Hack Schmack

As promised, here is my well considered rant about the use of the term life hack:

We've all seen them. You usually run across them in Google search result pages, revealing seemingly mysterious ways you can do things, like "10 Ways to Amaze Your Friends Using Only a Spent Toilet Paper Tube."  Stuff like that. There are two categories of these things. One (1): ways someone just thought up to do things that you would never need to do, nor want to, using things that normally get thrown away, like how to keep your computer mouse cord from slipping off the corner of your desk using common office supplies stolen from your company--these are usually just click-bait, and, two (b), things that if you are alive and have been paying attention, you would, or should, know anyway.

It's kind of funny. I learned to do things by watching people, perhaps acting in my behalf in response to me asking them how to do something, or maybe by trial and error, or, you know, just looking at it and figuring it out--the normal way we all learn things.  If you can't figure something out, you ask someone. But now, with the Internet, you Google it, and your answer is called a "life hack." Whoop-de-do. Hack is what you do when you break into someone else's computer system--you sneak in using devious means and then do something you shouldn't. You "win" because you did something that someone else does not want you to do. Good for you.  But, how to change a flat tire, or what to do to keep your iron from clogging up from using the steam setting, those are thing that, really, it's OK to do. We encourage you to. Just fucking learn to do it, like everyone else in the world did, and you're good to go. No big deal. No laws broken, no winners, no losers, just getting along in life.

Because even though the Internet seems to be telling you otherwise, the truth is that you are, most likely, average, or very close to it, as we all are. Granted, some of us are stunningly average, but otherwise, just normal people, some good at some things, some good at others.

OK, end of rant, which (as poorly written as it was,) started out intending to show how smart and cynical I am but wound up demonstrating that I'm trying to get along in a world full of twenty and thirty-year-olds when I'm, like, a thousand.

But seriously, it has something to do with all the toys they got for Christmas when all I had to play with were sticks. Maybe some dirt.