Personal Experience Isn't Enough

I like being fed up with political articles and the news, because it covers up the fear that I'm horribly under-informed. It's easy to score coolness points by acting like current events are noise distracting me from some important life wisdom. It's easy to say "it's futile to try to keep up with current events".

That's better than admitting I'm being lazy by staying ignorant of what's going on. Or even worse, that maybe even if I did have the stamina to stay up on a lot of things, admitting maybe I don't have the intellect to make sense of what's happening in the huge space outside my routine. That space, by the way, is most of the world.

It's easy to distrust something that's hard to understand, or to discount things that have little to do with your daily life. I feel like I have so much to concentrate on every day, that I can get fooled into thinking that the long list of concerns has some kind of global relevance. It doesn't really. Think about the fact that there are societies separated from you by an ocean, speaking a language you don't speak.

I've been in plenty of arguments where the other person speaks mostly or only from experience. It's true that there are certain things we can learn only by doing, but it's a giant mistake to think we can only learn by doing. Other people have done, and have learned by doing. Some of those people wrote books, some of their doing has been included in statistics. No matter how strongly I feel a connection to something, I have to remind myself that there may be literal billions of people that do not relate to that.

And the longer I live, and the more attachments I develop, the harder it can be to care about events across the street. Which is why I always try harder to read more, try more things, listen more, observe more, look for patterns. And do my best (which is usually not very good) to remember I represent a very small amount of humanity.

There are over 7 billion people on Earth. Any personal opinion represents a tiny fraction of a fraction of a percent of human experience. More people are on Earth every day, which means your views represent a smaller and smaller percentage of people every day, and every year. That means every year an individual opinion represents less and less of humanity. Which means as a person ages, any argument from personal experience is going to be less representative of humanity overall. So the older we get, the less relevant our personal opinions get.

Another issue is when arguments from personal experience ignore the experiences of people that are better in some way. Finding your own way in a craft, or to physical fitness, or to your life philosophy, is all well and good. But if you think personal experience is the ultimate authority, then what about someone whose personal experience led them to be better than you at your craft? Healthier? What if they have a cooler life philosophy than you?

Science, books, facts, statistics, it's easy to dismiss these as not being useful if you feel some intuitive truth that conflicts with what you're hearing. Other people also discovered amazing things on their own, off the beaten path, and maybe better than what you discovered. Will you dismiss those discoveries because they didn't come from your own brain?

There's not much difference between that reality and science, books, statistics. It's one of the major advantages of being a human being instead of a fish or a giraffe. You don't have to (and shouldn't) rely only on what happened to you, because smart people have already figured out lots of things and all you have to do is read them.