Every bad experience becomes a good story

📖📖 My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

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About twelve years ago, I was backpacking in Cambodia. I was so moved after a day exploring Ankor Wat and many of the other most famous temples with friends that I decided to book a second day of visiting temples, even though none of the friends wanted to go.

I hired a tuktuk driver who took me to some of more remote temples. It was monsoon season and that, combined with the remoteness, made for one of the most magical experiences of my life. Stepping, in particular, through the beauty of Banteay Srey, with ditches full of rain water reflecting the sun and the majesty of the temples.

Being by myself allowed for a different type of experience, and allowed me to fully indulge my love of taking photographs. I took some of the most beautiful pictures I ever will - the water, sun and reflections creating something that touches me even now.

I planned that these pictures would be Christmas presents for my family when I returned home, and more.

And then, a few days later, I lost that camera and all the photographs on a bus south to Sihanoukville. Either someone who sat next to me took it as they left, or more likely I just left it in the pocket by my seat, and someone took it as or after the bus clear. A couple of days later, after hassling the bus company, reporting it to (and bribing) the police (and needing to pay for a translator), I had to admit the camera was lost. (Although I did manage to get some bit of paper that the insurance company - once they had got someone in to translate from Khmer - accepted and agreed to replace the camera… which was quite an achievement given the Cambodian police’s refusal to admit there was a crime.)

I was distraught by losing the camera and the pictures - upset about the loss, the stress of trying to recover it, the lost time on a trip of a lifetime, and the humiliation at having made such a stupid mistake.

My friend John then said a thing to me which, to be honest, made me want to punch him in the face.

‘The thing is, Robbie,’ he said. ‘Every bad experience becomes a good story.’

I wanted to punch him but… here I am telling the story, 12 years later, so it’s pretty clear he was right.

That story and what John said came to mind this week as I explored Russ Roberts’ book, Wild Problems.

The main thrust of Roberts’ book is that some problems - wild problems, the ones that are in the complex domain - can’t be solved with the ‘purely rational’ techniques that we and our societies like to pretend are the pinnacle of decision-making.

We can’t make pros and cons lists to decide whether to have children, who to marry, whether to take one job or another… because these things are about more than what Roberts calls ‘narrow utilitarianism’, meaning: more than just will they make us more or less happy on a day-to-day basis.

Anyone who has children knows that it’s at best unclear whether they make us more happy on a day to day basis (and to be honest pretty clear that in a narrow sense, they often don’t), and the pros and cons lists of whether to have children has a pretty clear winner once budget, tiredness and freedom are taken into account.

And yet most people who have children will tell you how central they are to their life. How much meaning they create.

It reminds that years ago I heard the psychologist Jordan Peterson making the case that, generally, happiness is a pretty bad thing to pursue. Meaning, he convincingly argued, is a much better compass to set for yourself.

As I understand it - and this may be Peterson again - humans mostly derive meaning from working towards a goal. From setting ourselves targets and then progressing towards them. (Crucially, not from achieving the goal.)

That’s also the lesson of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey - that there has to be a part in the middle where things are going badly, in the belly of the beast, on the road of trials, in between the trapezes. But on the other side we come out transformed.

I’ve written about this before: how we need to ensure we have enough freedom AND enough purpose in our lives.

Which is all to say: the things that matter in life, the things that make up a life well-lived, the things that Roberts would call a sign of us flourishing, aren’t always things that go well.

In fact, almost without fail, they include times that are incredibly hard. When we wish we could go back. But in the end, when we look back, we’ll be glad we did them. And on some level, we’ll know that they were part of what made that experience so magical, so meaningful.

Or, in other words: every bad experience becomes a good story.

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PS My new book, The Power to Choose: Finding Calm and Connection in a Complex World, is out now! Get your copy here: https://geni.us/powertochoose

This is the latest in a series of articles written using the 12-Minute Method: write for twelve minutes, proof read once with tiny edits and then post online.