Experience: the best deceiver.
There are some things I could have only learned from experience:
What it was like to get my heartbroken.
What it's like to become a dad.
What it's like to hold my soulmate in my arms.
What it's like to earn my first dollar.
What it's like to lose someone I love.
I couldn't read about these things. Experiential knowing was the only way.
"Book knowledge" often lacks the power to teach the way experience does. That's why, for thousands of years, people have been saying,
Experience is the best teacher. - Julius Caesar
It's true, experience is an exceptional teacher, it can also be a deceiver.
An example:
We see this all the time when people project the pain from a previous relationship onto a new one. A negative experience taught them that if you trust, you will get hurt. The lesson has been learned and is now ingrained deep into their psyche. So, they put up their defense and keep everyone at a distance, even those who love them. They trust their experience 100% and forfeit any possibility of a healthy, loving, and deep relationship.
Another example:
As a straight, white American male (in America), my experience tells me American doesn't have a problem. I've never been treated unjustly by the police. I have never been passed over for a job opportunity because I have a "black name." I have never been treated differently because of my sexual orientation. I have never been denied a loan due to the color of my skin. I have never been called a derogatory name because of who was was or how I look. The generational trauma of slavery does not exist in my family. I have never experienced prejudice of any kind, personally. So, based on my Experience, American is great. That's my personal experience.
Relying strictly on my personal experience is to be culpable in my own ignorance.
Here's a perspective that may help us extract this idea's power without relying on our personal experience too much.
More than personal experience:
What if we begin seeing this quote as ALL experience is the best teacher and not just personal experience?
This way of living is often lost on the western way of seeing the world.
The desire to be self-made, individual, tough, rational, and pragmatic, at times, creates toxic self-reliance.
Think about a time in your life when you needed help and didn't ask for it. Maybe it was because you were too proud, embarrassed, or perhaps, you didn't want anyone to know the pain you were experiencing. We've all been there. And that in many ways, is the American way.
What if we took a more communal approach to "Experience is the best teacher"?
Personal experience is an excellent teacher, and when we rely too much on our experience, we forfeit the richness and depth of the human experience.
The only way for experience to be the best teacher is to listen to others' experiences and reflect on our own. This will give us a more open and broad understanding of what is true and what is not.
You may wonder, how do we know who to trust?
The answer; Relationship.
In many ways, we have chosen echo chambers over diversity of thought, experience, and opinion.
We complain about how bias the media is and how they are so one-sided. Then, we click on our social media accounts and unfriend anyone who disagrees with us. We don't have healthy debates over dinner with neighbors. We only invite people who see the world as we do.
We call it a community when it's really a cult.
Self-deception is the most sinister form of blindness. It's one thing to be a victim of false information; it's worse to choose it.
Let’s instead be willing to hold our experience and opinion with an open hand and develop relationships with people who see the world differently.
The only way to know where your blind spots are is to be in a relationship with someone who can see them.
This is why opposites attract in intimate relationships. They see the world differently, and as a result, they fill in the gaps for each other.
As Dale Carnegie said,
"If two people always agree, one of them is unnecessary."
What would happen if we were deliberate in becoming close to those who see the world differently, not intending to change them, instead, with intent to change ourselves?