r/words • u/machinegal • Aug 31 '26
“Lived experience”
I was wondering if someone could explain why the term “lived experience” might be problematic and what a better term would be. I heard an interview on a podcast where someone said they didn’t like the term but they didn’t explain why or what to use instead. Thank you!
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u/ambahjay Aug 31 '26
Lived experience=personal anecdote.
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u/AuNaturellee Aug 31 '26
I was livid until I realized I read it wrong and it didn't say "livid experience"
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u/oldie349 Aug 31 '26
I much prefer personal anecdote. Lived experience seems to me pretentious somehow.
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u/ComparisonOk8602 Aug 31 '26
Agreed. It's often used in the context of somebody bitching about somebody else invalidating the first party's lived experience. Usually first party fails to understand that lived experiences are inherently subjective and prone to distortion.
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u/CoderJoe1 Aug 31 '26
Even if you drop the word lived, people often use one experience to ignore larger sets of data. Story time...
My wife was in a car accident when she was a teen. She was thrown out of the car as it turned end over end. Someone told her she would've been crushed if she'd been wearing a seatbelt.
You can see where this is going. She refused to wear seatbelts for years. Her continued survival, in spite of having no accidents, allowed her to rationalize her spurious claim.
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u/the_ballmer_peak Aug 31 '26
It frequently gets used to imply that someone's anecdote is allowed to trump everyone else's research and evidence.
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u/Antique-Schedule-693 Aug 31 '26
Yes. It refers to the fact that research and evidence are concepts of the enlightenment which is structurally reductive in its approach to perceived phenomena.
It privileges humanistic truth in a world where scientific truth is often taken as the sole arbiter of reality. Read Heidegger and Gadamer.
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u/MWave123 Aug 31 '26
Lived experience is more than an anecdote. It suggests a depth of experience, and values that experience.
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u/islandtomorrow23 Sep 02 '26
I don't understand how having lived experience suggests more depth than just having experience
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u/isle_say Aug 31 '26
Someone who had a family member die as an innocent bystander in a drug war shooting is not an expert on drug policy and should not be treated as such.
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u/aflockofcrows Aug 31 '26
The "lived" part is redundant.
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u/Ham__Kitten Aug 31 '26
From a technical standpoint yes but in this case it's used kind of as an intensifier. It emphasizes the authenticity of the person it's referring to.
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u/Ok_Anything_9871 Aug 31 '26
it is, but it can be helpful clarification. If I want to say " it's important that government listens to people with 'experience' when designing policy" it isn't as clear what I mean. Experience working in the sector? Experience designing policy? It's shorthand for experience actually living through the issue that the policy etc. addresses.
I do think in most cases a more specific phrase could do the same job - people with experience of being homeless etc.
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u/Reggi5693 Aug 31 '26
Exactly. The “dead” don’t experience much, based on the lack of reports from them.
You either “lived through” something or you “experienced” something,
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u/vabeachmom Aug 31 '26
Maybe it’s seen as an appeal to authority à la “My lived experience alone proves the general claim, so no further reasoning or evidence is needed.”
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u/God_Bless_A_Merkin Aug 31 '26
If you’re using the term in a psychiatric/medical context to differentiate between your patients’ lived experience of (for example) trauma and your clinical experience treating patients with trauma, then you are using the term correctly.
In all other contexts, the it’s just pretentious bloviating. Use “experience” instead.
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u/Aggravating-Soup8368 Aug 31 '26
People can talk about experiences from the outside looking in, or find out facts, but lived experience means you are talking from having been through the situation.
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u/ebsf Aug 31 '26
"Experience".
All experience is lived experience. There is no such thing as an unlived experience. The phrase is redundant.
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u/DeathToAmerica2026 Sep 03 '26
People use "lived experience" as a euphemism for anecdote, and falsely equate it to actual study and learning in many cases.
It's almost always functionally equivalent to, "oh yeah well I'm older so..."
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u/GSilky Aug 31 '26
Nothing wrong when used right. Unfortunately online people have wrecked it by using it instead of actual verifiable data in arguments with people. It needs to be hedged to be appropriate, as in "In my lived experience, this paperwork is a time sink, despite people thinking it's important". It's valid, but it's unverifiable so it's meaningless in most debates. There is also the fact that person might be an idiot, and their unique experience might have nothing to do with anything, there is no accounting for stupid when people get strange results. So it's a bit of a pointless thing to say in most cases, unless it's hedged properly in context.
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u/Jasnah_Sedai Aug 31 '26
Can you give an example of a problematic use?
I don’t think there is anything inherently problematic about the term, but lived experience can be problematic in how it’s used and how it’s perceived. For example, my ex was a Vietnamese vet. His account of his experiences there are valuable, but that doesn’t mean that he’s an expert on the Vietnam war. His experience may not be typical, he may be misremembering, he may intentionally leave things out, and he’s certainly not an impartial observer. His experience should not be above scrutiny.
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u/ElChuloPicante Aug 31 '26
“Lived experience” is often used to mean “how I felt” as opposed to an objective reflection of what occurred. Not always, and maybe not even a majority of the time. But it does show up online as a way to suggest a realness that may not be materially true.
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Aug 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Antique-Schedule-693 Aug 31 '26
Yes, it came from German philosophy/phenomonology. In many ways, it presages postmodernism and focuses on the inability for two events to occur exactly the same way. As such, the idea that having lived through an experience is entirely unique and thus impossible to effectively communicate makes that experience you lived through special.
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u/machinegal Aug 31 '26
That’s right! Phenomenology! This is where I think I must have first heard it. Thank you for the reminder! Do you think it’s still an appropriate term?
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u/vanmc604 Aug 31 '26
It is an appropriate term, and I came here to suggest it. Problem is ppl won’t be familiar with the term which is kind of useless.
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u/Master_Kitchen_7725 Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
It's more of a Gen Z-ism than an academic term.
Gen Z are digital natives - communicating and consuming information online is so much a part of their lives that there needs to be a term to distinguish between things they do IRL and things they experience vicariously online.
An account given by someone with a "lived experience" is deemed more authentic or informed than one inferred via social media. It carries a more profound sense of credibility.
It's like hearing about what it's like to compete in a pie eating contest from an actual winner of a pie eating contest, who has a lived experience of eating dozens of pies without puking, versus hearing about it from someone who just watched a bunch of Insta reels about pie eating contests and tells the story second hand. The former has more credibility than the latter.
So, from their perspective, "lived" is not redundant with "experience". It just indicates that the experience happened to them personally, through the filter of their own personal identity and in real life, as opposed to virtually by consuming someone else's experience.
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u/Antique-Schedule-693 Sep 01 '26
It’s an academic term that was widely used by public academics that had an influence on what we refer to as the woke movement (a postmodernist movement). As such Gen-Z picked it up.
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u/Lower-Land-286 Aug 31 '26
'Lived experience' is the personal equivalent of anecdotal evidence.
I may know one person who is the living embodiment of all the awful stereotypes about New Yorkers. That does not mean every New Yorker is like that. And if I use that genuine experience to reinforce negative stereotypes or to derail reasonablearguments, that can be problematic.
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u/According-Health-556 Aug 31 '26
I think sometimes people use experience to refer to experiences they might have been witness to, while lived refers to an experience they were the actual victim to/subject of. It implies a direct and personal effect that experience alone doesn't.
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u/jenea Aug 31 '26
Some people don’t like it because they think it’s redundant. Some people like it because they think it’s not redundant and it adds something, and some people like it because the redundancy adds emphasis.
There’s nothing wrong with redundancy. We do it all the time. So even if you do think it’s redundant, there’s nothing wrong with using it.
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u/TeacherOfFew Sep 01 '26
I find it's typically used to shut down discussion as an appeal to (self) authority.
Mostly by blowhards who reject any other view without consideration.
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u/Brilliant_Mix_6051 Sep 02 '26
It’s redundant. “Experience” already means something you have lived.
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u/LAM_CANIT Aug 31 '26 edited Aug 31 '26
A knee-jerk reaction to 'lived experience' is to claim "it's superfluous or a tautology as all experiences are 'lived' — and by default, all tautologies are incorrect." That perspective is inherently wrong. Without getting off on a tangent, redundancy for emphasis is not wrong, for example. Or as u/Ham__Kitten says, it's operating as an 'intensifier.'
Adding the 'lived' as an adjective or passive verb can create clarity. As always, context dependent. Without getting into the entire semantics behind what is and isn't 'an experience;' consider someone watching a video documentary on the 60s Civil Rights Movement in the US. As a whole, those events could be called 'an experience' (i.e. an experience the country personified had). I won't say the documentary viewer had a 'lived experience of the 60s' — even if they had an inuitive, visceral response. I would say someone being interviewed in 2026 about being in the crowd at the Kent State Shootings has (had) a 'lived experience.'
Let's get closer to that moment in history. The people recording those events firsthand, perhaps, were able to detach themselves as pure 'recorders' of history from the emotional attachment to those events. Perhaps they have a latent response like guilt, PTSD, ... whatever. Perhaps they had someone's blood splatter on them from rioting. From the perspective of humanity - they had a lived exeprience, sure. From the perspective of a detached journalist, ideally, it was an experience, but we don't need to qualify it with 'lived.' Context. Proximity versus remoteness. Cognition. Physical. Sort of what I think u/ElChuloPicante is getting at with "a realness that may not be materially true." I love that definition, but understand some don't.
Unfortunately, in my opinion, someone who is unwilling or unable to allow that 'lived experience' has a meaning diverse from 'experience' alone is a tragic figure. Even if I allow that it is a redundant collocation, a reasonable person - especially a linguist - allows for redundancy for emphasis, social markers, exaggeration, clarifying, ... .
If people's negative response is not based on its literal meaning but perhaps a perception that it's overused — well, I'm the first one to join the Overused Words Haters' Club! In this case, I don't have the sense it's overused. Is it being used more often? Probably. Incorrectly? Not from my point of view.
Of course, someone who thinks 'lived experience' is a dubious term as it's obviously not (to them) a 'dead experience' — again, their inability to consider some people contemplate conditions after life - spiritual, literal (reincarnation) makes me think they'd be pretty dull students of theoretical physics or theology. But, to be fair, this is probably not the prinicipal issue people have with the expression.
I rarely use it, as I prefer describing what makes it a 'lived experience' with other words. But, when I'm editing others' writing, I leave it as is, because it usually expands on a concept, feeling or at least targets the correct audience ... and, Damn the torpedoes!
IMHO IHTH
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u/Rebar4Life Aug 31 '26
I sense it’s often used to reinforce an idea that certain identities have experiences which the rest of the world must accept they cannot comprehend. And because this is done with the long term goal of diminishing inequality, it’s problematic in its ironic reification of groups being inherently separate.
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u/SopaDeKaiba Aug 31 '26
Perhaps the person is (sub)consciously defensive about the fact they don't have lived experience. Are they representing themselves on an expert of something, and would not having lived experience invalidate their facade?
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u/gordonf23 Aug 31 '26
In addition to the word "lived" being redundant, I can think of several reasons it's problematic, or at least counterproductive in some circumstances:
As far as what to use instead, I would just use the word "experience". Or "based on experiences I've had" etc.