Rant piece: Please Just f***ing think!

I have a loose mentoring relationship with one of my friends who enjoys dabbling in computing; however, this is kept loose for one important reason in particular.

This friend does not understand the importance of applying logic or critical thinking skills when seeking my advice or seeking other professionals for advice in our connected friend group. I don’t mind helping, giving advice, or hell, even showing them how it's done! It's a source of satisfaction for me while helping you do better. The issue comes up when the questions that are being asked are due to a lack of engagement with the material that I am providing. An example of this is when I was helping them connect to my tailscale network and failing to read stdout when a command failed.

Error: changing settings via 'tailscale up' requires mentioning all
non-default flags. To proceed, either re-run your command with --reset or
Use the command below to explicitly mention the current value of
all non-default settings:

tailscale up --auth-key=tskey-auth-**** --operator=****```

Now, to be charitable, this output would be scary to anyone that I pulled off the street, and that is to be expected. Sadly, this friend is not some random person I pulled off the street. In fact, they’ve been a Linux power-user for a decade now, so I expect them to Read The Goddamn Errors by now. Or at least possess the ability to read and think without immediately panicking when a command fails like the one outlined above. The now standard response from them is "This is not working" or "Rose just make this work!" or "No I do not want to take notes to build my own knowledge base. I only remember the important things anyways". Flash forward 5 hours later we finally get them to build a note taking system which never gets used. Congrats you played yourself. Oh and we never did get iSCSI working.

I understand operating under pressure is a practiced skill, and hell, I still struggle with it when someone is watching me. When the stakes are this low, I do not understand how to help you if you won't help yourself first.

This is not just an isolated issue; I see this every day in HomeLab. I see the outright refusal to read documentation, practice basic research skills, note keeping, reading skills, or just using basic critical thinking skills, becoming argumentative when faced with a challenge, without being given immediate answers. I blame AI https://www.brainonllm.com/, short-form content https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1454296.pdf, and even the general toxic attitude our culture likes to encourage. So what do we do when we are faced with these types? Tell them to kick rocks? Expose ourselves to Homelab in hopes of bumping into that one person who wants to learn and challenge themselves? I think we do have to keep looking for those who want to learn. Despite those individuals like my friend who refuse to accept help, but will still gladly ask me for my time and energy, I'll save that for those who actually need it and will apply themselves. If this post makes it into your DMs by a mentor or a friend, take it as a hint that you need to do better.