Age doesn’t automatically give you experience or wisdom. I’ve never really bought into that idea, neat as it sounds stitched on a pillow. I’ve always believed that if you’re going to make a big mistake, you should make it while you’re young. That’s when the consequences sting, but don’t scar. You learn, you recalibrate, you move on slightly wiser and a lot more alert.
My first proper scam happened in my early twenties, in Greece. I was taken for sixty dollars. That doesn’t sound like much now, but at the time it felt enormous. Sixty dollars was meals, bus tickets, maybe a night or two of freedom. I remember the moment clearly—not the mechanics of the scam, but the feeling afterward. That hot mix of embarrassment and irritation. The sudden awareness that I’d been played. I learned fast. I adjusted. I travelled on.
The second scam came much later, and that’s the one I hesitate to admit. Not just because of the money—though that hurt—but because by then I “should have known better.” It wasn’t travel-related. It was quieter, more insidious. An online working colleague. Someone I trusted. Someone who spoke the language of collaboration and shared goals. It turned out to be a pyramid scheme. And I fell for it.
I hadn’t done enough due diligence. That’s the simple truth. No dramatic backstory. No villain twirling a moustache. Just me, assuming that shared work meant shared values. The embarrassment lingered longer this time. Younger me shrugged and carried on. Older me replayed the tape and noticed what I’d missed.
So do I claim to have experience and wisdom now? I do . . . but not because I’m older.
I also don’t claim to be an expert, and that distinction matters. Expertise suggests mastery, certainty, and the confidence to say this is how it works. Experience and wisdom are different. They’re quieter. Less tidy. They come with caveats and footnotes and an instinctive pause before saying yes.
What I have isn’t expertise. It’s pattern recognition. It’s the moment something feels familiar in the wrong way. The email that presses urgency. The opportunity that discourages questions. The person who borrows credibility instead of earning it. An expert might explain the system. Experience notices the shape.
Travel teaches this early if you’re paying attention. The too-helpful stranger. The deal that only exists for the next ten minutes. The story that doesn’t quite line up with the map. Work teaches it later, dressed up in better language and nicer fonts.
Age didn’t give me wisdom. Repetition did. Attention did. And the willingness to admit, sometimes quietly, sometimes painfully, that I’d seen this pattern before and ignored it once.
That’s what experience really is: not expertise, not authority, but recognizing the shape of a mistake in time to step around it.
