“I am alive during the invasion of Ukraine, therefore I must know more than someone who spends massive amounts of time researching it 20 years from now.”
Not assuming what they’re saying is well researched, they’re probably not- but being alive during an event doesn’t exactly make you an expert on it just because you watched the news.
It’s honestly the equivalent of saying that because you lived in a country you know more about the sociopolitical status of it and why it got there thab someone who doesn’t. Like when people say “you never lived in X type of country, so you have no idea why it was so bad.”
I’d trust a sociology professor from the UK about why living conditions in America are so bad for the average working class person much more than a MAGA conservative nutjob who believes in the deep state trying to replace white people. Just like how this post doesn’t really prove that just because you were there means you’re an expert in that event or why and how it happened.
It depends on what you want to know. A UK sociologist could absolutely explain the school to prison pipeline better than a maga nutjob, but they won’t talk about how the crosswalk light has been broken in town for two years, but the cops have new cars.
To be clear, the sociologist is more important for being well informed about a subject, but the individual stories are more interesting for me every time.
I absolutely don’t doubt that individual accounts will have useful lessons to learn. But personal experience will always have personal biases. People will literally change the way they experience reality to facillitate their world view, which is why the sentiment of this post is stupid af. Just because “you were there” doesn’t make you any more of an arbiter of truth than someone who wasn’t. At most it provides you with the advantage of a perspective more directly affected by said events.