Wise

Finding Purpose, Meaning and Wisdom Beyond the Midpoint of Life

By: Frank Tallis

Narrated by: Simon Shepherd

We are living longer and our lifespan after the middle years continues to extend due to medical advances. But how do you age wisely? How do you remain psychologically healthy and fully engaged given the immense and daunting challenges of later life - accumulated regrets, loss, disappointments, physical deterioration, and mortality?

From ancient Greece to the 21st century, the greatest philosophers and psychologists have considered these questions, and remarkably, their opinions converge. There is a single essential task - integration - that once accomplished, equips us to cope with the many problems we are likely to encounter as we get older. What's more, their insights are supported by cutting-edge neuroscience. Exploring the common ground shared by the Stoics and the Existentialists, William James and CG Jung, Iain McGilchrist and Daniel Siegel, clinical psychologist Frank Tallis has written his own essential alternative to the standard self-help prescriptions.

Frank Tallis takes on such questions as how we can embrace and accept our mortality when our brains are hard-wired to resist it, how we can achieve meaning in our lives, and how we can understand the passage of time and make the most of it. It's immensely readable whilst also intelligent and thought-provoking.©2026 Frank Tallis

Critic reviews

Frank Tallis is one of the most insightful psychologists of our time. In Wise, he explores life's most urgent questions - our purpose and mortality - with clarity and humility. What emerges is a deeply profound book, where psychology, philosophy, and lived experience come together to show us how to live... Wise is for anyone, young or old, in search of happiness

This is a rich and beautiful book. Using a range of perspectives and vignettes, Frank Tallis shows, rather than tells, us about the diverse ways that we might attain wisdom; wisdom that we need to sustain us as we move into the autumn of our years