The Problems With 'Lived Experience'

What “Lived Experience” Can, and Can't, Tell Us About the World

In recent years, the phrase “lived experience” has become a popular tool in public conversations, especially around identity, race, gender, and social justice. At its best, it reminds us that personal experience matters. Listening to individuals, especially those from minority groups, can reveal important truths that official data and traditional narratives miss.

However, a good idea becomes bad when taken too far. And that’s exactly what’s happened with “lived experience.”

Instead of being seen as a perspective worth considering, the “lived experience” of certain minorities is increasingly treated as unquestionable truth. In some circles, a minority simply saying, “This is my experience” shuts down the conversation. Disagreeing or even asking questions gets you accused of disrespect or worse.

Experience Matters, But It Isn’t Always Right

An expression of one’s personal experience is instructive. But it’s also limited and flawed. We all see the world through the lens of our memories, emotions, beliefs, and biases. Two people can live through the same event and walk away with different, and even contradictory, views of what happened.

Psychologists have long shown that people’s memories are unreliable, their self-perceptions are often skewed, and that we all have blind spots about ourselves and our experiences. DNA-based exonerations have shown that over 70% of wrongful convictions involved mistaken eyewitness accounts. This is why we should be open to the idea that even our strong memories are distorted and biased. While someone’s story should be heard and taken seriously, it should never be accepted without question.

As clinical psychology professor Michael Karson put it, “Lived experience can be a claim that what the person is aware of is all there is, with no allowance for the way the narrative may be self-serving or just plain wrong.”

In other words, feeling something deeply doesn’t make it true. And treating every personal account as automatically correct isn’t respectful, it’s intellectually unsound.

“You Weren’t There” or “You Aren’t a Minority” Isn’t the End of the Discussion

One common move in debates these days is to say, “You can’t understand, because you weren’t there” or “You can’t understand because you don’t have my minority identity.” That’s often true to some extent. No one can fully grasp what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. However, this line is increasingly being used not to invite empathy, but to shut down disagreement entirely.

What’s more, many ideological activists only apply this rule when it supports their beliefs. Take race, for example. Progressive activists often tell us to “listen to black voices,” but in reality they want you to listen only to black voices that agree with them. Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates are held up as authentic spokesmen for the black experience, while blacks with different perspectives, such as Glenn Loury and Coleman Hughes, are dismissed or ignored. All of these men are black. All have lived experiences. Why do some count and others don’t?

Kimi Katiti, a black artist and writer, noticed this double standard. In her essay, “We Love ‘Lived Experience’...Until It Undermines the Narrative,” she wrote:

“When I identified as a victim, my lived experience was lauded by all as authentic. However, when I came out as a proudly free-thinking black individual, and no longer claimed victimhood as a part of my identity, my lived experience was rejected and discredited by both friends and strangers alike”

There’s a widespread idea that only people from a given minority group can talk about certain issues. While it’s often important to focus on what they have to say so they aren’t drowned out, this shouldn’t mean that outsiders have no right or ability to contribute thoughtfully. No group holds a monopoly on insight.

Common Sense Matters

One of the biggest problems with this trend is that it asks people to suspend basic common sense.

For example, assertions that all white people are oppressors and all minorities are victims, and that a minority’s subjective expression is unquestionable truth, aren’t just factually wrong, to most people they are obviously wrong. Many will point out that when three black people experience the same situation differently, it’s nonsensical to say that each ‘lived experience’ is the final word. However, in certain academic and activist spaces, these claims are expected to be treated like gospel.

Much of this stems from radical ideologies that push abstract theories disconnected from how real people live and think, and their lived experiences. The ideologues reject open debate and expect blind agreement.

Ideas that can’t survive contact with everyday reality and what people know are doomed to fail. People eventually push back, not because they’re bigots, but because they have working brains.

Coddling Minorities and Young People Doesn’t Help Them

This way of thinking is especially harmful to young people. When we tell teenagers, college students, and young minorities that their feelings are always valid, that their personal experiences can’t be questioned, and that disagreement is a form of harm, we’re not empowering them. We’re infantilizing them.

Being challenged, revising your views, and learning from mistakes is how people grow. Shielding people from discomfort doesn’t build strength. It leaves them emotionally immature and intellectually unprepared for the real world.

“Lived experience” has value. But it should be a part of the conversation, not the end. If someone shares a personal story, the respectful thing to do is to listen, but also to think, ask questions, and consider how it fits with other evidence and perspectives.

References

Katiti, K. (2024, June 4). We Love ‘Lived Experience’...Until It Undermines the Narrative. Journal of Free Black Thought.

Haidt, J. (2019, January 10). By mollycoddling our children, we’re fuelling mental illness in teenagers. The Guardian.

Loftus, E. (2017). How Can Our Memories Be Manipulated? National Public Radio.

Riley, N & Font, S. (2023, October 4). The problem with “lived experience”. American Enterprise Institute.

Karson, M. (2021, July 26). The problem with claims of “lived experience”. Psychology Today.

Hsiao, T. (2022). The lived experience fallacy. National Association of Scholars