I would love to get some examples on how “life experience” in general is necessary for an informed and rational opinion on a subject. The examples in these comments seem to relate to not “life experience” but specific experience (i.e. doing tracings, playing chess, etc.) Yet people seem to think that “life experience” in general adds “something” and that further conversation on the subject cannot substitute for it.
As someone whose peer group is generally much older than me, I can say from comparing myself to others that “life experience” doesn’t add to your knowlege or intelligence or mental development, past a certain age. What it does add is context. As you get older, your context shifts—certain things that you thought were important no longer are important and certain things become more important. I think it’s explaining this context shift that is so difficult (but not impossible!)
For instance, my younger self had serious worries about her relationship that now seem trivial. This is because I’ve learned that communication and trust are much more important to having a healthy relationship than physically being close to someone. And this context shift comes from simply life experiences in dealing with people.
Sports… That requires a form of Life Experience in order to gain an informed set of opinions on the subject.
When playing something like Soccer/Football, the basic skills may be imparted through training, yet the ability to successfully play with others on a field is going to take experience in learning how the whole of a team interacts both with you and against you (speaking in third person).
Another area where I understand that Life-Experience is not to be communicated is in the field of certain types of military, paramilitary or intelligence gathering activities. Like Art, there are basic skills which must be learned through your typical learning patterns, yet the application of those skills is something that I learned (in VERY hard and dangerous situations) only through life experience. My would be peers tried to tell me, and warn me as best they could. Told me that there were various situations that would come up for which there was no fixed answer, no set play, and that only having a set of basic skills that were honed as well as could be would save my pitiful ass once I found myself in those situations (fortunately for me, I recalled the words of my art teacher “You won’t know why you are doing these things until after you have done them.”)… And, since I had paid attention to the basic skill set needed, I was able to put it to good use to save my skin and that of others when the time came. It was only by life experience that I learned about the communities and personalities involved. Those are things that cannot be learned from a book.
Just like on a sports field, there are personalities and the character of the moment that arises in a play that cannot be taught, and must be learned through doing.
Even doing those tracings that I mentioned. We got something out of that that the other students who didn’t put in their time would spend years to learn, and it was something that even a full explanation by our instructor wouldn’t have taught us (as we all realized after having done what we were told). We learned that we needed to have a reflexive ability to react in order to be able to take in a situation, rather than having to concentrate upon things that should be instinctive, and thus miss out on an opportunity to learn something we would miss otherwise.
I would love to get some examples on how “life experience” in general is necessary for an informed and rational opinion on a subject. The examples in these comments seem to relate to not “life experience” but specific experience (i.e. doing tracings, playing chess, etc.) Yet people seem to think that “life experience” in general adds “something” and that further conversation on the subject cannot substitute for it.
As someone whose peer group is generally much older than me, I can say from comparing myself to others that “life experience” doesn’t add to your knowlege or intelligence or mental development, past a certain age. What it does add is context. As you get older, your context shifts—certain things that you thought were important no longer are important and certain things become more important. I think it’s explaining this context shift that is so difficult (but not impossible!)
For instance, my younger self had serious worries about her relationship that now seem trivial. This is because I’ve learned that communication and trust are much more important to having a healthy relationship than physically being close to someone. And this context shift comes from simply life experiences in dealing with people.
Sports… That requires a form of Life Experience in order to gain an informed set of opinions on the subject.
When playing something like Soccer/Football, the basic skills may be imparted through training, yet the ability to successfully play with others on a field is going to take experience in learning how the whole of a team interacts both with you and against you (speaking in third person).
Another area where I understand that Life-Experience is not to be communicated is in the field of certain types of military, paramilitary or intelligence gathering activities. Like Art, there are basic skills which must be learned through your typical learning patterns, yet the application of those skills is something that I learned (in VERY hard and dangerous situations) only through life experience. My would be peers tried to tell me, and warn me as best they could. Told me that there were various situations that would come up for which there was no fixed answer, no set play, and that only having a set of basic skills that were honed as well as could be would save my pitiful ass once I found myself in those situations (fortunately for me, I recalled the words of my art teacher “You won’t know why you are doing these things until after you have done them.”)… And, since I had paid attention to the basic skill set needed, I was able to put it to good use to save my skin and that of others when the time came. It was only by life experience that I learned about the communities and personalities involved. Those are things that cannot be learned from a book.
Just like on a sports field, there are personalities and the character of the moment that arises in a play that cannot be taught, and must be learned through doing.
Even doing those tracings that I mentioned. We got something out of that that the other students who didn’t put in their time would spend years to learn, and it was something that even a full explanation by our instructor wouldn’t have taught us (as we all realized after having done what we were told). We learned that we needed to have a reflexive ability to react in order to be able to take in a situation, rather than having to concentrate upon things that should be instinctive, and thus miss out on an opportunity to learn something we would miss otherwise.