You can't manufacture 'real' experience

The idea that we should be trying to "collect" experiences can be unavoidable. Photo / Getty Images

I was on the state highway, covered in sugar and blinking chocolatey sweat out of my eyes. The cupcakes I was carrying had melted and somehow dripped into my armpits. Drivers roared past, honking, laughing and shouting stuff. I was lost, stranded, and very sticky.

I don't make a habit of rolling around in confectionery and running down highways. I was supposed to be on a farm. I was supposed to be writing a funny article about what happens when a city slicker girl makes a tit out of herself working with cows and what not. I was supposed to be giving the cupcakes to the farmer as a thank you for letting me come.

Except that I had tried to take a bus. AT had soundly promised me that I could get there on the bus. I checked, I double-checked. I had looked repeatedly and sceptically at my phone. But it said I could do it. It lied. I ended up stranded in a gravel pit on the highway, a 45-minute drive from the farm.

I had no choice but to crawl back to the CBD to explain to my editor why I couldn't do it. And also why I bore such resemblance to a chocolate-dipped raisin. It wasn't what I'd call a career highlight.

Why am I telling you this? Well, this week I was thinking about the modern-day mantra that we should "collect experiences". I keep seeing a beer advert that raises a critical eyebrow at its viewers and asks, "Are you an experience collector?" Diesel tried something similar when it ran its "smart has the plans, stupid has the stories" advertising campaign. And I can't seem to walk past a travel shop that is not selling me life changing exotic experiences! (*Flights and diarrhoea not included.)

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.