of learning. It’s not just about getting results, it’s about enjoying the process and improving. Wisdom can help us reclaim what we’ve lost to modern education and our thinning culture, with their relentless pursuit of career, the rat race, and the constant chase for external validation and immediate gratification.

While it’s quite challenging to determine how to teach wisdom, we can certainly cultivate it by developing an appreciation for nuance and perspective, fostering skills to enhance awareness, conducting conflict resolution workshops, engaging in discussions of real-world ethical dilemmas and vices, and integrating practical apprenticeships. Additionally, we could focus on building character skills through stories that illustrate the lessons humanity has learned at its best and worst, and by redefining what success is so we can measure it differently—from how well you perform or what grade you got, to how much courage or curiosity one demonstrates.

3. A Meaningful Life

With virtue as our moral foundation and wisdom as our guide, we can explore how they lead us to a meaningful life—beginning with our earliest experiences of the world.

Every time I watch my 5-year-old son tinker with his toys, blocks, magnetic tiles, and art supplies, it reminds me of the deep curiosity we’re born with. He builds boats, binoculars, and telescopes out of paper. I can hear him get frustrated sometimes, but he’s never embarrassed by his creations. Most children are uniquely talented, naturally curious, and eager to learn. Of course, the privilege of resources, safety, good parenting, and having basic needs met plays a significant role in their development—but it still doesn’t account for children’s innate curiosity. Even without these privileges, children’s natural curiosity to explore and make mistakes without self-criticism is a powerful force we should never lose. Curiosity is what drives them to make sense of the world.

At the heart of a meaningful life lies our self-perception and our sense of purpose. A positive self-image is crucial, as it impacts our ability to socialize, learn, contribute, and be content. Why do most children initially think highly of themselves, only to lose much of this self-image later in life? The obvious reason might be that we simply overestimate our ability to perform until it gets difficult, at which point a significant skill gap begins to form. But the less obvious culprit may be the story we develop—how we begin to think and feel about ourselves in the face of that gap. This early, subtle, and developing narrative profoundly shapes how we navigate life.

To a large degree, this is a cultural narrative about self-worth and identity. By default, we associate how well we perform with our identity. You might say, “I’m a great engineer,” or “I’m a talented x, y, or z,” implying that your identity is directly related or worse—dependent on your skill set. To me, that’s the first challenge of the gap between our positive self-image and our skill gap: attaching our identity to our learning and performing.

In Adam Grant’s book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, he talks about how the Finnish school system changed their approach to education—never putting performance above well-being. He says: “Finnish educators assume the most important lesson to teach children is that learning is fun.” The goal is not performing. It’s not even about just teaching, but to teach students to love learning. It is about learning how to learn and enjoying it that matters most at the core of education.

The fact is we are born whole, but we begin conditioning our self-worth to our skills early on. Young adults soon realize that without a developed skill set, they struggle to find their worth in a society that rewards performance. Consequently, the nature of our capitalism makes these young adults see themselves as incomplete, with their self-image dependent on performance. While the school system emerged as a solution to this problem, it does not address what I perceive the root cause to be. We must recognize the inner workings of this emotional gap and disassociate this performance identity from our children.

This conditioning of self-worth seems to reveal a deeper cultural paradigm. Why do we condition our self-worth to our profession, where we work, how well we perform, or how much money we make? In The First Rule of Mastery: Stop Worrying about What People Think of You, Michael Gervais says: “Performance is meant to be an expression of who we are, not a definition of who we are. When we define ourselves by performance, we build our identity on a house of sand. How well we do at anything in life shifts and changes. Harnessing our sense of self to performance, and the approbation that comes with it, creates a petri dish for stress, anxiety, and depression.”

For instance, when I was in 3rd grade, my mom and I had a meeting with my teacher. She said: “He doesn’t comprehend anything he reads.” All I remember is focusing on pronouncing the words precisely, evidently not caring to comprehend what was said. After the meeting, I felt there was something wrong with me. This is an example of how we slowly journey into the wrong kind of education, where learning becomes less fun, less about the practice, and more about the person. We need to be mindful of how early educational experiences (and parenting) can shape self-perception and influence how we feel about learning.

Learning how to learn is about our ability to persevere, tinker, make mistakes, and have fun—confident that we can persist and be resourceful. Self-acceptance is at the core of this learning mindset, freeing us from the paralysis of judgment, perfectionism, and the fake mirage of external validation. Let’s shift from labeling ourselves with fleeting results and achievements to gauging progress through continuous improvement, effort, and the joy that comes with it. We can say: “I can learn from this, I can grow from this experience, and I can figure this out.” We need to let go of the need to control outcomes and focus on the process.

The paradox lies in the fact that world-class performers often build their success on a performance-based identity, yet this comes with hidden risks. The caveat is that all performance inevitably declines over time. The habits formed through this identity make it too painful to start anything new, should they need to. By conflating achievements with our identity, we avoid making mistakes and can feel threatened even by genuinely constructive feedback. To manage this paradox, we must strive to be equally fascinated by failures as we are by the successes, though it’s easier said than done.

In her insightful article, Enhancing Artistic Fulfillment: The Shift from Performance-Based to Purpose-Driven Identity, Martha Eason explains that “Living out identity based in purpose is always something you can control. It is always something in which you can enjoy success. Whether we are hired or not might be within our influence — but ultimately it is out of our control. What do we have control over? Living according to our purpose.” 

Beyond self-image and performance, purpose may be the key to our well-being. A purpose-driven identity may free us from our unreasonable inner critic, enabling us to become young explorers again, opening us up to virtue and wisdom. In this way, we welcome feedback and enjoy the process. Perhaps we can narrow the gap between self and skills by approaching it with more direction and compassion, fostered by an education that encourages holistic growth. Instead of living in constant fear of failure, need for external validation, and the all-too-common image of flipping burgers, we can embrace the excitement of working toward our purpose.

We have now come back full circle to our traditions and spiritual beliefs, which understood the importance of purpose and believing in something bigger than oneself. Let’s reconnect with virtue and wisdom to find our purpose, cause, and beliefs. A meaningful life is one where we rebuild that unquestioned self-love we once had.

As discussed, virtue, wisdom, and meaning are essential alongside our increasingly scientific and technological world. While modern society has reduced life to calculated decisions, from dating to retirement, let’s not forget that our deepest emotional challenges and our most significant life decisions, are not rational problems to be solved. That’s not what science is for. Rather, it’s virtue, wisdom, and meaning that can profoundly guide us through those inevitable, challenging moments in life. If we honor our virtues and embrace our timeless wisdom, we can tap into these forgotten gifts. Let’s not take scientific progress for granted, nor overlook the deep human qualities that help us in trying times. This is how we ultimately reclaim virtue, wisdom, and meaning in life!