Modern wisdom is wrong. We need things, not experiences.
The blood-red Gretsch guitar hangs on the wall next to my writing desk.
The neck is walnut, inlaid with pearl fret markers; the volume and tone knobs are a golden tortoiseshell; two silver humbucker pick-ups rest beneath the strings.
When I sit down to play, with nowhere near the skill this guitar deserves, its wide-body curve rests snugly on my knee. The action is comfortable and smooth, the tone mellow and full.
At certain times of day, light reflects off the body of the guitar, casting oblique patterns on the wall. Every hour, depending on the weather, it appears slightly different.
It is a thing of beauty, this blood-red Gretsch. It is a 40th birthday gift from my family that I will always treasure.
Modern wisdom would suggest, however, that for such a milestone birthday, I should have done something remarkable, flown somewhere picturesque, ticked a box off the bucket list, collected memories, taken a few gigabytes of pictures — had an experience.
But what would I now have left?
A set of digital images stored out of sight in an iCloud drive; memories only I can see; one or two stories the family can share, the details cloudy and changing over time.
Instead, when my kids visit me at my desk, we look together at the guitar they gave me. We take it off the wall and strum it, I show them where to place their fingers; they ask questions about why I play guitar and who is this David Boogie (Bowie) I keep talking about?
When I die, the blood-red Gretsch will go to them. They will share it with their kids and tell them that grandad used to play. It will be more than a faded memory, more than pixels in a database; it will be a real and living artifact, a tangible and shared piece of history.
In an age of the ephemeral and transient, these are the gifts of the physical and permanent.
Non-Things
The world today sees things differently.
Society has embraced what the media theorist Vilém Flusser described as ‘non-things’, or what we call ‘information’. We have come to value the novelty and consumption of information over the stability and possession of things.
Writing in his superb book, also called ‘Non-Things’, South Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han argues that the terrestrial order (things of the earth) is being replaced by the digital order.
“We are today experiencing the transition from the age of things to the age of non-things. Information, rather than things, determines the lifeworld…Things are the calm centres of life. They have been wholly enveloped by information.”
We have become addicted to information, and thus to experiences. Our need for the next hit of dopamine compels us to seek out the next experience, which provides us with the ingredients to create fresh information, as we document the experience for our digital lives.
Han continues:
“Information is anything but the calm centre of life. It is not possible to linger on information. It is relevant only fleetingly. It lives off its capacity to surprise. Information’s fleetingness alone can account for the fact that information destabilizes life. The tsunami of information agitates our cognitive system…”
If you’ve felt a lack of stability, a sense of agitation, a sense that everyone is rushing around concerned with the next thing to do, this is why.
The real is taking on the transient and ephemeral nature of the digital. Our once-stable physical world increasingly reflects the unstable digital world. The shelf-life of everything is becoming shorter.
‘Fast fashion’ churns out cheap clothing en masse to keep pace with social media trends; ‘planned obsolescence’ is built into expensive MacBooks and iPhones, and ‘right to repair’ legislation is challenged by manufacturers.
Objects of previous longevity are not immune. Cars are paper-thin and cheaper to scrap than repair; tools break easily; houses, once built to last centuries, now barely last decades.
At a macro level, jobs are absorbed into the short-term ‘gig economy’ and relationships are reduced to the milliseconds between left and right swipes.
Life as infinite scroll
‘Infinite scroll’ is the design term for the feature that allows us to flick endlessly through our social media feeds, one post instantly following another, without end.
(Aza Raskin, who invented infinite scroll in 2006, has said he deeply regrets its creation.)
Real life has become an infinite scroll, every moment a fleeting item to be rapidly replaced by something new. The ground shifts constantly under our feet and we have no rock on which to anchor ourselves.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love a memorable experience. One of my best memories is backpacking around the UK to see Radiohead live in their hometown of Oxford, with Sigur Ros and Beck supporting. An unforgettable night.
But tellingly, I kept the ticket stub. Far more than any virtual memory, it’s the stub that anchors me to that time and place, precisely because it’s a rare, physical memento. There’s a reason that merchandise is popular at shows — your concert video will be forgotten or deleted, but that OK Computer t-shirt will last forever.
The same applies to travel. I love to visit new places, but the experience quickly fades into the hazy outline of a few key moments, while the photos disappear into a digital vault (or disappear completely from social media) and the next destination takes priority.
But on my wall hangs a small framed print purchased 15 years ago from a market stall in Istanbul. Like the Radiohead ticket stub, it takes me back to the minarets and the call to prayer and coffee on the rooftops. It is a far more evocative memento than any Facebook post.
The value of an experience does not survive the translation into information but is actively destroyed by it, while the focus of the experience becomes collateral damage.
Social media attracts vast crowds to the same places, drawn by the scent of novelty and surprise. Venice and Barcelona buckle under the weight of numbers and Mt Everest has queues up the lethal Khumbu Icefall.
Experiences are now a disposable consumer good, information to be consumed and forgotten. They become not moments of unique or personal significance, but performative items to tick off a list.
Some may argue that the value of ‘experience’ is inherently intangible; that its virtue is in what we learn, or how we ‘grow’, or how our eyes are opened to the new in some original way.
My rebuttal is that, firstly, it’s a hallmark of Optimaddiction to dress up all we do as part of an eternal process of self-improvement. This argument for experience is no different. Byung-Chul Han describes this attitude as “the more I experience, the more I am.”
Secondly, there’s little that’s original about doing the same thing as everyone else. Take this example of travel-as-Instagram from a famous spot in my homeland of New Zealand:
Finally, it’s an argument contradicted by modern behavior. Again, from ‘Non-Things’:
“Today, we pursue information without gaining knowledge…We communicate incessantly without participating in a community. We collect vast quantities of data without following up on our recollections. We accumulate ‘friends’ and ‘followers’ without meeting an Other. In this way, information develops a form of life that has no stability or duration.”
Whatever we learn from an experience is quickly replaced by the next ‘lesson’ or piece of information. It is not absorbed. Our eyes are ‘opened’ by one moment, then immediately ‘opened’ again by the next.
This transience is destructive. It contributes to the sense that everything — from emotions to things to people — is throwaway and temporary.
Byung-Chul Han describes this as a shift from possessing to experiencing:
“It seems that people are no longer able to dwell with things or to imbue them with life and make them their faithful companions…Now, we no longer want to be tied to things or people. Ties are untimely. They restrict the space of possible experiences, that is, freedom in the sense of consumption. We even expect the consumption of things to provide us with experiences. The informational content of things, for instance their brands, is more important than their use value.”
Having worked in marketing and design for years, this is exactly how consumption is treated. Brands speak about the ‘customer experience’, the ‘brand experience’, or the ‘retail experience’. Every consumer expects a special, individual experience, and companies spend vast amounts of time and money to design and deliver ‘hyper-personalised’ experiences.
The entire act of marketing is ultimately an appeal to experience and emotion, while the product is largely secondary. As Byung-Chul Han says, “they [products] come loaded with prefabricated ideas and emotions…hardly anything of the consumer’s life enters into them.”
Indeed, the product itself also no longer sticks around long enough to become something central to its owner’s life. This is desirable and deliberate on the brand’s part, as their goal is to quickly define what a customer has just bought as no longer good enough, and nudge them toward the next offering.
By abandoning the physical and permanent, however, we abandon control. We are easily manipulated by transient information, our behavior and choices determined by invisible algorithms, our lives shaped by unseen hands.
We see this today in the dissolving bonds of communities, the decrease in civility, the effect of social media on our psychology, and the impact of consumerism on our environment.
It is time to turn this around. We must have physical things we commit to, things we jealously possess, things we invest in emotionally for the long term. They will keep us grounded, they will act as a shield against the transience of modern life.
This is not a call for consumption, but curation. Curation implies care and purposeful selection. Buy that painting you saw, invest in that handmade axe, collect those antique brooches… find and treasure those things, imbue them with something of yourself, then pass them on to others.
Experiences will come and go, but things will remain forever.
For my part, it’s time for guitar practice.
