Experience Capture > Experience Creation

Welcome to the MBA in Selfhood

Introduction

The purpose of this post is mainly to coin and try out a new concept: “Experience Capture.” While the idea came to me as a joke, and I have mixed feelings about mixing existential advice with the language of business, I will attempt to describe it unironically.

First, consider a few phrases that employ the word capture:

Regulatory Capture: “a form of corruption of authority that occurs when a political entity, policymaker, or regulator is co-opted to serve the commercial, ideological, or political interests of a minor constituency…” (citation: Google)

Elite Capture: When representative minorities with power (elites) deploy the language of oppression and marginalization not to fight oppression and marginalization but to self-deal.

The above phrases are negative, as capture is a synonym for hijack or kidnap.

But “Value Capture” is an important, positive concept in business:

“Value Capture is the process of retaining some percentage of the value provided in every Transaction. If you’re able to offer another business something that will allow them to bring in $1 million of additional revenue and you charge $100,000, you’re capturing 10% of the value created by the transaction.” (citation: Google)

Value capture is the cut you get on value creation—and in contrast to the other forms of capture described above it’s considered a sign of health. Saints and martyrs, we might say, have high value creation, but low value capture (at least in business terms). On the other hand, if the metric is points towards heavenly merit, then their value capture remains high. It also remains high, if, per mysticism, they don’t distinguish between self and other, and so a win for the world is as if a personal win. In normal terms, though, capture means: capture by self. Creation means: creation for others.

Value Capture is Mostly Irrelevant to Saints, Martyrs, and Purists

So perfect altruists shouldn’t care about value capture (unless they think they are uniquely positioned to use the value they capture more efficiently than others to create more value).

Homer and his descendants don’t collect royalties on the Iliad, so from a business point of view, Homer has low value capture relative to value creation. I personally think this is fine. I might even go so far as to say that Homer’s nobility inversely tracks with his value capture—that more time spent on value capture is time not spent on value creation; I’d rather have Homer worrying about his art than worrying about maximizing long term shareholder value of $HOMER tokens (assuming we could travel back in time and allow his early readers to purchase them).

Experience Capture

All this being said, what is “Experience Capture”? Let’s posit that for every Experience you have, some percentage of it sticks as a memory. Some of it even sticks in a deeper way, forming your sense of self. But not all experiences are equally sticky. A person with a good memory, or high porousness—the ability to assimilate events into a sense of self—has better experience capture than someone who just drifts along.

Two people with 70 years of life experience may have the same level of experience creation—even if, for the sake of simplicity, we assume a static rate of one experience per minute. But if one person remembers more, or feels more deeply connected, or is able to make more synthesis out of, the past, she can be said to have captured more of her experience.

When Plato’s Socrates rails against writing, I take him to be saying to us moderns, obsessed with note-taking apps, that good notes are no proof of value capture—the stuff has to get inside your soul. If it sits in your Notion or Evernote or Roam or whatever it is that you use, your yellow page legal pad, it’s value creation, but not value capture.

The Ambivalence of Capture

Look, I get it. Some of you might be thinking it’s gross to think of memory and identity formation in business terms. You might be thinking, who cares whether Einstein captured value—he was Einstein?! Good for you. Perhaps you are really saints and martyrs. For the rest of us, though, the aversion may be simply that we don’t like to accept the cold truth that there is a self-interested part of us that must be concerned with value capture to survive. Even the idealistic sentiment that value creation pursued for its own sake will lead to value capture is implicitly justified only on the consequentialist grounds that it will lead to value capture.

In regulatory capture and elite capture the notion of capture is framed as zero-sum; value capture for me is value capture from you. In good business, though, value capture is not merely antagonistic, but a form of incentive alignment. Value creation leads to value capture which leads to more value creation. (The fundamental difference between Marx and Adam Smith comes down to whether value capture is seen as a vice or a virtue, a form of warfare or a form of collaboration).

The Future of Experience Capture

If I am right that, for most of us, most of the time, experience capture matters more than experience creation, in the same way that value capture (profit) matters more than value creation (creating something others want), then we are probably poorly designing a lot in our lives—we are more focused on going to exotic places or engaging in extreme sports or chasing highs at raves, or doing all sorts of things that we think will yield experience, but without any consideration on whether or how that experience will be captured.

Perhaps we should be investing as much in reflection as we do in Airbnb weekends in Big Sur. I once met a person who spent an equal amount meditating on his conversations as he did in the conversations themselves. I admit that this fellow was extreme, but I have to admire the dedication to experience capture that is often exemplified by the mindful.

Isn’t Experience Capture a Pretentious Way of Saying Memory?

In German, the word Andenken means both to remember and to reflect. There is an element to what I am saying that is just “Be more reflective.” But I think it’s deeper than that. Experience capture is about forming a sense of self that is capacious, a view of selfhood that is growth-oriented in an existential sense, and that seeks to turn more moments into moments that enlarge who we are. The person who comes to mind here is Walt Whitman, whose “Song of Myself” is a kind of tribute to a life in which all experiences, all sights, contribute to the great poem that is the individual life.

The alternative view, and the common view, is to focus on accruing peak experiences. More peak experiences, more value. But if you have higher experience capture, you need fewer discrete experiences, and they needn’t be novel or exotic. Conversely, a person who only chases experience holds onto little and the experience vanishes into the ether, just like value that is uncaptured.

Experience Saints and Martyrs

On the other hand, everything I’ve said only holds if you think value capture matters. If value creation is what matters, then, by all means be an “experience saint,” an “experience martyr”—pursue a life of experience for no other reason than the experience itself—maybe some contemporary will benefit from it (the saint model), or else your example will serve as an inspiration for those to come (the martyr model). And when you get to heaven you will get all the reward that us short-termist suckers, focused on the illusions of earthly delights, have ignored. For in heaven, God will not say to you, “How much of your experience do you remember, but how much of your life did you experience?”

At your own risk. This is not investment advice.