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You’re Never Doing Nothing With Your Time

Everything is experience

Kim Witten, PhD
2 min readMar 8, 2024
A woman is lying in bed, scrolling through her phone. The surroundings are barren, with just a few items on a windowsill.
Photo by Shane on Unsplash

When I first moved to the UK to do a PhD, I led seminars on sociolinguistics to undergrads. I helped many students through their final projects. Their assignment was to pick a speech community, focus on one feature of their accent, and present research findings on it.

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! And all of that is rooted in 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.

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Kim Witten, PhD
Kim Witten, PhD

Written by Kim Witten, PhD

Helping all kinds of thinkers make better sense of what they do. Get unstuck every Thursday with Hold That Thought at www.witten.kim/subscribe

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