You’re Never Doing Nothing With Your Time

Everything is experience.

Photo by Chris Lynch on Unsplash

When I first moved to the UK to do a PhD in linguistics, I led seminars to undergrads. I helped many students through their final projects — their assignment was to pick a group of speakers, focus on one feature of their accent, and present research findings.

After introducing this project, I would invariably get several students come to me saying things like, “I grew up in a small town and I’ve done nothing with my life, so I don’t have anything to write about!”

To them, that seems true. But they were overlooking something important.

Just like how everybody has an accent, everybody is part of a speech community. Several of them, in fact! All of that is overlooked experience.

Experience is what you’ve done, including “nothing”

What the students didn’t realise was that everything is experience. Even if they’ve not had hobbies or “done much” with their time, that is something.

Experience is all the missed opportunities, too. The roads not taken. The endless hours of boredom. And enduring longing. Or grief.

It’s often uncinematic. It can be small moments and the absence of drama.

It’s the person who has never left their tiny town and the deep knowledge they have of place, its ways of being and doing, and what makes them different from others.

It’s the alcoholic who has spend their days with the bottle and knows the language of drinking, how people get on with it, and what the perceptions are.

And the person who has travelled about, never settling anywhere, deftly navigating the peculiars of culture and language that others miss. (And they usually have an accent that reflects that non-specific, geographic breadth.)

In sum, everybody has experience. Even that is “what it’s like to feel aimless and stagnate for years on end.” Or, “what it’s like to flit around, never stopping anywhere.” You can fill the blank of “what it’s like to …” with anything at all.

You’ve put in the reps; you know.

Everyone knows something you don’t.

That’s true for you, too. Your history isn’t finite or meaningless. It’s an endless source of insight. I learned something new from every single student who presented their findings. The self-proclaimed “boring” or “uninteresting” groups they came from were new and endlessly fascinating to me and others.

Which is exactly why it is worthwhile to offer a picture of your experience to others. They might broaden their own picture of the world and learn something new.

This is the whole point. Of sharing and of living.

This article first appeared on Medium, Mar 8, 2024.