Cow Life Sim RPG (Steam, Itch) is a pretty good game! It's this bizarre but cosy send-up(?) of RPGs with some surprisingly good writing.
Because it's an RPG there's a bunch of different skills you get experience in and level up, like Walking (which, of course, you gain experience in constantly just by walking) and Juice Drinking (which increases the probability that you'll be able to drink juices with a lower Edibility stat). Juice Drinking is a weirdly pivotal part of the game - there's this whole crafting system, and juicing things is one of the main verbs in it, and like all the other verbs you can do this to literally any object. And everything's just done with adjectives, so (for example) if you juice a trumpet it makes a trumpet juice (which you need a pretty high level in Juice Drinking to drink), and if you juice a trumpet juice you make a juice juice, which you could then set on fire to make a juice ash (which would give you Arson experience).
The crafting achievements are some of my favourites. There's "Behold a Caramelized Wolfs Milk Slime Mould Basket", which requires you to parse what parts of that item name are noun and which parts are adjective and how you're supposed to apply those things in that order, or "Eat a BBQ Sauce" (the solution to this one is pretty funny).
Okay, to get to the point: one of the skills in the game is Experiencing, and you get experience in Experiencing by having an experience for the first time; for the most part this means crafting an item for the first time (or drinking the corresponding juice), but it also accounts for various things you can interact with in the game. The first time you experience something, you get experiencing experince for it. In the context of the game it's a neat way to hide a "completion" stat. But I've been thinking of how you could apply it to real life...
Because, you can talk about "gaining experience in skills" in real life, right? Giving everything numbers and "levels" and so on is gamer nonsense, but like, the general concept exists in real life because it's something that RPGs lifted from real life and codified. If you have more experience in something, you generally get better at it. So... can you get better at having new experiences? Probably, kinda! I mean, even in the game Experiencing levels don't actually do much, but it just got me thinking: I think there is significant value in having an experience, any experience, for the first time.
Sure, you'll be better at doing that thing the second time, but even if it's not likely to happen again, at least now you know what it's like; you can take that into any similar experiences, or if anybody you know does the same thing, you'll have something to talk about, words of advice - or sympathy if the experience is one that sucks.
And this is all something I've thinking about because of Cohost shutting down. A social media website I spend all of my time on semi-abruptly closing is definitely a new experience! And it sucks, and it's not like this is an experience I expect to repeat any time soon, but I still think I gained something out of it: for one thing, I actually started sending personal messages to people I only know from online, which, it turns out, is fun and not as difficult as I thought.6 And I think the only reason I was actually brave enough to do this is because of my previous experience with the end of Blaseball, a kind-of similar thing where a community fell apart and I regretted not actually making social contact with anybody post the end of that.
I'm not trying to make a "suffering is good actually" point here; my point is more so that novelty is good. A bad experience can be useful not so much because it is bad, but regardless of that. Though, I suppose if you only ever had good experiences the pool of experiences you could draw from in future would be pretty limited... you shouldn't seek out suffering, but I don't think you should avoid a first time experience just because it might (or will) be a bit unpleasant. You'll get the Experiencing XP either way. Even if the experience is terrible (and in fact, even if it's good). You might even level up!