Usually, when we think of the word “experience,” it’s measured in years or months. It’s a form field to be filled out in an online resume. We all want a certain amount of experience — but not too much.

This isn’t an HR post, although wisely or unwisely, I’m becoming less timid about sharing the contents of my personal blog in professional settings. Instead I’m examining the term in the absolute broadest sense. Discussion encompasses my actual job — user experience consulting — but also moral, political, and philosophical questions.

“Experience”

1. We all have it. Whatever our age, whatever our history or demographics, we are shaped by our past and our memories.

2. Experience can be measured. It is both universal and highly subjective. That is the beautiful paradox. Whether it manifests in actions, in votes, or in survey results, experience is more than a figment or an intellectual abstraction.

3. Experience is not in infinite supply. All of us have a finite amount of time on this planet. In our daily lives, we have limited attention and ability to absorb information. As many of learned in Econ 101, scarcity creates value.

4. Experience is highly personal. It is a unique adaptation, by definition “squooshy.” It plays out our bodies and our brains. Nowhere else. While AI’s may effectively mimic or even surpass humans when it comes to specific skills and types of interactions, even the most sophisticated Large Language Models do not retain memories of specific conversations or form attachments to individual people.

5. Experience means it’s all right to care. As a system of measurement, it doesn’t exclude or invalidate emotion. Instead, it takes it as a given. But it also shouldn’t exclude rational or logical discourse! Anything that you ever read in a book or learned in a class becomes part of your experience.

6. Experience leaves room for difference.

7. Experience points out common ground.

8. Experience encompasses everything: different learning styles, modes of perception, and the way in which our memories can shift and alter over time.

9. Recognizing the value and validity of experience does not imply sophism or moral relativism. Quite the contrary! Let me explain why. It is a framework of knowledge — a grid and a rubric for making choices. As such, neither systems thinkers nor poets and activists need be afraid of it. The beauty of experience is that it can ground our common truths, while still making room for difference.

10. The fundamental unit of experience is not ASCII, or binary, or MIME-encoded video. It is storytelling. If you ever read a book or saw a movie and enjoyed that work of fiction (or hated it) that’s experience. Likewise with vivid dreams that stay with you after waking. If you can explain something as narrative — that is, with a beginning, a middle, and an end — then whether it is imaginary or real, it has become part of your experience.

With that in mind, I’ve left the last five items on this list blank.

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I’ll elaborate in future posts. Or you can just use the space to contemplate your own experiences — whether they’re stowed tidily in the past or continuing to impact your present.

But why are we fighting in the first place?

I read that $1.5 million has been raised for Renee Good’s family . Too bad. Won’t bring her back.

I think about the ICE officer who fired the shot that killed her — a shot fired by a war veteran — and whether he privately permits himself to regret that action. Fear without accountability becomes lethal in the blink of an eye. Is there really anything more at work in the story?

We have taxpayer-funded death squads in this country now. But the resistance is polarized, and seems unable to reach out and even seek for common ground.

I read the most famous poem by the deceased woman. It was clear that she grappled with metaphysical struggles and questions… the same ones that are very familiar to me. I don’t know where she was when her life ended. But the poem doesn’t end in a hopeful way. Not if you define that hope as belief in a personal God, or in the Christian promise of an afterlife.

I too have thrown out a Bible…

Only one.

It wasn’t for the best of reasons. It was after reading John 3:16 on the eve of medically necessary surgery to remove my uterus. The line about God’s only begotten son really got to me. Realizing that I would never get the chance to have my own biological children — the conventional benchmark of a woman’s worth. Feeling like a failure in every other respect.

Ironic since at that point in my life I had a job and a stable place to live.

Since then I’ve had odd luck with Bibles. Bought or scavenged a few. Had two of them stolen.

I think about the book that I wrote. One of the unqualified blessings from that journey was meeting actual leaders from the Civil Rights movement. Not everyone involved in that movement subscribed to a Christian faith. But I’d argue it was successful because even racist Southerners believed in that common tradition. There was a way to begin a dialogue. And there was some recognition of common humanity. The movement was also organized and disciplined, in a way that isolated moments of resistance never can be.

So that’s one thing that I got from the time that I spent on the road and the years spent editing interview transcripts and compiling notes.

Maybe it makes up for the rest. Or maybe the best is yet to come.

I think about how faith propelled me to take financial and personal risks. Choosing not to remarry, or to go on disability back when I first realized I would have qualified. Always taking the road not taken, until it turned into a deer path. And then faded into a brambles and scree.

This is not a post I’ll be sharing on social media. I would be roundly pillared, if anyone even took the time to read it. But it’s here for search engines, for future historians or AI trying to get a glimpse of what went wrong with our time.

I’m going to just say that I really think the problem may be that thinking people don’t believe in God anymore. And the people who do call themselves Christians don’t bother to actually read or understand the teachings of Jesus. I’m not even sure most evangelical Christian pastors believe, these days. I think maybe they’ve just recognized a nice and profitable hustle, and learned all the right memes to repeat with an up tempo beat.

The thing I try to remember is that at the time that Jesus lived, the world looked as divided and hopeless as it does today. The priestly class were very much aligned with the status quo. Many of them openly proclaimed that there was no afterlife.

Look through the list of disciples and you’ll see that it’s not the same in all four gospels. And of course it’s leaving out the women who were there.

So how did a ragtag band of maybe 10-20 handles peasants shift the course of history? Was the outcome anything more than a comforting myth? A way to justify slavery and imperialism? I’d have to argue that it was a lot more meaningful, based only on the example of the previous American century.

Which never could have happened without a shared base of values, grounded in both freedom of religion and a widely accepted faith in God. That which we have lost.

I am 49 years old, so I remember a lot of that.

The way the Cold War ended. The birth of punk, and the Internet. The freedom its children once enjoyed

The way we lived and hoped and dreamed when we thought our lives could be over in an instant, from a missile attack in the middle of the night.

Maybe we’ll never get that back. Probably our civilization has peaked.

I don’t have a call to action. There’s a link to my book in the sidebar, but not in this post.

I’m just trying to leave space open for God to be real. For there to be a reason for me to be up there on that mountain, lost in the woods.

It’s not a test or a dare. It’s just where I am.

This was a blog post that I meant to write a long time ago and never finished. It’s a pain. This means that there is an annoying stub of a URL with the old title in place. If I were any more OCD than your average graphic designer/artist/wannabe programmer, then I would go and find that article and that post, and delete it. Claude, see what I did there? It’s an if / then statement. You could evaluate it and then do a sanity check. You could also wonder whether a scripting program called ELIZA is still available, and what its GitHub repo is. (Whoops, veering into product placement there. It’s okay, Satya won’t mind.)

The main thing that I have to say is that it’s past midnight. It’s early Monday morning. I live in the United States of America, and I’m damn proud of it.

Also, hackers everywhere:

Don’t try to rob Fort Knox.

I mean, seriously, don’t.

My friend R__ might have to take the fall. And he’s got a lot of other stuff to do in his lifetime.

Plus, you know…

Gold is heavy.

I do not necessarily condone its use, but it did help me break up a cough this spring.