On Lived Experience

I once read a blog post by someone who was deeply affected by a video they found on YouTube. In their excitement, they showed this video to a close friend hoping to elicit a similar experience in their friend. The friend was not terribly impressed and was certainly not impacted in the same way as the first person. This failure to create an impact on a friend ironically had an impact on me. It helped me understand that we all react and appreciate things very differently, even if we seem to have similar interests and proclivities. Our lived experience and our genetic make up predispose us to very different reactions in similar situations. As simple and obvious as this sounds, it was a revelation for me.

I am currently reading the excellent book by John J. Mearsheimer, “The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities”. In the first part of this book about the fallacy of international liberalism he defines the two core human traits that determine so much of our societies. First, humans are fundamentally social creatures and we are affected primarily by our social environment and our networks of family, friends, community and nation. Secondly, that even within a liberal society there is a very wide variety of assessments of what constitutes the Good Life. His first point seems obvious to me, but the second point is even more interesting.

The Good Life is something I have come to realize is very different for people who, on the surface, seem to share so much. Some people focus on fame and fortune, while many are happy with a modest and stable job, others are motivated by social contribution while many have no interest in contributing to society in any meaningful way. Some dodge taxes while others dutifully comply. Some buy expensive cars (whether they can afford them or not) while others run old rust boxes into the ground. Many of these people come from similar background, cultures and families sand yet behave in radically different ways. I see the same surprising divergence of behaviour amongst parents who have similar public facing values, but raise their children in very different ways. All this happens variety of decision every day, everywhere, in societies that you would think would have more conformity than they really do. It is remarkable, fascinating and certainly a good thing.

There is no doubt that so much of who we are comes from our lived experience. But more than the lived experience, we are most certainly predisposed by nature to certain experiences or sensations. I can already see radical differences between my own children. There is a concept in genetics of dormant genes. These genes, hard coded into our genome, lay dormant and only manifest themselves under certain conditions – good or bad. This can be both positive or negative. We can have dormant genes that only activate when stimulated with external chemicals (think drug addition) or internal ones (think gambling), we can have genes that determine if we take flight or fight under pressure and much more. We can have dormant genes that traverse generations without us even realizing we carry them. In sum, our genetic predisposition to experience seems to be far more flexible that we originally understood it to be. Who we are depends on our genes, our lived experience, and our choices in those circumstances. Even our own definition of what is The Good Life can change dramatically over time.

Much of our young life is inevitably dominated by our childhood experiences and the behaviour and expectations of our parents. In today’s modern era, most people live until young adulthood with their immediate families, who heavily influence on how a young person perceives the world. The impact from your immediate family – positive or negative – is lasting and in many cases people never escape the constraints of their upbringing. Even those who do take a divergent path from their families usually do so progressively and over an extended period of time. Occasionally, it can happen at a younger age. A friend of mine grew up in a highly religious family who home schooled their six children, but when he started questioning the Bible and what his parents were telling him, he was shipped off to public school – never to return to the family’s intellectual bubble. His five siblings continued to be home schooled and turned into adults who followed most of their parents beliefs. The young rebel moved to the satanic city of New York and decided to vote democrat, a true heresy by his parents standards. Some percentage of people make dramatic intellectual shifts from their parents, but many do not. We are undoubtedly formed by our family environment. Our religion is almost always that of our parents, for not other reason that the location of our birth as Richard Dawkins explained well here.

Establishing your own world view, separated from those who raised you can often take decades. In many ways you need to deconstruct what you experience to then rebuild a new view of the world and yourself. There are no shortage of self-help books and gurus in this field of endeavour – but it is an introspective journey that people need to decide to take. Beyond deconstruction of oneself which can be exhausting and risky (you never know what you mind find), the next best thing I have identified as a path forward is to expose yourself to a wide array of lived experiences. This is not difficult to do, but it requires a basic level of effort. Every single person you meet has a unique story and point of view and every book, article, video and resource can bring you something novel and interesting. The challenge is to let yourself be exposed. Just yesterday, I met a fellow parent at the park who told me his unique story that I can now incorporate into my own worldview.

Too often and perhaps more than before, we life in a bubble where our social media feeds us information, we do not spend extended periods of uninterrupted time with new people due to our dependence on the internet and our fragmented days. Probably today is not much worse than before when you were trapped by the smallness of your local village and religious institute. In the excellent movie Brooklyn, a young woman returns to her native Irish village and thinks of staying. A local matron of the village oversteps and tries to tell this young woman what to do. Realizing that staying in her native Irish village will condemn her to live her parent’s life, she returns to America where the horizon is open. We have isolated ourselves from the lived experience of others. Learning takes time.

Time is critical. By spending time with others, you can effectively transfer the learned experience of others into your own person. When it is a family member, the impact can be even more memorable and lived experiences can transfer between generations. I was lucky enough to spend a good amount of time with my paternal grandparents, who were able to tell me stories about their own lives and upbringing. They even shared stores about their parents and those stories transferred to me. A couple small example was my grandmother who lost a brother in the first world war. The French soldiers at the start of the war were sent off in beautiful bright red coloured pants. It was of course critical that the French go to battled in style. He, along with hundreds of thousands of other young men, were promptly shot by the Germans as their red pants made them easily stand out in the muddy battlefields of Europe. This story, which was told to me by my grandmother deeply reinforced my believe in the stupidity of political leaders who decide to go to war. This same grandmother also explained how she had grown up on a large estate in Brittany, France, but that estate was later sold to the owners of a large grocery store chain. Her family went from a prestigious family to an average middle class family. The family’s crime was their inability to adapt from a agricultural based economy to a commercial and industrial one. They failed to see how commerce and industry would supplant the wealth of the landed aristocracy. The lesson I learned was to constantly be looking for changes in the economy and where the wind is blowing. I could go on and on, but suffice to say the experience of my grandmother and her shared memories with me had a significant influence on my understanding of the world.

In sum, we are who we are due to our active genes, our dormant genes, our experiences and the experiences of those we spend time with. It is a messy soup of information, feelings and reactions that lead us to become who we are today and who we may be tomorrow. Knowing upside from down or why we do things a certain way requires reflection and examination. As Plato said in the Apology, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”, but I also really like Werner Herzog who explained that too much examination is not good either. He explained the stupidity of psychoanalysis and too much examination in the following way. Imagine living in a house where every corner of that house is constantly illuminated with light, allowing you to see every centimetre, every crack and every pile of dust. It would drive the sane man mad. So, as I prod forward toward some objective I have not clearly defined I can only commit to trying to learn from others and react in the best way possible to the vicissitudes of life that are inevitably going to come my way. The rich tapestry of the world has no beginning or end, no up nor bottom and we are in the thick of it – whether we like it or not.