There’s a lazy story we tell about older people who won’t take on anything new. We say they’ve lost their curiosity, that their minds have closed, that they’re set in their ways. It’s a comfortable explanation, and in my experience it’s very often wrong. The ones I’ve known who flatly refuse to learn the new skill, the new gadget, the new way of doing a familiar job, are not short on curiosity in the slightest. What they cannot stomach is something else altogether. They can’t bear to be visibly bad at something in front of other people.
Learning anything means being terrible at it first
There is no route to a new skill that skips the stage of being hopeless at it. Every competence you have ever possessed began as a clumsy, fumbling incompetence, the dropped notes, the stalled car, the first few inedible dinners. When you’re young, nobody minds, because being bad at things is more or less understood to be your job. You’re allowed, expected even, to flail about for a while. Somewhere along the way, though, that permission gets revoked, and being a beginner stops feeling like a normal stage and starts feeling like an exposure, a public admission that you don’t know what you’re doing.
For most of us this grows harder with age, and it grows hardest of all for one particular kind of person. The one who has spent decades being the competent one in the room.
The chef who wouldn’t touch the new system
I worked, years ago, with a head chef who was, inside his own kitchen, close to a god. Thirty-odd years of total command, a man who could send out two hundred covers without once raising his voice, who knew his trade so completely that the rest of us watched him the way you watch anyone do something effortless that you happen to know is impossibly hard. Competence wasn’t simply his skill. It was his whole identity, the self he was, the fixed point the entire room arranged itself around.
When the restaurant brought in a new computer system for the orders, he would not learn it. Flatly, immovably, would not. Everyone put it down to the usual old-timer business, technophobia, a refusal to move with the times. I’d watched him master fiendishly complicated things his entire career, though, so I never bought that for a second. What I came to understand was that he could not tolerate standing at that screen, in his own kitchen, in front of the young commis chefs who revered him, prodding at it wrongly, fluffing it, being slower than a teenager would have been. To be a fumbling novice, out in the open, in the one room where he had always been the master, was intolerable in a way that had nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with who he believed himself to be.
The better you’ve been, the harder it becomes
This is the cruel twist in the whole affair. You’d assume competence would make new learning easier, and in a narrow sense it does, capable people often pick things up quickly. But the deeper effect pulls the opposite way. The more masterful you’ve been, and the longer you’ve worn it, the further you have to drop to become a beginner again, and the more of your sense of self is staked on never dropping that far. A person who has been middling all their life can take up a new skill badly at no cost to themselves, because being a bit rubbish is already home ground. The acknowledged expert has no such cushion under him. For him, being bad at something isn’t an ordinary Tuesday. It’s a small crisis of identity.
So mastery, the very quality that made him impressive, slowly becomes the thing that pins him in place. The competence he spent decades building hardens into a cage, and the bars of it are made of other people’s eyes.
It’s the audience that does it, not the difficulty
The giveaway is that this fear is almost entirely about being watched. Plenty of people who won’t let themselves be taught in company will happily stumble through the identical task alone, in private, where nobody is there to clock the clumsiness. My chef, I heard later, did in the end learn the system, slowly, after hours, with the kitchen empty and dark, where there was no one to witness him being briefly useless. It was never the system he couldn’t handle. It was the gallery. The willingness to learn, when you trace it all the way down, comes to rest on the willingness to be seen not knowing, and that is a wholly different muscle from curiosity.
Being a beginner is a skill in its own right
Because that’s what it really is, a muscle, and one that wastes away with disuse. Letting yourself be a beginner asks for a specific and uncomfortable thing, the temporary surrender of your standing, the willingness to be nobody for a while, to not know, to be corrected by someone half your age. Children are wonderful at this purely because they’ve never been anything else. The longer you spend as the authority, the one who knows, the weaker that knack for cheerful self-demotion grows, until some people lose it entirely and mistake the loss for having simply outgrown the need to learn at all.
I can feel it starting in me
I notice the early form of this in myself already, at thirty-eight, which is younger than I’d care to admit. There are pursuits I now avoid, and the reason isn’t that they bore me. It’s that I’ve reached a level of broad competence where being a clumsy novice again feels faintly humiliating. The first flicker of “I’d rather not look stupid” has started turning up, and I recognise it for what it is now, the very first brick in the chef’s cage. So I’ve taken to deliberately doing things I’m hopeless at. Taking up a pursuit where I’m comfortably the worst person in the room, on purpose, partly for the pleasure of it and partly as a kind of training, keeping the beginner muscle supple while it still moves freely, so it doesn’t seize up completely by the time I reach his age.
My old chef is well into his seventies now. He did, in time, learn the system, and the smartphone, and a good few things since, always alone, always clear of any audience, always at a quiet price paid to a pride he could never quite put down. I think of him whenever I catch myself declining to be bad at something. He wasn’t incurious. He was, right to the end, one of the most curious men I ever worked alongside. He just could not bear to be watched not knowing, and it cost him years of things he might have picked up far sooner and enjoyed far more, if only he’d been able to stand the brief, necessary indignity of being a beginner in front of somebody else. The people who keep growing into old age aren’t the cleverest, or even the most curious. They’re the ones who never lost the knack of being cheerfully, publicly terrible at something new.
