Experience vs Experiences; The battle of the Millenial beginner
Experience. It feels like the defining feature of our late stage capitalism. We don’t want to buy things we want to buy experiences. And for the last 10 years or so the Idea has been sold to us that what we all value is experiences. Experiences became the new consumer item. More musical festivals, food tours, paddle board yoga than you can shake a stick at (and probably some stick shaking classes as well). We are of the world where we want to go to places and do things, we make bucket lists with the full intention of ticking everything off and we tell ourselves that this variety of rich experience is the stuff of life.
So far, all very beginner friendly.
But if you asked the same group of Inca trail hiking, festival attending, bali scooter riding millennials what they felt about being successful, you can pretty much bet that they (and by they I mean us/ me) would consider success as being good at a skill not just the doing or trying of it. Instagram feeds are full of the perfect banana bread loaf (not the 5 failed attempts before where it never rose) life like drawings of St Pauls Cathedral shot so you can’t see the amount of times it was rubbed out and redone, or the shot of you starting to scale a wall, never showing the fact that you only got a meter off the ground. Failure, it turns out, is only allowed to be shared or showcase if it belongs to 1. A ‘look how far I have come’ Instagram montage , 2. On a hen do, where the point is that you tried
Beyond that we don’t want experiences that we aren’t good at. This got me thinking? Why? Why are there so many thing I want to do and imagine myself doing and trying. But if I am honest in my fantasies there is not one single one which I am not great at. I want to try them then, because it looks fun. It looks fun to be a good surfer, a good painter, a multilingual, a photographer, A mural painter, a drummer.
However, if I knew that in all likelihood I would not be great at most of these. Or in fact any of these (especially at the start, and maybe forever). Which leaves me with a very short list when I try to answer the question ‘what would I want to do if it didn’t matter how good I was at it?’
Why don’t I have an answer?
Because in a world where success if high performance, where life is measured in not having tried and failed a lot of things but rather always succeed, It always matters how good I am.
Which leaves me question what do I do? Because I am a product of my generation and crave experiences as much as the next person. But I also want to be experienced. To be good. The two don’t go hand in hand. Breadth equals just that a lot of things lightly experienced. Whereas expertise is dug in the trenches of deep and continued work on the same thing. Having recently read ‘Range’ I am convinced of the value of trying new things. The only problem is my ego isn’t.
I am used to being good at things and I want to do things well and ‘use my time effectively.’
Being a high achiever is what success means and I know deep down that there are many things I want to try but don’t because actually I would rather not know for sure that I am not very good. I lack the peace with being bad, I lack the tolerance and patience’s for working at something and the beginners mindset to believe actually pretty much anything I want to do can be taught. And if I don’t want to do the learning, maybe it’s ok to just do it and be bad?
As far as I remember the word dilettante was a word trudged up in Jane Austen books about a character that you really didn’t want to be. Flighty, not serious, and a bit a dabbler. So it made a real impression whilst reading Tom Vanderbilts book ‘Beginners’ I discovered the origin of the word is Italian meaning ‘to delight’. That in fact we had moved from the idea of delighting in the discovery of different things, to the unreliable unserious actions of a dilletante.
I do love many things, I do want to learn many things, I want to collect experiences, Invest in a few things and a few people, but also have the pick a mix of life’s many options. It’s sort of like when you’re sweet shopping and you know you want shrimps and bananas because they are great and you love them. They fill have the bag, the rest well, whatever takes your fancy, did you like all of them (probably yes they are made out of sugar, but go with the metaphor here) of course not, but was it good to try? Hell yes. (I might be dangerously close the suggesting that pick a mix is the answer to this deep philosophical question. But when you really think about it, perhaps we need to allow this same level of risk tolerance, or failure, of trying to our time. Maybe some things are worth our time, even if they are mistakes that go wrong. What if the value of time wasn’t what we achieved or even what we learnt but the actions we took.
What if we could be brave enough to try and fail. And maybe even talk about it? (Like that time I tried to make cheese (4 times, Cry)
I don’t know if there is an answer. But I think it’s worth recognising the question. Because it gives us a chance to see that both the desire for experience and experiences are culturally conditioned and always in battle. So we may not always stop ourselves being caught between the two, but maybe we can be a bit kinder to ourselves when we are.