Taking online painting class today w/this artist, who I’ve found one of best oil painting TEACHERS – not just painters – on YouTube so far. Teaching is totally diff’t skill: you need to be able to explain WHY and HOW you are doing something. Tougher than it sounds.
Having taught copywriting and fiction classes, I know firsthand how much work this is. But I found it super valuable to me as a WRITER to break down my process so it could be communicated to someone else. It engages a totally different part of my brain, and allows for better recall when I work, too.
Another skill I’ve been working on this year is how to learn and improve new and existing skills. At middle age, it can be easy to say, “Well, I know it all” (cue scary music: whatever.scalzi.com/2017/05/03/t…). I think this is part of the “is this all there is???” existential angst of middle age.
We have this myth that wherever you are at 35, 40 is… just wherever you’re going to end up. Which is a dangerous and demoralizing myth, really, especially w/so many of us living longer. My spouse’s grandmother is 91. Had moment at xmas where I was like IMAGINE IF YOU LIVE ANOTHER 45 YEARS KAMERON.
(I hadn’t seen her in some time and at xmas was struck by how she’s in such remarkably good shape, still quite sharp; not a bad 91!!). And it seemed remarkable waste to sit around at current skill level just…I don’t know, waiting for the riots or insulin shortages or a bus to hit me or whatever.
I got REALLY into gardening in 2020; one good thing to come out of The Pandemic Years. Our yard looks so much like a park that people stop me when I’m working out there and ask if they can tour it ?. Taught myself via Gardeners World and local gardener channels and pond building videos on YouTube.
What frustrates me about living in this unevenly distributed and enshittified time is that we literally have all the world’s collective knowledge at our fingertips. But the act of having to SIFT THROUGH all the shit vs the noise is a gargantuan undertaking. My left arm for human moderated lists.
My approach was to mine the “good” videos for additional resouces and recommendations, the same way I’d go to the notes and bibilography section of a book. That’s made this process easier. But jfc, the number of shitty gardening videos I was served up from people who gave the WORST advice was legion.
And you see those shitty ones often get served up because they got the most “engagement.” Usually because everyone in the comments said they were wrong, then their fans came in to defend them, and BOOM!! Engagement metrics ? (leaving this here, again: www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgiv…).
What we’re all actually desperate for isn’t internet comments, it’s learning something worthwhile from someone who knows what the fuck they are doing. And that’s not something that happens organically via “the crowd” or (shudder) “the algorithm.” We don’t have the TIME to cull thru the shit.
2020 was great time to learn shit because many of us had the TIME to do this work. Here over winter break, I have the same luxury of TIME. What kills me is that it doesn’t COST a lot to have humans moderate lists and recs. But shit content DRIVES MORE ENGAGEMENT than useful content.It’s an ouroboros.
This has led me back to the library, which is (ONLY BARELY!!) hanging on as an ad-free and human-curated alternative to the shit machine. The vast majority of what I’ve ingested this year when it comes to learning has been via the library, and books I bought that I couldn’t get at library.
I’ve also found their human curated lists to be much more useful, and of course, you’ve got those valuable human-curated bibliographies. Most library apps are as easy as (and in fact even interface with) a Kindle cloud reader. I keep seeing retro futures in our future, out of necessity.
Humans continue to be the very best content moderators. Imagine that.
