Childhood was centered around experiencing a variety of things for the first time and pursuing activities to find passions, inspirations and time to practice skills. But as we progress into adulthood, opportunities to learn new things and new skills become few and far between.
By the time a person reaches high school or adulthood, the pressure to appear entirely competent and confident in all actions and tasks done throughout the day builds internally and externally. There seems to be an understanding that, by this age, one should be able to do everything they intend to with a level of decent or excellent skill.
However, not everyone has equal access to opportunities in their childhood, so learning later in life becomes the only option. Unfortunately, adults pursuing later learning face a higher degree of scrutiny and backlash than a child would when learning something for the first time. Receiving such criticism fosters an unforgiving environment, which promotes perceived success and condemns low skill, perpetuating an internal sense of inadequacy when not exhibiting a high level of skill.
With this external critique of success and internal desire to be seen as successful, it becomes more difficult to open oneself up to new learning experiences for fear of looking unintelligent or incapable. For some, this causes complete stagnation of the pursuit of new ideas and activities, because it is easier to avoid learning than to face the shameful feeling of starting from the beginning.
Depending on the access to opportunity a person has in their childhood, this stagnation could result in a feeling of monotony in life, with very few hobbies or passions. For others who may not have received adequate education, the stagnations could result in never learning socially valuable life skills, such as reading or writing. This avoidance, then, leads to a person being unable to fully participate in everyday life.
However, when individuals who lack literacy, social skills or hobbies break their stagnation and begin the learning process, they often are met with mockery and public humiliation from apathetic social peers, either online or in real-life settings.
Typically, this scrutiny and mockery take the form of blatant disrespect and impatience directed toward the learner. With social and literacy skills, the critic often emphasizes a need for the learner to move more quickly and be clearer, while, at the same time, insulting the learner’s intelligence and ignorance. In these situations, the critic fails to comprehend that not everyone has the same knowledge set and capabilities as they do.
The same occurs in taking up hobbies like cooking, crafting or learning to play an instrument. While some critics show direct disrespect, others — especially online — make claims about how bad a person is at whatever they are doing, ignoring the idea that the learner may be a beginner. Imagine posting a newly completed painting, for example. Excited to share your creative expression and progress in painting, you open the comments, unleashing a series of insults and jokes about bad composition and poor lighting from strangers whose first time it is viewing your page. Humiliated, you take down the post and trash the painting.
Other commenters, who demonstrate awareness of the beginner-level of the learner, assert that the hobby is not worth pursuing, given the current low or average level of skill of the learner. These comments appear on videos, such as a musician’s series of posts documenting their journey to learn the guitar, where comments assert things like, “you should be better at this by now,” or “you’re wasting your time.”
Cases such as these humiliate the learner into giving up on their pursuits to avoid being shamed.
Moreover, some online commenters claim that a person who has lower skill levels is intentionally performing poorly to create engagement, or ragebaiting. While in some online spaces, this may be true, directing insults toward a person at the beginning or middle of their learning process treats the learner as though they should have been an expert from the first attempt. This phenomenon even occurs in schools, whose grading systems leave very little room for the learning experience, pushing instead for immediate, successful results.
When this level of instant gratification and success is constantly expected of others, learners begin to internalize the belief that they should be instantly skillful and that any other experience is not worth pursuing. Importantly, this way of thinking and learning defines a natural talent, which is entirely in opposition to the intense, often frustrating, learning process that the majority of trained skills require. By assuming all trained skills must be natural talents, critics directly undermine the necessary dedication required to improve.
Committing to practicing a new skill for months to years feels daunting in a world where being an adult beginner is so overhated. It becomes even more challenging when the early stages of many skills involve a frustrating process of repeated failures and learning opportunities.
In this hostile environment, many people look for ways to avoid the awkwardness of being a beginner. And, recently, it has become much easier for many people to use AI to overcome these challenges — producing music, art, writing and more on the user’s behalf without the years of dedication or the moments of frustration.
But using an AI program to complete your bucket list doesn’t make these things something you, yourself, have done. Instead, they are things you instructed a program to complete for you.
In essence, the use of AI deprives you of the experience. And by committing only the few seconds it took to instruct the program to create your vision, your level of attachment to the final product is very low and almost negligible, making it easy and quick to move on to the next thing.
In response to this trend and the reduction of hard-earned skills into natural talents, short-form internet artists have taken to creating videos, showcasing a series of clips from their years of practice and struggle to become skillful. The movement offers a breath of fresh air from AI-generated slop, and a reminder that the ability to produce something valuable takes dedication and failure.
It especially comes as a reminder that the experience of learning and hobbies should be a means of self-expression that is deeply personal and rigorous. The intention behind raising awareness of the difficulties of learning a new skill is not to dissuade learners, but, instead, to encourage everyone to continue beyond the initial difficult phase and the desire for instant gratification — and, as a society, to be a better audience for learners in the world.
Allison Bonaventura is a sophomore double-majoring in comparative literature and anthropology.
Views expressed in the opinions pages represent the opinions of the columnists. The only piece that represents the view of the Pipe Dream Editorial Board is the Staff Editorial.