4 November

I think one of the most abused words in modern culture is ‘experience’. It’s our religion, we see life as something to be ‘experienced’. Like we’re passive tourists on life’s journey, and it will keep throwing up new sights and sounds for us, which in turn will change us in some way, make us better and happier people. The thing is, everything is an experience. It’s an empty concept. There’s nothing about ‘being there’ with travel, for example, that will give you the greater reality of the pyramids. The experience of being there has no magical power to give you deeper access to them. The only path to true happiness and joy in life is understanding. What you understand will in turn profoundly shape what you experience. The more you understand the less experiences you’ll need. You’ll ’see the world in every grain of sand’. You don’t get to bypass the understanding step and just have experiences, which will do the understanding for you. People can travel for years and remain the same person, despite the hype about it broadening the mind. It absolutely doesn’t. The proof is in where people arrive, in a life sense. Those who rely upon experience to do their thinking for them have a never-ending desire for more experiences. They never arrive at some point of greater wisdom and happiness, they’re always booking the next trip or adventure. Always bored, always needing that next distraction from the deeper encounter with themselves. They can’t just BE, they always have to be DOING. We’re human doings now, not human beings. Look at the stats on modern mental health. People are not happy, they’re not all the things the culture of experience promises them. They’re snowflakes, increasingly fragile and depressed. This is kidult culture, adolescents have a furious urge to ‘experience’ the world, because their lives are constrained in schools. It’s just that we now never grow up, we don’t know how.