What Do You Want to Experience?
“For once in my life, I have someone who needs me, someone I’ve needed so long…”
Many people like to employ the “no regrets at the end” strategy to explain why they do certain things, take certain risks, or go certain places. They say its important to them that, at the end of their lives, they experience no regrets.
Good luck with that.
It just doesn’t strike me as possible for anyone to have absolutely no regrets. Every day we do things, make decisions, choose options. The odds are stacked monumentally against all of those choices and decisions being good ones. And that’s okay. Making mistakes is part of living a successful life, because its only by making mistakes that we learn to be and do better. People seldom make adjustments to things they do well.
At some point, most people do some thinking about all the things they’d like to have and all the things they’d like to experience. Research into our preference for investing in things as opposed to experiences was started by Cornell University Professor of Psychology Thomas D. Gilovich 20 years ago and has been widely reported on. Gilovich contends that the memory of experiences lasts far longer than the satisfaction of acquiring things. His reasoning is compelling, but not really the subject of this article.
Assuming, from Dr. Gilovich’s work, that experiences are extremely important to most people you are led to wonder exactly which experiences people want to have in their lives. These fall into more categories than I have space to cover here, but I wanted to consider the bigger ones to help establish a foundation for more productive, more meaningful thinking.
Is Love the Ultimate Experience?
No concept I can think of is less understood than love. Every person I know has wrestled with the definition throughout their lives, and it seems to be elusive because it changes so much so often.
It’s easy to confuse other things for love. Comfort is one. When we’re very comfortable with another person we may come to believe we love them. To some extent, perhaps we do. When someone provides us with exceptional support that helps us past some difficulty its easy to see our response as love.
Lust is often mistaken for love, sometimes purposefully. Lust is great. We were built to enjoy each other, and if we can do so without harming each other it’s even better. But harming each other is easier than we might think it is. Beyond the participants in the sex itself are the related folks on either side. Spouses, children, friends, others. How will they be impacted by our intimacy? Does our experience of our family outweigh the momentary thrill of an illicit affair? And, if not, why do we remain in that family?
Often, love hurts. When it ends, or one of the participants leaves, there’s a definite period of grief involved. Is it really better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? There are many who would argue on either side of that question.
Cheap Thrills are Still Thrills
A very dear friend of mine reminds me of this regularly. Cheap thrills are still thrills. But what constitutes a thrill?
Danger? Are we thrilled when we experience danger? Is it a good thrill? Is the potential for harm worth the thrill? We need to ask these questions, but I’d venture to guess we seldom do. Is skydiving a thrill? Perhaps the first few times. Is driving fast a thrill? Perhaps an irresponsible one. What makes certain sexual encounters thrilling and others routine? Do we experience genuine thrills on a roller-coaster? A ski run? Committing a robbery?
Are there good thrills and bad thrills? And can we tell the difference?
Success
In a conversation recently I heard someone list four people who had all made similar decisions at some point. The person listing them posited that, “these are all successful people, and I think its valid to agree with them.”
I know some of those people, and my immediate reaction was that they were four people who had amassed a substantial amount of wealth. But there was at least one I would never characterize as “successful.” I consider him to be selfish, self-centered, self-absorbed, and totally artificial in his relationships with people, often attempting to literally buy the love of those around him. And totally ignorant of the impact he’s having on the people around him.
I would hardly characterize that as being successful.
I turn my thoughts to activists like Thich Naht Hahn, a monk who dedicated his life to improving conditions in his beloved Thailand. His writings have been a constant source of inspiration and insight to me. I’ve also read extensively about how he suffered at the hands of government goons and others in reaction to his work to achieve peace. I consider Thay to be a very successful person, and he never owned anything, much less riches.
Also, I think about friends of “limited means” whose families love them deeply, and with whom they share wonderful times. Vacations may only be a drive away to a camp site, not to some far-off tropical paradise, but they thoroughly enjoy each other’s company and the experiences they share. On the other hand there are people I’ve worked with who achieved great wealth, but have never married nor had children. When we speak, they tell me they envy me because I have raised a family and enjoyed them thoroughly. What I see as normal, a rich man calls a paradise. He’s my age, and has dated many nubile young women that many would consider paradisical. The grass may indeed always be greener on the other side.
My best attempt at defining success is that you achieve that which you set out to achieve, whatever that is. In many ways, I have experienced success. In many ways, I have not.
Travel
An oft-quoted axiom of the ‘80s tells us that travel is always the best investment.
Indeed, I know of a family who took their children to more places around the world in the first few years of their lives than most people get to see in a lifetime. They clearly believe that experiencing other places is the most important value they can provide to their children. The smiles in the photographs serve as proof of just how right they are.
My mentor is now 90 years old. He has always travelled the world delivering academic papers and his only concern right now is that injury and illness don’t stop him from continuing to do so. For him, the experience of stimulating the minds of others around the globe, and getting to experience all those places is the most important priority.
On the other hand, there’s me. Friends have often warned me that I spend too much time “living in my own head.” Gifted with a vivid imagination, I enjoy wonderful experiences in there, and that’s what inspired me to become a working writer. My favorite experience is having a reader talk to me about their experience of my writing, what they learned, what they question, what they challenge.
In his book On Writing, famed horror writer Stephen King explains that writing is telepathy. The writer sends their thoughts out by writing, and the reader receives those thoughts by reading. To me, that’s the most thrilling experience of all.
One Thing I’m Sure Of
As we move through these examinations of different categories of what we want I realize more and more that there’s so much more to consider in each of them. It’s hard to imagine ever being completely thorough, and that’s frustrating.
But the one thing this writing has taught me, and I hope has taught you, is that there’s real value in contemplating our intentions, really thinking intently about what we want to experience in the course of our lives. Only a goal that has been set can ever be fulfilled.