What is experience? According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, experience means the conscious events that make up an individual life, the events that make up the conscious past of a community or nation or humankind generally, the direct observation of or participation in events as a basis of knowledge or the fact or state of having been affected by or gained knowledge through direct observation or participation.
These are the most significant definitions of this everyday word that we often use, not being truly aware of the amount of knowledge, emotions and memories it refers to. Huge amounts of data that we store in our head as we live our lives.
Each and every one of us has a constant need to share his or her experiences and memories with the people around us, our beloved ones or just someone we happen to connect with for whatever reason. Books, movies and music are the most common and oldest means with which humans have shared their experiences and thoughts with others.
Browsing the Internet, one comes across thousands of blogs, a little window we decide to open to the world to let everyone know what we did yesterday or show our the pictures from our vacation.
Because what we need to remember is that our need to express ourselves and tell our story applies to little everyday things as well.
I came across an interesting website called Experience project, where anyone can subscribe and write a down a moment of their life, share a secret or a thought over a random topic. At humanexperience.stanford.edu, people’s lives and stories are told with a different, more academic approach, but with the same deep-down need to tell, remember, teach and learn from others.
But where does this need to share and perpetuate our experience actually come from? As doctor Robert Firestone, from Psychology Today, states that “human beings, unlike other species, are cursed with a conscious awareness of their own mortality.”
Knowing that we are on this planet for only a limited period of time, we feel a need to leave traces of our passage. Often we don’t get enough time with our children or grandchildren or friends to tell our story in the way we would like to, to show them all our pictures, to read aloud all our notes.
Tools like Swiss DNA Bank, a secure data storage that provides a will service in order to pass on all information to generations to come, is the ultimate answer to human fear of disappearing and being forgotten.
