Own personal experience — personal decisions about what a person has seen and experienced himself, developed habits in connection with past experience.
Personal experience is the most important source of knowledge.
Until the child convinces himself that fire burns, the words of persuasion will have little effect on him. Until the girl saw for herself how the right (or wrong) diet affects her figure, and the time she goes to bed affects her complexion, the words of her parents sound like a boring noise.
In a world where there are many prejudices, myths and deceit, personal experience is a guide to reality. To believe or not to believe this or that advertisement or this or that person — a person is prompted by his own experience. Great life experience is the basis of life wisdom.
Unfortunately, not every personal experience is good. Personal experience can be overly subjective, personal experience can be simply negative and traumatic. With personal, own experience — big problems. The subjectivity of human perception is such that people easily, based on their personal experience, successfully convince themselves of what they were previously sure of.
Those who are convinced that it is harmful to suppress emotions find confirmation of their point of view. Those who know that the control of emotions is a natural and simply obligatory thing, based on their experience, are daily convinced that they are right. And which one is right? Everyone has their own personal experience.
The personal experience of an unbalanced person, based on random emotional impressions, is the source of everyday superstitions.
Imagine that you fell in love for the first time, and you are overwhelmed with the desire to share your innermost thoughts and feelings with your beloved, you want to give your beloved all of yourself. And you, without hesitation, share all this. And your young man or girl, in a private conversation with friends, voices these innermost thoughts of yours. It is easy to evaluate such behavior of a loved one as a betrayal, experience heartache and make a decision: you can’t be open with anyone, they can betray. This is a bad decision, but many live with it for years.
At the same time, a reasonable person’s own experience, based on a sufficient series of observations and experimental tests, deserves more respect.
What a person has learned and experienced from his own personal experience is firmly held in him and remains in him for a long time. However, time affects everything. One side. early memories are erased with great difficulty and are the natural basis of everything that a person lives on, which later is dear to him and his values. On the other hand, time changes both our memories and our experience. In most cases, more positive memories of the past remain in the memory, although in general the memories of past experiences become more and more distorted over time. As a rule, all distortions go in the direction of increasing the internal consistency and coherence of recalled events.
This is a feature of our human psychology. It is important for us that there are no contradictions within us. A person wants to live in such a way that everything inside him is logical, understandable and beautiful for him. Whether it will also be logical, understandable and beautiful for other people is another question, which interests people of a higher level of development.