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William James said that sentence in the title in 1890, without even imagining the amount of information we would be surrounded by in digital times. And I keep thinking about it. He argues that "experience" is not the passive reception of everything around us. We are not sponges. Experience is only what we agree to attend to. The opposite — the non-experience — is what he calls "gray chaotic indiscriminateness." Distraction, in one word.

Language doesn’t thrive in compartments. It spreads, sticks to memories, images, and experiences that don’t fit into neutral examples. A word only truly comes alive when it finds a story to lean on — even if that story is personal, ordinary, or slightly too much.