By JTFounder, The HowTo Network · June 2026
“I used to find this inefficient. Now I think he was onto something.”
My father had a complicated relationship with technology.
Not hostile — he wasn’t the type to refuse a smartphone or pretend the internet was going to ruin everything. He engaged. He figured things out. But he figured them out on his own terms, at his own pace, with a particular kind of methodical stubbornness that I did not fully appreciate until I started watching him do it up close.
He didn’t ask for help if he could avoid it. Not because he was proud — or not only because he was proud — but because he genuinely preferred to figure it out himself. There was something he got from the figuring that he didn’t get from being shown. The answer landed differently when he worked for it.
I used to find this inefficient. Now I think he was onto something.
Here is the thing about being shown how to use a technology: you learn the steps, not the logic. You learn to click the button, not why the button is there. My father, working things out slowly and frustratingly by himself, was building something I was skipping. He understood what he understood in a way that was his. He owned it.
The flip side, of course, is that he sometimes spent forty-five minutes doing something that would have taken me two minutes to show him. He knew this and it bothered him less than you’d think.
There is a generation of people — your father’s generation, your grandfather’s — who adapted to more technological change than any generation in history. They went from rotary phones to smartphones. From card catalogues to search engines. From paper maps to GPS in their pocket. From film cameras to a device that takes unlimited photographs and stores them in a cloud they can’t see or locate.
They adapted. Most of them. Not perfectly, not without frustration, but they adapted. And they did it without the baseline assumption that their children grew up with — that technology is supposed to be intuitive, supposed to just work, supposed to be learnable without a manual. The manual existed. They read the manual. They hated the manual and read it anyway.
I want to give that generation more credit than we typically do.
We laugh at our parents for not knowing keyboard shortcuts or for calling everything they dislike on the internet “a virus.” We get frustrated when we have to explain the same thing three times. We forget that the context they’re operating from — the mental model of how information moves and how machines work — is fundamentally different from ours, built in a different era, and not wrong, just from a different world.
They are not slow.— JT
They are translating.
If your father is still navigating a technology that feels overwhelming to him, don’t fix it for him. Sit with him and help him figure it out himself. There’s a difference. One leaves him with a working device he doesn’t understand. The other leaves him with something he can actually use.
Ask him what he’s trying to do — not what button to press, but what outcome he’s trying to reach. Work backward from there. Most tech problems, when you state them in plain language, are simpler than the vocabulary around them suggests.
And if there’s something he’s figured out on his own — something he worked out through his own particular methodical process — ask him to show you. He’s earned the right to show you. The knowledge looks different when he built it.
My father figured out his phone the way he figured out most things. Slowly. Without asking. Making mistakes and backing up and trying again. By the time he had it, he had it.
I could have shown him faster. I’m glad, in a way, that I didn’t always.
JT wrote a letter to every edition of The HowTo Network this Father’s Day. This one is for the fathers who read the manual.