The Experimental Life: 10 experiments towards braver living

What if, instead of living our lives as a performance or a competition, we lived it as an experiment?

Instead of focusing on results or reactions, we focus on what we learn, and share those learnings with others, like every good scientist does, so that others may be inspired to their own experiments, and we all become wise?

This gentle approach: where we focus our efforts on ourselves, and are open and relaxed about change, is at the heart of The Society and stands in contrast to the increased urging, false promises and criticism that dominate so much public discourse.

In this essay I look at the arguments for the experimential life and suggest 10 exercises, based on the principles of alternative entrepreneurialism, which allow you to try out new ways of living and working, without long-term commitment, and which should deliver to you new information, which you can use to structure further experiments of your own.

Experimentation vs Evangelicalism

We do not need to be evangelical in an era of hype. Gurus and influencers with their 10-step guides, their hacks and tomes, exist already.

So too do the critics: those calling out others for their actions, or even what they choose to stay silent about. From how we apply our contour to what rules we apply to our children's diet: every decision is publicly contested; everything matters so very much that in the end we can't be blamed for feeling that nothing does.

You cannot lecture someone into making better choices for themselves.

What you can do, is live your own life in such a way that the wisdom, calm and joy you radiate, becomes a call to action in itself.

We do need to ensure that our beliefs and practice are based on evidence: and what better material for experimentation is there but our own lives?

How many folk think sobriety is boring, who have never experienced more than one month without alcohol? How many believe a car is a necessity, because they have not even looked at a bus timetable?

Isn't it better, at intervals, to take our beliefs out of the drawer and air them?

Most reach the end of their lives without ever really starting to experiment: Life is treated as something to protect, polish, or prove, rather than something to riff on. Too late we realise: one lifetime is not long enough to achieve perfection. We were destined to fail whilst that was the goal. We would have been better learning a few true things rather than spending decades following rules and beliefs we never truly put to the test.

From an evolutionary point of view, that is all any of us are:
a small, temporary experiment.

So why not live as one?

An experiment that doesn't get the result you hoped for, is the most valuable experiment of all

Failure, in the context of the experimental life, exists only when we refuse to learn from what we observe.

The experimental life is not about achieving a target. It is simply discovering something you did not know before — about systems, about people, about yourself, about the invisible forces that shape life. If you run an experiment and you uncover friction, resistance, dependency or hidden truths, then even the most uncomfortable result is a success. If you fail to complete the experiment, you need only to understand why, to have perhaps the greatest learning of all.

It is an embarrassing truth that what distinguises adults from children, is that adults are reluctant to try anything without a guarantee or reasonable hope of success. A child simply tries.

This is the heart of the experimental mindset:we measure ourselves by our willingness to engage, to expose assumptions, to see what actually happens when we step outside the scripts we normally inhabit. The outcome becomes secondary; the journey, the encounter with reality, and the knowledge gained become the source of joy.

It is liberating and terrifying in equal measure. Terrifying because it forces us to confront what we truly depend on, and what is outside our control. Liberating because it releases us from the tyranny of perfection, the compulsion to perform and the inherited beliefs which wastes years of our lives.

In this frame, we can approach life not as a sequence of successes and mistakes, but as a series of experiments — each one meaningful because it expands the territory of what we know.