Author: Jeffrey McMahon

Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience names the quiet catastrophe of our moment: experience itself has been replaced by its press release. We no longer meet the world face-to-face; we encounter its avatar—curated, quantified, filtered, and politely optimized for consumption. Reality arrives pre-processed. Life is no longer lived so much as represented. We scroll through it, measure it, track it, and somehow wonder why it feels thin. This is what I call Representational Displacement: a condition in which lived reality is steadily displaced by its mediated substitutes—screens, metrics, feeds, dashboards—until experience is filtered before it is even felt. The world is not encountered but managed, not inhabited but previewed. We live one remove away from our own lives, alienated not by scarcity but by overrepresentation.

Rosen is clear about the cost. “Experiences,” she writes, “are the ways we become acquainted with the world. Direct experience is our first teacher.” Strip that away and education becomes a simulation of learning rather than the thing itself. And that is precisely what is happening in classrooms. Direct experience is contracting. AI-driven functions are expanding. Students are increasingly trained to manage outputs, assemble responses, and comply with systems rather than grapple with ideas, language, and uncertainty. The result is a generation at risk of becoming well-behaved functionaries—NPCs with decent syntax—rather than human beings engaged in Higher Learning as a transformative act. As a writing instructor, I refuse to let the classroom collapse into a content farm staffed by polite machines. My job now is counterinsurgency: designing assignments that restore friction, embodiment, memory, and lived encounter—work that forces experience back into the center of learning, where it belongs.

 One such counterinsurgency is the Memory-Specific Writing Prompt. It is deliberately designed to anchor writing in lived experience rather than transferable knowledge, requiring details that arise from a writer’s embodied past and cannot be convincingly generated by pattern recognition alone. It demands concrete, localized specificity—named places, obsolete objects, idiosyncratic rituals, sensory impressions, and personal contradictions—that exist only because the writer was physically present at a particular time. By tying meaning to unrepeatable memory rather than generalizable insight, the assignment makes fluency insufficient and forces authorship to matter. The result is writing that values presence over polish, consequence over coherence, and recollection over reproduction—conditions under which AI tools become at best marginal assistants and at worst obvious impostors.

Dismissing this assignment as “merely creative writing” misunderstands both its purpose and its rigor. Memory-specific writing trains the same cognitive skills demanded by the so-called real world: sustained attention, accurate observation, causal reasoning, ethical self-representation, and the ability to translate raw experience into accountable language. Professionals do not succeed by producing generic prose; they succeed by noticing what others miss, explaining complex situations clearly, and grounding claims in evidence that can withstand scrutiny. This assignment treats memory as data, description as analysis, and narrative as a method for testing meaning rather than decorating it. In an economy saturated with frictionless text generation, the capacity to produce precise, credible, experience-based writing is not ornamental—it is a core competency, and one that cannot be automated away.

One such prompt I’ll give you is titled “The Unlikely Happy Place”: Write an 800-word personal narrative essay about a place that was not designed to make anyone happy. The place was ugly, uncomfortable, mundane, or even faintly miserable—yet it became a genuine source of refuge or joy for you. The power of the essay should come from the contradiction between the place’s surface qualities and the deep meaning it held for you. Ground your writing in dense sensory detail and memory-specific facts: textures, smells, sounds, named people, obsolete objects, routines, and rituals that could only belong to that place at that time. Do not smooth over its flaws. Show how this unlikely happiness allowed you to escape, rehearse, or become. The goal is to show what your connection to this place said about your character, values, and personality. Here is a sample based on a gym that still haunts me from my teens:

My Unlikely Happy Place–Walt’s Gym

By the time I hit fourteen, my sacred sanctuary was none other than Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a temple of iron that had started its inglorious life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. The place was a veritable swamp of fungus and bacteria, a thriving petri dish of maladies eager to latch onto the unsuspecting. Members whispered in hushed tones about incurable athlete’s foot, the kind that made dermatologists throw up their hands in defeat. Some swore that the strains of fungus and mold festering in the corners were so exotic they had yet to be classified by the most intrepid of mycologists. Roosting among the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog that the pro wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. I never saw Charlie myself, but I often wondered if he was a real creature or a figment of the wrestlers’ imagination, birthed by too many concussions and late-night benders.

The locker room was perpetually occupied by a rotating cast of characters who looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour tracksuit and a gold chain thick enough to anchor a ship, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney. He’d discuss his sordid life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his past under a rug large enough to cover the entire state of California.

Out back, an unused swimming pool lurked, its water murky and black—a cauldron of plague, dead rats, and God knows what else. Walt, the gym’s owner and part-time crypt keeper, had a peculiar ritual. Every so often, he’d saunter outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, and scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature. He’d hold it aloft for all to see, like a demented priest presenting an unholy sacrament. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, who treated Walt’s rodent exorcisms like a halftime show. Walt would then toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor delivering a monologue, bowing deeply as if he’d just conquered a dragon.

Walt’s Gym showcased a walking fossil named Wally, an octogenarian who swore he was the original model for human anatomy textbooks—perhaps ones etched on cave walls. We all loved Wally. He was a beloved gym fixture even though he could be a pain in the butt. Wally’s routine was the stuff of myth: He’d righteously correct everyone’s form whether they asked for his advice or not. He’d monopolize the gym for hours, his workout punctuated by monologues worthy of an Oscar about his deadbeat relatives who “borrowed” money, his former lovers who once graced the silver screen, and his eternal battle with arthritis. Between sets, he’d often deliver a Ted Talk on muscle inflammation and the sorry state of the national economy. He delivered these soliloquies with the gravitas of a news anchor, then spent an eternity in the sauna and shower, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes only to douse himself head-to-toe in talcum powder, turning into a spectral beacon of gym dedication. When Wally spoke, he was engulfed in such a thick talcum haze you’d swear a lighthouse was about to blare its foghorn warning.

The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop, as if the DJ had been possessed by the spirit of a broken record. Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship” echoed through the gym like a soundtrack to my personal purgatory. As a kid navigating this adult world, the gym was my barbershop, my public square, where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the exorbitant costs of sending kids to college, and the soul-sucking burdens of caring for elderly parents.

It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to start building biceps like bowling balls, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. The Road to Swoleville, I realized, was all about sidestepping the real world entirely. Why bother with mortgages and 401(k)s when I could disappear into my true paradise, the gym? As Arnold himself wrote in Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was the ultimate Happy Place: “The weight lifters shone with sweat; they were powerful looking. Herculean. And there it was before me—my life, the answer I’d been seeking. It clicked. It was something I suddenly just seemed to reach out and find, as if I’d been crossing a suspended bridge and finally stepped off onto solid ground.”

My “solid ground” was the 1976 incarnation of Walt’s Gym, a germ-infested, rat-plagued wonderland where dreams of muscle-bound glory were forged—and quite possibly the greatest place I’ve ever visited on this planet.