We live in an age that tries to shortcut everything. We read summaries instead of books, watch highlight reels instead of games, scroll through travel photos instead of traveling. We consume secondhand experiences and wonder why we feel strangely empty.

Camus understood that experience is not information. You cannot get it by reading about it or watching someone else go through it. Experience requires that it happen to you, that you be changed by it, that you come out the other side knowing something you could not have known before you went in.

This applies to grief and to joy, to failure and to love. You cannot understand heartbreak by studying it. You cannot know the weight of responsibility until it is yours. You cannot appreciate the simple pleasure of a meal after hunger unless you have been hungry.

This is both the difficulty and the dignity of being alive. No one can undergo your experiences for you. No summary captures what it feels like to stand in the rain after a long drought, or to hear your name spoken with tenderness, or to fail at something you cared about and then get up the next morning anyway.

Stop trying to create experience. Go undergo it.

See also: The Most Living | The Wealth of a Day