Experience is everything.

Knowledge, identity, understanding, and skill all come from experience. It is the dark and thrilling compost heap where we level up.

You cannot shortcut experience. The internet may try to convince you that information and virtual-experience is all you need, but that’s a life-wasting mirage.

Watching an expert doesn’t make you an expert. Food channels cannot satisfy your hunger. Pornography can’t give you the experience of loving someone.

Passively consuming online content is one of the least-experiential things you can do. The little hits of dopamine may fill you with the feeling of progress, but as soon as the video ends you wonder “what was Sabine talking about in the middle again?”

Life isn’t to be optimised or outsourced (both forms of hiding). It is to be lived as a human-animal because that is what we are.

But if you really want to squeeze the most juice from life:

• get your hands dirty,
• keep your eyes open,
• learn how to listen,
• clear your mind,
• follow your dreams,
• listen to your heart,
• don’t follow leaders and watch your pawking metaws,
• and beware clichéd advice.