Rex Kerr
3 min readApr 20, 2023

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Everyone else has been commenting on the relationship angle, so I'd like to have a go at the "lived experience" angle.

The problem with lived experience is that it's an important-sounding phrase that means "how I interpreted things, with all my personal flaws, biases, limitations, and all the limitations of me only having my own experiences". That this is an absurdly unreliable way to come to an objective understanding of anything remotely non-obvious is most clearly exemplified by noting that those people who most loudly trumpet it simultaneously reject the lived experiences that aren't the right ones.

This dovetails into the idea of "narrative". Of course, if you want to tell a particular story, only some "lived experiences" are going to advance your particular plot. So you tell those and not others: this advances the narrative.

This also highlights why narrative is utter rubbish when it comes to understanding anything objective: it's covert license to engage in the most egregious sort of cherry-picking while simultaneously feeling virtuous about it.

The idea of "lived experience" is a good counter to gaslighting that claims that what happened to you didn't even happen or that what you feel isn't what you feel. It protects from unwarranted intrusion of objective claims into the personal subjective realm. It also can play a critical role in revealing when some widely-accepted claim is actually wrong: "you say this is always true but I have a counterexample."

The framing of things as "narrative" is brilliant both as a pedagogical technique--we intuitively really get narratives--and as a caution about the gap between self-produced narrative and objective reality, because once you start thinking about narrative seriously, a very natural question is, "Could I tell this story a different way? From a different perspective? Is that way equally valid? If so, but they have different implications, is there even a 'true implication' that should be drawn, and if so, what is it?" However, all too often narrative is--for people who advocate it--scored not based on degree of truth or pedagogical effectiveness, but on their perception of what counts as virtue.

But, anyway, if you find people not respecting your "lived experience" while expecting that you respect others', I think it's likely because it was never really about actually caring about people individually. It was about being able to get away with sloppy thinking and bad reasoning while wearing the Hat of Virtue. And I wouldn't hold it against them particularly, either, because rationalizations like this are a core part of how our cognition works (see, for instance, The Righteous Mind). Even knowing that there's a little man behind the curtain pulling levers doesn't always give us the ability to tell him to cut it out even in ourselves, let alone others.

Personally, I find the whole "lived experience" & company a self-contradictory muddle of nonsense and just try to stay clear, or at least not take it any more seriously than if it's just someone telling me how they feel, or asking about advice on how to get things to come out differently in their lives. (I always take seriously that something is important to someone--even if the reasoning is bonkers--because the feeling is real and makes an actual difference to their well-being.)

Note: "lived experience", "narrative", "my truth", and so on are far from the only sources of self-contradictory nonsense. If nonsense is a large pie, that perspective has only served itself one slice.

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Rex Kerr
Rex Kerr

Written by Rex Kerr

One who rejoices when everything is made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Sayer of things that may be wrong, but not so bad that they're not even wrong.

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