Lived experience

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Lived experience
(n.)
Knowledge about the world one accumulates by gained first-hand by living through it. Knowledge that is joyously subjective, and not the quasi-objective, pseudo-knowledge by which we are all systematically indoctrinated through social institutions such as the education system, government and the calculating fingers of the media.

Can get confusing when you consider the lived experience of being indoctrinated through social institutions like school.

In any rate, subjective, and — where, thanks to one or more intersecting marginalisations, one’s particular lived experience has not been a happy one — a justification for prioritising your ghastly experience over those more fortunate, or at any rate less marginalised, when deciding the policies which should govern the implicated social institutions.

It’s a bit circular like that.

Lived experience as a finite game

James Carse’s fabulous Finite and Infinite Games provides a great prism for framing these battles between the past and present. For what is a “lived experience”, a “grievance” or a “standpoint”, if not an articulation of history?

The future contains only as-yet unlived experiences. There are no grievances there. Our standpoints, the margins and their intersections are unknown.

Being historical, an already-lived experience is permanent, and set in stone. It cannot be moved. It cannot be removed. It cannot be compensated for. It cannot be denied. It becomes a monument. A shibboleth. A sacred prophecy. But it remains our own imaginative construction.

We are autobiographers. Literally, we talk our own book. We choose by which significant events we define the trajectory of our own lives. We build our own memorials. We choose to live beneath their shadows. But our present is a function of every point in our past, not just the ones on which it suits us to now fixate as we construct our personal narrative.

To adopt — some might say “colonise” someone else’s personal narrative is the empathetic stance: to step into their shoes, to take sides, to exalt them and perpetuate their grievance. Empathy is to exalt history, whilst pretending to despise it.

But, look: standpoints iterate. As the present moves through space-time, we lay down the tracks of future, each new decision we make contributes to our lived experience. We update our standpoints — it is only by refusing to update our standpoint that we can optimise our grievance. There are people whose professional interests are served by optimising their own grievances. They are not fun people. They probably don’t have much fun. Don’t be like that. The decisions we, and our ancestors made, and had made about us, fall ever further away in time and significance. It is an inverse square. Keep moving forward, and they fall further away.

The infinite game counsels us to look at where we are, see what we’ve got now and how to make the best of it. It focuses on the decisions we can influence now and the possibilities of the future. It regards the past as informational and instructive, not constraining. If I once hit my thumb with a hammer, I know to be careful next time I use a hammer. It does not make me forever a victim of hammer abuse.

See also

• Path-dependent