Are You Experienced?

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There is nothing that can replace experience. Nothing. Why is that? Why is it that in order to be able to "know" what it is like to walk down the street at PatPong market in Thailand at night, you have to actually DO that? To smell the food in the air. To hear the conversations. To feel the sweltering night air. To see how the people interact. And...alternatively, how is it that we think we know what a thing really is without having experienced it? To the first point, the act of experiencing something immerses you in that experience. You interact with the person, place or thing. You form a relationship with it. You become emotionally invested in it. There is another factor involved as well - You have opened yourself up to that experience and that opening up is a sunk cost which biases you to generate a deeper emotional connection to the experience. If you have to take a week off work, and pay a large sum of money to travel somewhere, you are much more likely to want to get something out of the experience. Alternatively, why is it that we are so quick to say we "know" something without having experienced it? Our own experiences should empower us to be able to understand that others who have experienced something that we have not gives them a knowledge that we don't have, and as much as we can reject or embrace a particular mental concept of an experience, an experience is a knowing that can only be taught by...experiencing it.

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