Semantics, right? I suppose, to a degree, you could say so. I tend to think of life experience as the wrinkles around my eyes and mouth, the lines in my face. Lived experience is more like the scars and the indelible memories of life-altering events.
Why lived experience carries more weight in some conversations
I tell one story in GBOGFY about pickup truck surfing on a back road in a small town in Maine. In that story, which was not difficult to recall whatsoever, I describe an experience that involved some pretty acute physical pain and one very valuable life lesson. This was like the adult equivalent of burning your hand on a hot stovetop or sticking a fork in an electrical outlet. This particular experience was enough to make sure I would never again, for the rest of my life, stand up in the bed of a moving pickup truck. I have a story about tequila, repeated vomiting and a night spent on a friend’s lawn, too, which resulted in a decade and a half, maybe two, of abstaining from that particular libation. Maybe I will go into that one in my next book.
Lived experience vs life experience in personal storytelling
We all have both types of experience, I would presume– at least to some degree. However, having a lot of lived experience from which to draw makes it so much easier to write about your life; at least it’s done so for me so far.
I started out fairly poor in a small town, I went to public schools and smoked cigarettes in my teens and sang in a rock and roll band toward the end of high school. I had a number of great teachers and made some close friends along the way who I still speak to (text) today. It’s when I begin to describe a particular day in great detail and spend a thousand words detailing the events of that one day I tried “haying”. Yeah, haying is a fucking verb in rural Maine; or at least it was in the 80’s. That’s another story for another book. That was definitely lived experience.
Why this matters beyond semantics
Eh, I don’t know that it necessarily does matter to many of you who may be reading this thinking I am prattling on about nothing. However, if you choose to accept the difference in the two and carry the distinction with you, you may have a clearer idea about how to tell a story using a combination of just the right amount of each.
I think of further vs farther and that vs who and all the grammatical nerd porn that exists. Like “I couldn’t care less”, which is one that I am absolutely a stickler on. If you say you “could care less”, it gives me the impression you don’t think about the meaning or grammar of the phrases you hear and repeat. Doesn’t make you less of a person or anything, it just tells me something about you. And I am absolutely judging you.
So which phrase should you use?
It’s pretty simple; “life experience” for general, sweeping descriptions of a type of experience and “lived experience” for when you get more granular. Easy! For me, you can only spend so much time on life experience before I get bored listening to you. I need some lived experience, something I can really relate to, if I am going to spend more than 10 minutes listening before saying I need to refill my cocktail or take a piss and then find someone else to chat with.
The deeper truth under lived experience vs life experience
The stages of my life to this point absolutely have helped to shape who I am and no doubt a number of the things I seek out in life. High school. College. First job. Second job. Paper route at 12-14 years old may not really qualify as a job (and I do have some “lived experiences” within that stage of my life during middle and early high school).
The lived experiences that comprise a collection of stories that could fill a 2,000 page book is the stuff that makes me worth listening to at a party and the reason you might just come back for more after you actually do fill your drink and take a leak.
Storytelling is really just about using enough lived experience to keep it interesting, being a little self-deprecating and using enough humor to properly season your discourse or perhaps monologue once the hook is set.
OK, I have the perfect example! See that image at the top of this post? “Life experience” is riding down the road, past that traditional red barn and concrete silo on a warm day with the sun on my back and RATT in my helmet playing “Wanted Man”. “Lived experience” is the flat tire I got from a rusty old six penny nail stranding me on the side of Road WW in Wisconsin. This event is followed by me inspecting the flat, wondering what the hell I am going to do when an early model Ford pickup stops just ahead of me on the shoulder, the operator of the truck stepping out and asking me if I need some help. It’s the hour and 40 minutes that follows, wherein I realize that while perhaps unlucky in getting a flat, I am lucky enough to have caught that stupid nail at just the right time and place to end up attracting the nicest Wisconsin couple you could ever want to meet. It’s our conversation as we set out to get a tire repair kit and then return to the bike, which is actually not even mine, but a test ride from a dealership 21 miles southeast of where I picked up that rusty, bent shitty little nail that added some adventure to my life that sunny afternoon just north of the Illinois border.
