You can't seem to get away from the idea that we should be trying to "collect" experiences. Like we're in life's supermarket and have a shopping list for "moving moments". It's especially strong among us 20-somethings. Now is the time when we are supposed to be collecting experiences like being poor, sexually liberal or "wild". (Totally, like, #YOLO.)
Often, when we're getting our "experience" we're not getting what we think we're getting.
Take young people playing the poor student lifestyle. We don't actually know what it's like to be poor because it's so much more than having no money. It may be part of modern hipster-dom and student living to be poor. We may go around impressing ourselves with our economising, anti-materialism and stripped-back lifestyles. But living cheaply doesn't mean we understand what it's like to actually be poor. (Only middle-class people have time to be hipsters anyway.)
Being poor means that you feel like there is no glittering future, no safety net, no world full of opportunities waiting for you. That's not something middle-class kids feel; we were raised to believe we have the world waiting for us. So how can we manufacture that experience? We don't understand the emotional background to it.
These pesky emotions also can stop us actually having an experience in other ways. To have an experience you actually have to be emotionally moved by it.
And this brings me back to my farm story. I was supposed to go to the farm to have a "humiliating experience" where I realised what a silly city slicker I was. I thought I would be "humbled" and then "grow". I was such an idiot.
To be humiliated you have to feel wounded pride. But I don't care that I can't farm. So how could I ever feel genuinely humiliated if people knew that? You can't create your own humiliation. Real humiliation was when I had to explain to my editor that I couldn't find the farm or write the story. I care about my job and I never thought I'd end up looking like such a lemon.
When you plan for an emotional experience you're adding something to your life. It's not really part of your life - it's an interesting tack-on. This often means that you're not really connected to it. That makes it difficult to care about and difficult to be moved by.
The real experiences happen in everyday life. They happen when you see a person crying in public, or you smile at an old man, or you help a mum carry the shopping so she can hold her baby. You don't need to go somewhere or create something to "have an experience".
Normal life is infinitely weirder and more moving than anything we could create.