When I was young, any time my family got a new VCR or stereo, I would press every button, plug and unplug every cord and cable, just to see what everything did. With time, I learned how it all worked. And because I knew how it all worked, I was often the only person in the house who would use the stuff.
Like many millennial children, my parents looked on as if I were some sort of prodigy. To them, the fact that I could program the VCR without looking at the instruction manual made me the Second Coming of Tesla. They would shake their heads and guffaw and say, “How do you use that thing?” and I’d just kind of shrug and not really understand the question. There are buttons. You press them and see what happens. Eventually, you learn to press the right ones.
It’s easy to look back at my parents’ generation and chuckle at their technophobia. But the further I get into adulthood, the more I realize that we all have areas of our lives where we’re like my parents with the new VCR: we sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it.
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