As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary. — Ernest Hemingway

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Author: Ernest Hemingway

Insight: There's a particular loneliness that comes with growing up and realizing your heroes are flawed. The teacher you admired turns out to be petty. The artist whose work moved you made their family miserable. The political figure you believed in disappoints you. It's tempting to respond by deciding heroes don't matter anymore, that needing them is something you outgrow like action figures. But Hemingway understood something real: those heroes aren't really about the person. They're about what we need to believe is possible. As cynicism gets easier—and it does get easier—we need those North Stars more than ever, not less. Not because we're naive, but because without some model of excellence or courage or integrity to aim toward, we drift into smallness. The habit of looking for what's admirable in someone, even if they're deeply human and therefore incomplete, keeps us from settling into comfortable mediocrity. The trick older people learn is holding both things at once: knowing your heroes are compromised while needing them anyway. Not worshipping them, but using them. Letting them pull you toward something better than you'd reach on your own.

Source: Esquire, August 1933

/Quotes

Heroes matter more when we're older

As you get older it is harder to have heroes, but it is sort of necessary.

Ernest HemingwayEsquire, August 1933

There's a particular loneliness that comes with growing up and realizing your heroes are flawed. The teacher you admired turns out to be petty. The artist whose work moved you made their family miserable. The political figure you believed in disappoints you. It's tempting to respond by deciding heroes don't matter anymore, that needing them is something you outgrow like action figures.

But Hemingway understood something real: those heroes aren't really about the person. They're about what we need to believe is possible. As cynicism gets easier—and it does get easier—we need those North Stars more than ever, not less. Not because we're naive, but because without some model of excellence or courage or integrity to aim toward, we drift into smallness. The habit of looking for what's admirable in someone, even if they're deeply human and therefore incomplete, keeps us from settling into comfortable mediocrity.

The trick older people learn is holding both things at once: knowing your heroes are compromised while needing them anyway. Not worshipping them, but using them. Letting them pull you toward something better than you'd reach on your own.

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Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was an influential American novelist and short-story writer known for his concise and impactful writing style. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954 for his mastery of the art of modern storytelling, particularly noted for works such as "The Old Man and the Sea," "A Farewell to Arms," and "For Whom the Bell Tolls."

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