You don’t need to feel bad for not being good at something you haven’t done for 2.6 million years

It doesn’t matter whether you’re Gen Z, Millennial, Gen X, a Boomer, or one of the Silent Generation: I’ve heard complaints from all ages about how using a computer just doesn’t come naturally to them. For many people, there’s a sense of shame to this (specifically, tech shame), like it’s a personal failing.

Shall we put this into perspective?

Human tool use started about 2.6 million years ago, and for all but the last little part of that, we’ve been making every one of those tools out of stuff we found lying around near our homes somewhere.

Our species, Homo sapiens, has been around for 300,000 years.

We’ve only been recording our history for the last 5,000 years or so.

We’ve only been using electricity in our homes for around 150 years.

We’ve only had computers in our homes for about the last 50.

Over the last 2.6 million years of our evolution, we’ve had computers for 0.001923% of the time. That’s like if you took the Empire State Building and held your fingernail up to it.

For the rest of those 2.6 million years, our bodies have been adapting to our changing environments, building connections with those close to us, developing languages, figuring out agriculture, domesticating animals, studying plants, tracking the stars, and more. We’ve been keeping pretty busy.

And yet, many of us modern humans bemoan the fact that we don’t have an instinctive sense of how to use our laptops, that it doesn’t come naturally to us. 

But from your body’s perspective, your laptop has only existed for a few seconds, at most. It’s bizarre that anyone finds it natural and intuitive, and in fact even the people who do find it intuitive tend to have their specialities and narrow expertise – there’s no one out there who can use any software on any computer for any task all of the time. Ask an Android app developer to modify the software for a nuclear reactor, and see how well that goes.

So cut yourself some slack when it comes to not feeling like technology is intuitive, and celebrate that your human body does instinctively know how to walk, dance, hug, laugh, and sing. The rest will come in time.

Photo by Eugene Zhyvchik on Unsplash