I’ve been playing video games for as long as I can remember. I’ve spent thousands of hours exploring virtual worlds, battling monsters, collecting loot, and watching other people explain how to do all of those things more efficiently. Gaming has been part of my life for nearly fifty years, and I hope it remains part of my life for another fifty.
For much of that time, something has bothered me. Something small, admittedly, but irritating enough that I’ve complained about it to friends on numerous occasions. The word “tech.”
If you’ve ever watched a video game strategy guide, you’ve probably heard someone explain that they’ve discovered some new “tech” for defeating a boss or farming resources faster. Every time I heard it, I wondered why these idiots insisted on calling a strategy or trick “technology.” There was no new technology involved! It was just a different way of doing something! Why couldn’t they simply call it what it was?
I made fun of this regularly. For decades. And I was quite confident in my assessment of everyone else’s stupidity.
Yesterday afternoon, Jettie and I were playing at the park when she excitedly told me she had some new soccer tech that would help her in her next game. Naturally, I asked what sort of technology she’d learned.
Without hesitation, she replied, “No, Dada. It’s not technology. It’s technique.”
I stopped dead in my tracks.
Nearly fifty years on this planet. Thousands upon thousands of hours immersed in gaming culture. Countless conversations, strategy guides, and videos. Thirty years of quietly, and sometimes loudly, judging people for using a word incorrectly. And not once, NOT ONCE, had it occurred to me that “tech” might mean “technique.”
I was absolutely dumbfounded. All those years, I’d been making fun of people for being idiots while operating under a misunderstanding so spectacularly obvious that an eight-year-old corrected it without even thinking. The possibility had never so much as wandered through my mind. Not even for a second.
I immediately stopped what we were doing and explained to Jettie what had just happened. I told her about the decades I’d spent misunderstanding the word, the friends I’d mocked it in front of, and the countless times I’d confidently decided someone else was saying something stupid. I explained that she’d just corrected a misunderstanding her dada had been carrying around for longer than she’d been alive.
She was delighted.
“I discovered something you didn’t know!”
I told her it was even better than that. Discovering something usually involves searching or figuring something out. She hadn’t needed to discover anything. She’d simply known something her dada had somehow managed to miss for his entire adult life. She thought that was pretty wonderful. So did I.
We’ve been laughing about it ever since.
There’s probably a larger lesson here about assumptions, confidence, and the stories our minds construct to make sense of the world. For thirty years, I had an explanation that made perfect sense to me. It was wrong, but because I never questioned it, every encounter with the word only reinforced my belief that everyone else was an idiot. My misunderstanding had become evidence of my superior understanding. That’s a pretty impressive trick for a brain to pull on itself.
I wonder how many other things I’m walking around being confidently wrong about. How many opinions have I formed around assumptions I’ve never bothered to examine? How many times have I mistaken my own ignorance for someone else’s?
I’m sure there are plenty, but I’d prefer not to discover all of them at once. My ego can only handle so much new tech in a single afternoon.
Mostly, though, I’m just delighted that my daughter got to experience the joy of teaching her dada something he didn’t know. Better still, she got to see just how excited he was to learn it. I hope she never loses that excitement herself, whether she’s the one learning something new or the one helping someone else understand.
So, to the countless gamers, streamers, and strategy enthusiasts I’ve silently or openly ridiculed over the years, please accept my sincerest apologies. You were apparently speaking a language I had spent decades pretending to understand.
Turns out the idiot was me.
At least now I’ve finally learned some new tech. And it only took thirty years and an eight-year-old soccer player.