Once Is Never Enough

Do you remember your first kiss? Our first experiences may have been terribly embarrassing, maybe clouded in our memory, yet they mark a beginning. Everything afterward becomes repetition. To be sure, repetitions carry their own power—they may be more enjoyable because we can compare them to what came before. This book explores the nature of human experiences. While we often think of experiences as past, present, or future, this book offers a new framework: experiences as firsts, repetitions, and those imagined experiences that we have not yet had, perhaps never will have, but which guide us like few actual events.

On a personal level, the book invites self-discovery: What experiences shape and transform us, and why? Do we prefer the comfort of repetition, seek the thrill of the new, or live in the shadow of imagined catastrophes and hoped-for salvations?

On a collective and political level, the book examines how these types of experiences restrict us because our politics are often based on one-sided fixations on too few of these types. For example, should we describe our age as the age of radical technological novelty, or rather be skeptical and discover the machinery of the old in the disguise of the new? And what happens to us when doomsday scenarios of the not-yet control our thinking?

On a theoretical level, the book proposes a shift in how we think about experience, placing it at the center of human understanding — an experience unattainable to AI. Human experience, as argued here, is more than knowledge; it retains the awe and wonder but retains the traces of standing in awe and wonder before the experience where we did not yet know.

The book draws on everyday observations, new research in cognitive science and psychology, and a range of archives — including the Kinsey Institute, legal case histories, and world literature — to explore the ways in which human experiences define us, individually and collectively.