Experiences better than possessions? Yes, but shared experiences are best

Good times with people you love are more important than bungee-jumping off the moon with Tom Cruise. (Unless you're good friends with Tom Cruise, in which case, it ocunts.)

I keep reading that young people today are more experienced-based. That they want to spend more on experiencing the world rather than on possessions. This was a change, apparently, from previous generations, when the priority was to get a big house, a fancy car and then some appliances ... actually, this sort of describes my mother’s wants and needs.

But then, my mother, as a Filipino immigrant to Canada, came from a very impoverished background. Her owning a big house and two cars in Canada now in her old age is manifest destiny for someone who grew up wondering where the next meal would come from.

And it’s probably my mother’s keenness for material goods – not out of greed but because she never had these things – that made me go in the opposite direction. When I read about the younger generation wanting to spend more on experiences than on possessions, I think to myself: I was ahead of my time!

While my mother prioritised getting “stuff”, I prioritised experiences before it was cool, and even before social media. Luckily, I found my way into fashion modelling, a job that can provide one with more than enough opportunities for “experiences”, both good and bad. There are no guard rails in fashion.

With modelling, I was able to leap into the elite party scene in any city I went to around the globe. I’ve partied with billionaires and celebrities at the hottest clubs in Europe, Asia, and Africa. But modelling also gave me the ability to get away from that scene and just travel. Whenever I had a contract somewhere, when it ran out I made sure I spent at least a few months just backpacking around. I’ve backpacked through South-East Asia, up and down the Eastern coast of Australia, through Southern Africa. Wow! Hooray! Experiences +9,000! Right?

Uh ... yeah, I guess.

The thing is, at the time when I was travelling and modelling, I felt like what I was doing was super important. Documenting what I did with photos of scenery and places. Every experience I had felt like something I could catalogue and check off my imaginary list: Cage dive with great white sharks off the coast of South Africa? Check! See the sunset over the Coliseum in Rome? Check! Camp in Botswana's Okavanga Delta with elephants and crocodiles? Check!

But looking back, I realise I did it all alone. I have hundreds of photos of me standing in faraway places with people I barely knew and have never seen since. Guess how much I look at those photos? Never.

I’ve tried. It’s just not that interesting to look at photos of scenery with you standing in the front of it. That’s the unfortunate truth.

I’ve realised that the experiences you want aren’t of travelling and doing fun and crazy things, you want those experiences with good friends or a partner.

We understand now that the way memory works is somewhat self-replicating. Something happens to us. We remember it. We recall this experience, and how we recall it becomes our new memory. So recalling experiences strengthens and shapes our memories of them. When you do a bunch of cool stuff by yourself, it’s hard to sit down and recall these experiences because there’s no one to relive them with. And if you try to talk about your experiences with someone else, you’re really just sitting down talking about yourself for hours at a time.

So all that fun stuff I did when I was younger remains in a box somewhere in my head, mostly unshared and unremembered.

I’m sure it has shaped me in other ways, and I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to travel at such a young age, but my advice to the younger generation that is prioritising experiences now is this: Don’t prioritise experiences as much as you prioritise experiences with friends and family.

Good times with people you love are more important than bungee-jumping off the moon with Tom Cruise. Unless of course Tom is your close friend, in which case, have at it.

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Big Smile, No Teeth columnist Jason Godfrey – a model who once was told to give the camera a ‘big smile, no teeth’ – has worked internationally for two decades in fashion and continues to work in dramas, documentaries, and lifestyle programming. Write to him at [e-mail] and follow him on Instagram @bigsmilenoteeth and facebook.com/bigsmilenoteeth. The views expressed here are entirely the writer's own.