Experience versus Memories

Experience Is the Raw Material of Meaning

The Matterhorn is behind me as I check our route on a screen

I have a post-it note on my desk that says: “Memory is all we have.” I wrote it more than six years ago while studying the work of the neuroscientist Eric Kandel for an AI project. It was meant as a reminder that when memory fails, who we are to ourselves is lost.

But while reflecting on that belief, I began to wonder if I had it wrong. Perhaps raw experience is what truly matters. This doubt raises essential questions: What gives a moment its weight? What makes one experience settle in the psyche like pebbles in a riverbed, while another washes past without leaving a trace?

These are not idle questions for memoirists or philosophers alone; they are the architecture of identity. The answer, I’ve come to believe, lies in the uneasy relationship between experience, memory, and significance. But this understanding required me to begin, as many of us must, by recognizing the quiet fallacies that shape our beliefs, starting with an error I had mistaken for truth.

I once assumed memory was the passive archive of experience, the residue of things lived. That belief, handed down through unexamined tradition, was comforting, but wrong. Memory is not a storage device. It is a performance. It doesn’t record the past so much as it reanimates it. The French philosopher Henri Bergson argued that memory is not a thing we have but an act we do. We retrieve, rearrange, reassign. We exaggerate, with feeling. Daniel Schacter writes:

“Human memory is not a literal reproduction of the past, but instead relies on constructive processes that are sometimes prone to error and distortion.”

This matters, because significance, that holy aura we assign to “important” memories, is not baked into the experience itself. T.S. Eliot once wrote:

“We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”

Eliot’s line is not merely poetic. It captures the fact that memory is not about preserving experience intact but reencountering it with altered understanding. Meaning arrives late. It emerges in the aftermath. A kiss, a phone call, a missed turn, each can be upgraded or downgraded in meaning depending on what follows. Meaning is retroactive, awarded like a posthumous medal.

But in the digital age, what happens to meaning when experience itself is never encountered raw? When every moment is pre-filtered, pre-judged, and algorithmically sorted before we even live it? Christine Rosen, in her brilliant book The Extinction of Experience, argues that we are losing the kinds of experiences that memory relies upon, the undatabased, unmediated moments that allow for later reflection and reconstitution. Our experiences are stuck to a screen!

She gives concrete examples: choosing a restaurant without checking reviews on the Internet, settling a bet without using Google, navigating without GPS. These aren't quaint anecdotes of nostalgia, they are moments of uncertainty and risk that seed memory with the stuff of future meaning. Their extinction impoverishes the narrative raw material of our lives.

Instead of the “Human Condition,” we increasingly inhabit what Rosen calls the “User Experience”: not embodied, finite, and reflexive, but disembodied, trackable, and endlessly mediated. This is not a shift in style. It is a transformation in substance. Where once we interpreted life through the irregularity of sensation and error, we now live within engineered precision. Meaning, in such a system, is a product feature, baked in, not discovered.

We make this trade willingly, seduced by the promise of a frictionless, risk-free existence, where spontaneity is replaced by convenience, uncertainty by reviews, and exploration by personalization. Experience becomes something marketed, measured, and managed.

What we lose is more than just the thrill of spontaneity. We lose the disciplines that bind body and mind. Handwriting, Rosen notes, is in decline, not only a skill, but a way of thinking. The patient rituals of waiting, the awkward silences between strangers, the shared gaze across a room, all are smoothed over by digital convenience. Boredom, once a crucible for creativity, is now treated as a design flaw to be eliminated.

Memory, as Eliot suggests, restores meaning in a different form. But how can it do this when the original form was synthetic to begin with? You cannot revisit what you never truly visited. You cannot reconstruct a moment that was never constructed but merely consumed. In a world where experience is pre-processed, memory becomes a simulation of a simulation.

The implications are personal and civilizational. Rosen describes how the digital age erodes face-to-face interaction, cultivates a culture of voyeurs rather than participants, and redefines public space as merely another WiFi hotspot. The extinction of experience leads not only to a thinner self but to a fractured polity. Empathy declines. Civility decays. People film a tragedy instead of intervening. A suicidal man on a bridge becomes a photo backdrop.

This is why trauma resists our tidy memories. It is the ultimate undatabased experience, an event that shatters curated narratives and refuses coherence. It exposes the limits of our engineered lives, erupting with a force that cannot be tagged or optimized. And so we create counterfactuals, the road not taken, as a coping mechanism. As Rosen observes, we forget not by deletion but by substitution. We rewrite reality in a more bearable key.

Even forgetting has changed. We used to forget what lacked relevance. Now we forget what cannot be monetized or indexed. What cannot compete with the scroll falls away. The phrase “You had to be there” once honored the irreplaceable. Now it sounds like a failure to post.

Yet the ache of loss is itself a kind of hope. We miss the friction, the face-to-face tension, the awkward waiting that once made us human. We crave the undatabased experience not because it is better, but because it is ours. Rosen reminds us: extinction is not inevitable. It is a choice.

To live well is not merely to accumulate experiences but to choose ones that resist mediation. To allow room for the unfiltered, the awkward, the analog. The most important moment of your life will not announce itself with push notifications. It may be a pause, a breath, the hush before a door closes. As René Girard wrote:

“Recipes are not what we need… our need is to escape from meaninglessness.”

Only later, when you’ve stepped outside, left your phone behind, and let the world back in, does something surface. Not a revelation, but a detail: the way the light caught a friend’s face during a forest walk, or the sound of snow under your shoes. Something too small to photograph and too human to be engineered.

That’s when memory stirs. Not the memory you post, but the one that finds you because you lived it fully, without trying to prove it. And that’s the only kind that lasts. You had to be there. Really there.

Stay curious

Colin