#14: Why is Everyone Good at... Everything?

The way social media and surplus to information has made everyone an expert, but is it ruining us?

Thanks to many hours spent in the bathroom as a teenager, playing with my hair and makeup to cover up my lackluster confidence, I became as much of a hair and makeup virtuoso as a 17-year-old could be in 2008. That mid 2000’s smoky eye, using Chanel’s eyeshadow quad? I could do it in my sleep. Being able to wield a curling iron that resulted in glossy beachy waves and not pageant curls? I had that Gossip Girl aesthetic down pat.

This resulted in my sorority sisters (betcha didn’t see that coming from me) scheduling actual appointments with me for hair and makeup before any of our date parties and formals in college. I was *the* hair and makeup girl. I proudly wore that title too, enjoying sharing my self-taught tricks with my friends and all my favorite products (in hindsight, I really should have seen the influencer thing coming).

Having lived through our college years without social media (minus senior year when Instagram debuted and the most exciting parts about it were the Valencia filter and getting 11 likes so you didn’t see the names), there wasn’t the pressure of keeping up with being in-the-know about anything other than what was within our social circles. Some of us were good at some things, like makeup or baking, others were good at pop-culture fluency and knowing the best restaurants. None of us were good at ALL the things, nor were we expected to be.

Social media lowered the barrier to entry

Social media, in its current state, has lowered the barrier to entry on a lot of things. With the surplus of YouTube tutorials, 30-second hacks, and answers just one Google search away, learning has never been more accessible than ever.

With that, it now feels like everyone somehow knows how to do everything.

Skills like how to DIY your own crown molding, do salon-level gel manicures, achieve Disney princess-worthy Dyson blowouts, organize your fridge to the point where there’s nary a single label and only a thousand overpriced containers from the Container Store, hack your fertility and hormones, make the crispiest potatoes over (drown them in an ungodly amount of oil), cleaning hacks (bless the internet for this one), navigate airline points for free trips— it feels like a perpetual game of optimizing your life and a chase of skill and cultural fluency like never before.