We are fond of touting the difficulties of modern life, the ways in which everything has gotten more interdependent, more fraught with unintended consequences, more complex. That discourse tempts us to overlook some key ways in which modern life has gotten drastically simpler. Let me illustrate.
About a year and a half ago, I found myself on the side of a dark highway, with red and blue lights flashing behind me. The friendly highway patrolman explained that he’d pulled me over because a number of my lights were burned out — taillights, brake, and the bulb illuminating my rear license plate. I was both surprised and greatly annoyed, because the vehicle had been in the shop literally that morning for an oil change and inspection, and they were supposed to have checked all the lights. (Don’t guess I’ll be going back to that place ever again.) So here I am, in the middle of a road trip, hundreds of miles from home with minimal tools, and I need to replace some light bulbs. When we arrived at our destination, I located an auto parts store and bought all the bulbs I needed. The taillight and brake light bulbs were easily accessible, and a job I’d done before. No problem there. But I couldn’t figure out how to get to the license plate bulb.
If you’re under 30, you know what happened next: YouTube to the rescue! Standing in my motel parking lot at 7:15 in the morning, I got out my phone and searched for how to change the license plate bulb on a 2003 Camry. Sure enough, there was a tutorial that walked me through the entire process. I had to take out the entire liner on my trunk lid to get to it, but once I’d done that, the rest was easy. Less than half an hour later, the job was done, the trunk liner was reinstalled, and the car was road-worthy again, all before my night-owl wife was even awake.
Now, I’ve worked on these kinds of superficial fixes for my car all my life. I’m no mechanic, and I can’t do serious car repair without help, but for this kind of stuff? Like anything else mechanical, if you just look at it long enough, you can work out what you need to do. All it really takes is time, observation, trial and error, and some basic tools. (Usually. Every once in a while, you have to limp your project, half-assembled, to the auto parts store to get some other part, or a little advice.) Back in my 20s, I’d just have picked away at the problem until I eventually figured it out. It would have taken me at least twice as long, but I would have gotten there. With this job in particular, I would have wasted a bunch of time trying to find some way to get it done without taking the entire trunk lid liner out. Knowing in advance that it was going to be way easier to just pull the whole thing completely out and then put it back when I was done was a huge time-saver for me. (Some of you guys are shaking your heads. Yeah, I know. But I don’t know a lot about cars, so I fumble around a fair bit with an unfamiliar task.)
But that day, no such fumbling was necessary. In a matter of minutes, using nothing but the phone in my pocket, I found out what it was going to take to get the job done. Tools and materials, how long it would take, exactly, step by step, what to do–all of it. And crucially, I knew all this before I ever committed to the first step.
This experience is ubiquitous. Whatever it is you want to do, there’s a YouTube tutorial for it — if not a half-dozen or more, all vying for your eyeballs. Older generations have been slow to catch on to this because even if we’re aware that tutorials exist, our first instinct is still to talk to our friends or just figure it out. We tend to only go for the tutorials if we;re stuck, or we already know we’re out of our depth. But Gen Z is Generation Tutorial. They hardly do anything new without consulting a video tutorial first, for the very good reason that, no matter what the task, the tutorial exists. Why wouldn’t you use it?
Like everything else, the ubiquity of tutorials is having a liturgical effect over time. But what is that effect?
On the positive side of the ledger, ubiquitous tutorials condition us to believe that things can be done. Many tasks that once might have been left to professionals (or simply left undone) for lack of simple knowledge are now easily accessible to the average person with a few simple tools. That knowledge used to be available in libraries, specialized manuals, or a skilled friend-of-a-friend, if you could make the time and connections to get access; now all you need is a quick search and a few minutes to watch the video. The minimal nature of the investment encourages us to explore and find out what’s possible, which is wonderful.
However, all this has a dark side too. As we discussed last week, advertising catechizes us to believe and behave as though everything is to us and for us, and consumer culture catechizes us to believe and behave as though the world is infinitely customizable to our whims. In a similar way, tutorial culture catechizes us to expect that we can know the procedure and the costs of any endeavor before we commit to it. In domains where this is simply not true–courtship comes to mind–that expectation leads to three significant failures: a doomed quest for certainty before investment, giving up, and prioritizing cognition over skill.
One response is a desperate, and largely doomed, attempt to procure certainty before investment. The online world is full of influencers that will confidently opine on the hidden meaning of your prospective date’s hairdo, height, birth order, makeup or lack thereof, job, clothing, the presence or absence of other people or objects in their profile pictures. Where literally everyone over 35 would say “Just go on a date; you’ll find out,” many Gen Z folk are waving off because “She mentioned travel; sounds feminist” or “He has a picture with a fish. Ew.” This overheated discourse easily descends to a Romans-staring-at-chicken-entrails level of dumb. The vast majority of the good marriages you know — you do know some people with good marriages, don’t you? If not, that’s half your problem. Find some good models. Ahem. As I was saying, the vast majority of good marriages you know happened despite one or more such superficial obstacles. One of them despises musicals, and the other was a musical theater kid. She never liked nerds. He never thought he’d be with someone that didn’t love camping. And then they got to know each other, and somehow….
That’s just how it goes, folks. Your preferences are not standards; get over yourself. When you actually get to know the person, those kinds of things are just not real problems. The real problems are much bigger than that, and the good matches nearly always have superficial “problems.” Trying to make such superficial factors into indicators of some big character defect is unnecessarily keeping you home on Friday night.
Another response is to just give up. Having never built the muscles to engage with an uncertain task and figure it out as they go, many members of Generation Tutorial are so daunted by the complexities of courtship that they simply opt out. Older generations urge them to get out there, meet some people, and just see how it goes, but that feels too dangerous. We need to acknowledge that they are, in fact, facing certain dangers that our generations didn’t face before social media, but we also need to realize that many of these young adults haven’t been strengthened by a lifetime of just trying something and figuring it out; they haven’t had to. Maybe the first step is not going on a date; maybe it’s tackling a home repair and seeing if you can figure it out yourself before you ask the internet for help.
Tutorial culture also encourages us to believe that we can execute once we know the steps. A lot of tasks can be executed that way, if clumsily. But for a lot of others, experience and embodied skill matters, and it ain’t as easy as that working pro made it look on YouTube. Having a cognitive grasp of the task may be useful, but it’s only part of the answer. Most things that involve relating to another human fall into this category, including courtship. There are too many variables, and the situation is simply too fluid, for pre-defined procedures to be as useful as we’d like. That pre-defined procedure is like memorizing the solution to a particular math problem. That’s fine, as far as it goes, but what about all the other math problems?
I first encountered this problem in a clear way when my brother and I got interested in learning to juggle. Ever the geek, I went to the library and checked out a half-dozen books on juggling. My brother, natural athlete that he was, went to the store and bought two tubes of raquetballs. Guess who learned to juggle first? Recently, I found myself explaining this principle to a friend as we were discussing bodywork. For even the most complicated maneuvers I use in a session, I can explain how to do it in well under half an hour, I said, “but that doesn’t mean you can actually do it.” Acquiring the palpation skill, use of felt sense, and on-the-fly clinical judgment to correctly execute those skills often took me hundreds of hours of hands-on practice.
Tutorial culture is a boon; it is a form of wealth. We ought to make excellent use of it to bring tasks within reach that were formerly closed off to us. At the same time, we must resist the ways in which it catechizes us toward untrue beliefs and unhelpful habits. We can’t always be certain before we invest in the beginning of something. “He who loses his life, the same will find it.” Sometimes, you just have to invest and see; trying to make every little thing into an omen of success or failure is just seducing yourself into a certainty that has nothing to do with reality. And refusing to play isn’t really an option if we’re called by God to be in the game: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it.” Resist the need to know everything ahead of time; some things are best learned by doing them; you can’t learn to swim by sitting on the pool deck.
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