Hello everyone! There’s occasional funky audio in this episode! Thank you for bearing with me! I don’t know what I’m doing! That’s the whole point! Okay, onto the podcast.
Hey y’all! Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me on my exploration of the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever (and never) wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: different methods of building fires and a look at why failure might be so hard to accept.
Fire is fascinating. It’s fascinating to make, fascinating to watch. It’s a lovely subject of philosophy, being neither good nor evil. It is both destructive and creative. Forest fires create fertile soil and open seed pods. Humans have harnessed fire for our own needs, from cooking to blacksmithing to electricity. But humans, being humans, have also harnessed the destructive power of fire. We use it to clear whole ecosystems for our own gain, and we use it to bomb each other to oblivion. But none of that destruction is the fault of the fire. We could refer to it as a tool, but nothing is a tool until humans turn it into one. There’s a reason it’s seen as one of the four elements. It’s a part of nature, mysterious as the oceans, beautiful as the forest. But look, here I am philosophizing. People are bad at simplicity. It’s fire, okay? We know what it is.
One of the easiest ways to light a fire is with a lighter. It makes sense. Build a little device that will light a fire for you, then use that fire to light more fire. Lighters were invented in the 1800s out of converted flintlock pistols, since they lit the gunpowder to fire the gun. Over time, a surprisingly large number of different kinds of lighters were invented. There are lighters that claim to be windproof that burn at a higher temperature. In the 1930s, the automobile lighter was invented and they were really common in cars for a long time. Who doesn’t want a cigarette lighter built into their car?
Of course, even in the simplest of methods for fire building, there is room for failure. We have the long kind of lighter in my house – you know, the ones where you have to push a button and pull the trigger, and you can use them for lighting grills? Seems easy enough, but I cannot for the life of me light one of those lighters. I don’t know what it is! Maybe my hands aren’t strong enough, or I’m not doing it quite right, but I really struggle to light them. I’ve been taught! I just told you how! But I can’t do it. I always try though, because maybe someday I’ll be able to do it. This is the kind of failure I can laugh at. It doesn’t require a lot of effort, and while I don’t know what exactly makes it hard for me, it’s not that big of a deal, so it doesn’t hurt that bad when I fail. It’s the ability to laugh at the failure that allows me to continue to try.
What’s the second easiest way to light a fire? Well, before there were lighters, there were matches. I’ve always found matches pretty fascinating – how the chemicals can light just from friction and how they don’t smoke until after they’ve gone out. My parents have sort of a match collection, with matchbooks from all over the country. I think most people my age think of matches as coming in those little boxes, all in separate pieces, which is different from what I think matchbooks are. Matchbooks were probably more common when people carried matches around more. You don’t want them all falling out if you drop them trying to light your cigarette. I think people use lighters to light cigarettes and blunts more often than matches now. Less conspicuous, easier to keep around. Probably cheaper too, since they last longer than a matchbook would. Anyway, let’s talk about matches and fire-building.
A challenge I did recently was to try to light a fire with a single match and keep it going for at least five minutes. Seems easy but also seems hard. Turns out it’s kind of hard to get everything set up perfectly for just one match. They burn for a while, but once it goes out, if it hasn’t lit the kindling around it so that it can sustain itself. It’s a decent lesson in preparation. You can’t just start something without a plan for the future, because once the initial burst of energy is out, if there was no plan to continue, it’ll be over. I also noticed that there’s this funny thing about humans, and it’s that we love to pose arbitrary deadlines and rules on things. Who says I have to only use one match? Maybe in a survival situation where I only had one match? But why would I ever be in that situation? Why would I ever prepare that little for something so risky? But challenges are fun and they make you feel like you accomplished something. It’s fun to point at a roaring fire and say “I built that with only one match!” But it’s also fun to point at a roaring fire and say, “I built that.” It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to fit our arbitrary little rules. You did a thing, and that’s fun.
What other ways are there to make fire? Flint and steel is one way. I wonder, have any of you ever actually lit a fire with just a flint and steel? Maybe some of you have, but I’d venture to guess that the majority of people haven’t successfully lit a fire by sparking some metal and rock. And in their defense, I haven’t either. I’m not sure I could identify flint if I came across it in the woods, nor do I have a steel striker. What I have used is a tool called a ferro rod. The word “ferro,” spelled f-e-r-r-o, is short for ferrocerium, which is mostly made of the elements Iron and Cerium. If you remember the symbol for iron on the periodic table, it’s Fe, which stands for “ferrum,” the Latin word for iron. So it’s a pretty self-explanatory name, but only if you know the words.
When you strike the rod with the back of a knife or another piece of steel, tiny pieces of ferrocerium come into contact with the air and burn, reaching temperatures over 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. So, hot! They spark really easily, so lighting a fire with them is surprisingly simple. It’s also really satisfying, because it feels like you’ve just used a flint and steel to light a fire. It feels much more primitive, more basic. Besides, success is fun, and they make success easy while seeming hard.
So far, the most difficult method of fire-starting is with a bowdrill. You know that thing about rubbing two sticks together to make a fire? Yeah, so that technically works, but it’s really physically hard. A bowdrill is a tool to give yourself some mechanical advantage. It’s essentially shaped like a bow and arrow and it spins a stick into another piece of wood fast enough to burn and start a fire. In theory. In practice, it’s still really physically demanding, and frankly, kind of frustrating. You’re working the drill back and forth, on your knees on the ground, arm hurting, almost losing your balance, and things keep going wrong. The string stretches on your bow or the knots come loose and you have to stop and retie them. You wonder if you have better string than this weird paracord. You don’t. You wonder if you know how to tie a better knot. You don’t. You try again and lose your grip on the stick, and it goes flying. You have to stop and set up again. Your arm is tired. It’s hard!
But when you start to see some sawdust under the stick and smell the wood start to burn, it’s so cool. You can see the burn marks on the end of your stick and on the wood below it. It’s super cool, except for the fact that it can do all that and still not give you fire. I have yet to successfully make a bowdrill fire. Possibly because the bowdrill I bought is… sub-par. I’ll likely have to build my own if I want it to work, but I don’t know how to do that either. Lots of learning to do. And that’s okay. It’s okay to fail. It’s frustrating, sure. But it’s okay.
The thing about failure is that our brains want to treat all failure the same, even when the stakes are dramatically different. Does it actually matter that I haven’t learned how to make a bowdrill fire? No. Does it actually matter that I can’t light a lighter? No. But I still care about it. I want to be successful and I want to be good at things. I’m not sure whether that response to failure is conditioned or innate, but I’m slowly starting to wonder if it’s more of a learned behavior.
Growing up, I was put in a lot of the gifted kid classes. Told as a third grader that I was smart, and that I was in different classes because I was smart, and that made me better. My classmates and I loved this praise, and it was given to us freely. We were told we were better and we believed it. But somewhere along the line, this rhetoric backfired. I became so caught up in chasing this ideal of myself, of the smart, great student, that I forgot that it was okay to not be that way. We judged people, silently and out loud, for not being in those same classes. And eventually, we judged ourselves for making mistakes, for not always exceeding expectations. Our expectations for ourselves were warped.
In high school, I see those same classmates pulling all-nighters, stressing over every piece of homework and every quiz, unable to let go of the pressure. They perceive anything less than their best as failure because that’s what they’ve been taught. They’re scared to fail. A lot of these people are scared to try new things, because they run the risk of not being good at it. Some people will try something new, but if they aren’t good at it the first time, they’ll never do it again. That’s sort of where I am. I might try something, but if it’s hard for me or I’m not good at it, it’s really hard to make myself try again. I’ve been told that I am good at things, and it is bad to not be exceptional. One way or another, I internalized that.
I got lucky with my family though. While I received those messages about failure at school, my life at home was never focused on my academic success and I was never pressured to excel or punished for failure. The people who caught pressure from both sides, home and school, are the ones I see on the 24/7 grind. Some of them have worked so hard all their lives to be perfect at everything that they’re not sure what they even like to do. I asked one of my friends, one of the smartest and most successful girls in the grade, what she wanted to do after high school, and her answer was unsure. “I don’t really know,” she said. “I guess I’ll go to UNC.” Maybe she hasn’t found something she loves yet, but I think it’s more than that. She hasn’t had any time or brain space to discover whether she really likes something or not. She doesn’t have the time or brain space to think about what she actually wants her future to look like, versus what she’s been told it should look like.
So how do we create environments where it’s safe to fail? Where it’s fun to try new things, and okay to not be successful after the first, second, or tenth try? How do we foster perseverance and the value of hard work? I wish I knew. People who learn instruments as kids know the value of practice, I think, but not everyone enjoys that. People who learn languages as kids also know the value of practice, but not everyone is able to do that. I think a lot of it comes down to a combination of equitable education and supportive parenting. Gifted kid programs turn out smart, curious students with a ton of self-esteem issues and anxiety. How is someone supposed to learn an instrument or a language without a teacher or the money to make it happen? A child who is punished for failure won’t try again.
Maybe one day I’ll light a fire with a bowdrill. Maybe not. Maybe I’ll try again and again, get better materials, strengthen my arm, build my own, keep practicing and improving. Maybe I’ll still fail. As much as I want to say that that’s all okay, I am still scared of that failure. It doesn’t matter, it’s not a high-stakes situation, but it’s still scary. So when I say this, I’m saying it as much to myself as to you. It’s okay to fail.
Thank you for listening to Fast Fact for Gen Z. School starts back up next week, so will this podcast continue weekly? We’ll find out. I’ll try. Follow this podcast to be notified when new episodes are released, and follow me on Twitter at @FastFactsPod. This is Callie, signing off.
Comentarios