People who lack wisdom and maturity display these 9 behaviors (without realizing it)

Do you believe that age is just a number?

In this case, I’m not asking you how old or young you would date, so don’t get all worked up!

I’m asking if you think that wisdom and maturity necessarily come with age or if you think that people can grow old without ever picking up these essential qualities.

Are people more like fine wines or canned food full of preservatives?

If you ask me, I think there are a lot of people out there who don’t seem to really grow up at a level that keeps pace with their age.

Being young at heart is one thing, but growing older without gaining insight and developing adult qualities and responsibilities is quite another.

People who lack wisdom and maturity display these nine behaviors without realizing it, but if you can pick up on them, you’ll be able to better understand who you’re dealing with.

1) They don’t consider other people’s feelings.

One of the easiest signs to recognize that a person lacks wisdom and maturity is that they’re self-centered.

When you’re a swaddling babe, sure, life revolves around you. You cry, and people come running to feed you or clean up your poopy diaper.

Must be great!

But as you get older, you have to learn the very hard truth that your needs won’t always come first in this world. This normally happens during the terrible twos when children discover that they won’t always get what they want.

But it seems that some people never really nail this concept and grow up convinced that the sun rises and sets on them. 

These folks are happy to do and say whatever they want and not first consider how other people will feel. They’re constantly making others feel overlooked or unimportant.

2) They gossip.

In case ignoring other people’s feelings isn’t enough to upset them, people who lack wisdom and maturity also love to gossip and spread rumors.

This is essentially a byproduct of the same thing we just looked at. They think they’re the center of the universe, and they use gossip for fun or spite – whatever!

They fail to think about the repercussions that talking about people behind their backs and spreading rumors about them can have. As long as it serves their purpose, they’re OK with doing it.

Now, this behavior almost always comes back to bite them in the ass, but for some reason, they seem to continue doing it and never learn.

I guess that’s the lack of wisdom rearing its ugly head.

3) They don’t own their emotions.

Emotional maturity has a few key components that most of us can recognize quite easily.

It’s not just stoicism and the ability to not get your feathers ruffled. That’s part of it, but it’s not the whole story.

Emotional maturity is about being in control of your emotions, regulating them, and expressing them appropriately. So, if you feel joy, it’s appropriate to be in the moment, laugh, and be merry.

If you experience pain, it’s appropriate to be sad.

It’s also about picking your battles and learning to put up with things you can’t change.

So when you meet people who have emotional outbursts that don’t seem appropriate or proportionate to the situation, you can tell that they haven’t developed this important quality of emotional maturity.

These are the types of people who you’ll see throwing temper tantrums, the kind a toddler would be proud of. Unfortunately, they’re also not wise enough to realize that their outbursts aren’t appropriate.

4) They know it all.

We all know someone who knows it all or at least acts as they do.

I once worked with a lady who must have been a certified genius because she had an encyclopedic knowledge of the world and everything in it. She would always say, “Yeah, I know,” to everything you ever talked about, even if you hadn’t even gotten halfway through your point.

The funny thing was that she always knew the things that other people said or asked her if she knew. She never seemed to actually make statements or offer opinions of her own.

It was almost like she was just pretending to know everything people were talking about all the time.

But that would be ridiculous.

Only a person who truly lacked wisdom and maturity would try to put on a front like that!

5) They block out new ideas.

People who are unwise and immature are usually also quite resistant to change and don’t want to receive new ideas.

They’re what we normally call closed-minded.

How does this present itself?

They make statements rather than asking questions. They want to be understood but don’t focus on understanding others. They close their minds around their favorite ideas or ones that support their worldview and repel anything else that may contradict these ideas.

An open-minded person has a certain amount of intellectual humility to be able to say, “I hold these ideas, but better ideas could change my mind.”

But if you’re immature, you probably just think, “I’m right, and you’re wrong, and that’s it”.

People like this don’t because wise because wisdom is precisely accumulated by learning about the world more deeply and finding new ideas that immature people aren’t able to hold in their minds.

6) They get upset when challenged.

Let me tell you, immature people don’t like to be challenged. 

I don’t mean challenged to a game of checkers or to nail a beer bong. I mean, they don’t like their main ideas and opinions being challenged.

What makes a person this way?

One suggestion is that they actually have very fragile concepts about the world and their place in it.

Since they feel that their opinions don’t have strong foundations, they try to protect them from being tested by acting affronted or insulted when someone questions them.

Another reason may be that they don’t have a lot of self-confidence and don’t feel able to enunciate their thoughts or defend their opinions successfully. So, instead of trying to do this, they get upset when their ideas are challenged.

If you strongly believe something, you should understand the reasons behind your beliefs. It also takes wisdom to understand that other people may want to discuss or understand your ideas, and to do this, they may question them.

It’s important to know that this doesn’t have to mean a confrontation will take place by any means.

7) They lack humility.

The Greek philosopher Plato famously quoted the teacher Socrates as saying, “I was conscious that I knew practically nothing.”

Actually, he said something in Ancient Greek – he definitely didn’t know any English!

At the time, Socrates was said to be the wisest man around (no mention of the wisest woman), but he understood the incredible depth of his ignorance about the nearly infinite mysteries of the universe.

So, he displayed great humility about his knowledge.

But people who actually lack wisdom and maturity seem to act in the exact opposite way.

They think they know just about everything and are good at everything. They’re happy to brag about these things to the whole world.

8) They show off.

People who are immature tend to show off.

This is a very different thing from showing who you are and revealing your talents. We all know that showing off is doing something to draw excessive attention to yourself

It’s also unnecessary.

If you’re at a party and a guitar is passed around, a person who can play well has a choice. An immature person may very well play the most technically demanding piece they can play in hopes of wowing the group. 

That’s showing off, alright.

A wise person, on the other hand, might consider the audience and play the most appropriate song they know to fit the situation. They might play something slow and lovely if the mood is chilled out or a song that’s fun and great to sing along to if that’s the kind of energy the party needs.

9) They make the same mistakes over and over again.

One thing that you’d likely expect from people who lack wisdom and maturity is continually repeating the same mistakes.

It’s funny because mistakes are as universal as underpants. And yet, some people never seem to accept or own up to them.

But it’s exactly that act of admitting your mistakes that allows you to accept them and learn from them fully. If you can’t do this, you’re destined to repeat them again and again until you can.

People may not realize they’re doing this, either, but when the same failures come up repeatedly, it’s certainly because they’re not learning anything.

Final words

People who lack wisdom and maturity display these nine behaviors without realizing it. 

They don’t know they’re not wise and mature and usually think the exact opposite.

But by detecting these behaviors, you can see through the illusion and recognize the truth about the people you’re dealing with.

Marcel Deer

Marcel is a journalist, gamer, and entrepreneur. When not obsessing over his man cave or the latest tech, he’s failing helplessly at training his obnoxious rescue dog ‘Boogies’.

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