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Well, now you're just straight up putting words in my mouth. I never claimed that volunteering in a foreign country doesn't count as meaningful life experience. Nor did I ever claim that working as a lawyer is exciting or meaningful, merely that it's clearly something distinct from writing.
I'm sure they have - but if it's significantly less common for successful screenwriters to have cleared that bar than it used to be, that could be one contributing factor towards the decline of writing quality that is described in this thread.
Sorry, I'm not trying to speak for you, specifically.
I am assuming that maiq, who thinks the people in charge of crappy media got their jobs "without ever meeting a person that isn’t upper middle to upper class professionals," would view such volunteering as a stunt.
Sure. But is it? Do you have any reason to believe that the modal screenwriter used to be more in touch? Because I keep running into examples that look pretty similar to today's.
It's not quite the same thing, but the article by Kevin Mims I linked above contains some fairly detailed statistical analysis of novelists whose novels get nominated for the National Book Awards. He argues that, contrary to the National Book Foundation's claims that its nominees are increasingly diverse, they've actually become less diverse over time, in the sense that the majority of nominees are people who studied English lit at undergraduate level before completing an MFA in creative writing - whereas many earlier winners and nominees for the award had no formal training in creative writing and in many cases no third-level education. It'd be interesting to see if this is also true of screenwriters.
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