Experiences
We – and by ‘we’ most people usually mean ‘everybody except for myself’, but I assure you I lump myself into this highly inclusive category – are an experiential culture. We value experience over truth; we are a culture of pragmatists. Example at hand: “five dollars is too much to pay for one cup of coffee…but try this venti caramel macchiato made with fair-trade, shade-grown beans and you will change your mind.” Not to mention, we are paying for the experience of learning about the history of our coffee beans while listening to our favorite anti-main-stream artist play alternative-progressive music in the background. When did coffee itself become ‘not enough’ to stand on its own two pots? I don’t want to denigrate experience. This is, in fact, how wisdom is obtained oftentimes. Some African tribes had a saying that conveyed the idea that when an elder in the tribe died, it was if a library had been burned - all of the knowledge, wisdom (there is a distinction) and ‘experience’ buried with them. But even experience has been cheapened, in a way. You no longer have to dawn a squirrel suit and gain the mental collateral to fling yourself off of the precipice of the fjords of Norway to ‘experience’ what it would be like to feel like Superman. GoPro and Youtube make that experience quite readily available to us all. We can go where it took Ferdinand Magellan years to go in mere seconds, go places that would normally require an access badge, like inside a nuclear reactor plant, and even drive down the streets of where we plan to go on vacation on Google Street View, and still be home in time for supper. Fifteen years ago, someone who had done all this would be a Renaissance man in the extreme. Fifty years, someone who had done all this would have been an alien. But now, if you’ve done this, “meh, so did my two year-old cousin while eating his Cheerios for breakfast this morning.” Perhaps the next wave of ‘experiential expert and prestige’ will be those who unplug completely and revert back to Marco Polo-esque experientialism. Or maybe, just maybe, we’ll revert back even further, to reading of experiences, and actually move ahead…naaah.
