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I rely entirely on reverse engineering to get through life. For a long time, I carried a quiet, stubborn shame about this. 

We are never actually taught *how* to learn, and the people who need to see the intermediate mess to understand the world are gaslit into thinking they’re thieves. But you can steal knowledge by reverse-engineering much the way you can steal balance from a walking-cane.

You see, as a kid I took a weird class at a weird school. That's where this starts.

In the fourth grade, at the once-a-week gifted and talented program they shipped us off to, there were colorful posters of Bloom’s Taxonomy taped to the cinderblock walls. They had those neat, brightly shaded pyramids mapping out the levels of human thinking... but as a kid, they just looked like wallpaper. Nobody actually explains the mechanics of how to bridge the gap between staring at a blank slate and making something exist. We’re never taught how to learn, exactly; we’re just expected to inherit the knack for it. 

Guess it's not shocking, but "pedagogy" isn't on any popular word lists.

One of my classes that year was an "Art(ist) Appreciation" class, half art history and half... well, art. Every week, in chronological order, we’d learn about a new artist’s sad-ass life story, and then we’d have to pick something from their body of work to recreate.

The teacher would curate about a dozen reference pictures. Because we had to finish during class, you ended up sitting at a table with whoever chose the same piece as you. We could use whatever medium we liked: crayon, watercolor, tempera, ink; anything but oil paint (took too long to dry).

I did pretty well with the history part, but I struggled hard with the recreations. Part of it was my own hipster bullshit.

While the other kids defaulted to the most popular, recognizable hits (Van Gogh’s Starry Night and his Sunflowers were massive crowd-pleasers): I wanted the weird stuff. My choices came down to stuff like his gritty, dark still-life bottles and pots, his incredibly depressing A Pair of Shoes.

Honestly, I believe the challenging and bizarre Still Life with Three Puppies by Paul Gauguin is the one that broke me.

As the other kids huddled together at the "popular" tables, I viewed them as a massive collective of cognitive dissonance (before I had the term, of course). It appeared to me that, as a group, they could figure out how to approach the task much easier just by being in proximity. They could see how the person next to them tackled the curve of a vase or the swirl of a sky. But they never saw it that way... they all thought they were being uniquely brilliant! Bridled and blinkered, locked in a silent race to out-paint each other.

Deciding to be a lone wolf, or maybe just subconsciously avoiding a race I knew I’d lose, I went to a table by myself.

And immediately, I knew I was screwed. I had absolutely no idea how to translate a master-tier impressionist work onto a piece of beige construction paper using nothing but a messy box of mushy pastels and scratchy charcoals. The leap from Masterpiece to My Piece was too wide. I couldn't do it. 

So I asked the teacher if I could see a finished version of the same painting done by a student from earlier in the week, a kid from a different school whom I’d never meet. I realized that if I could look at the original masterpiece and see how a normal kid’s brain translated it into crayon, I could find the entry point. I didn't want to copy their art; I needed to reverse-engineer their problem-solving process. It worked, and eventually, the teacher just started handing me a peer's version automatically alongside the master reference.

Years later, in the adult haze of hindsight, it’s easy to look back at that and wonder if it was a symptom of learned helplessness: a quiet, early admission of defeat. But there’s a part of me that wants to defend that kid for finding a backdoor into a room where the front door felt entirely locked.

When Web 1.0 started, I learned HTML the only way that made sense to me: right-clicking a page and selecting "View Source." It was a world of open blueprints. I’d borrow the structural markup, which was mostly just clumsy nested tables and hex codes, and swap out the colors, the backgrounds, and the actual text to make it mine.

Then the design hawks arrived. In that early era of personal websites, a culture of intense gatekeeping cropped up, and people started publicly calling out smaller sites for "stealing layouts." One popular site had a catchphrase that shook me enough to stick in my head for decades: "for every person that thinks you're original, ten people know you're a thief" (or something along those lines).

I hate actual plagiarism, but that phrase weaponized shame to protect a total illusion of effortless, "clean-room" originality. It was the same righteous land rush that happens to every new "frontier," wherein every petty tyrant becomes their own Ramses III, and the greed and damage occur at the exact same time. People claim a territory that was built on public infrastructure (or outright colonial theft), then fence it off, and call anyone looking at the blueprints a criminal.

They even started calling out people for using templates, made available to everyone by the creators, since that's just one step away from theft... it's still unoriginal, right? Luckily, all of that devolved into something... somewhere, of which I'm largely unaware. I remember some version of it cropping up in the MySpace era, but too many normies were around for anyone to care about some "stolen" javascript "code" on a socially impactful level anymore. But, we weren't on our own sites, so we weren't making the rules anymore, either.

Before we realized it, we were all being told: "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better!" and I'm checking the bottom of my boot for a moth to explain how this happened.

That’s where the real frustration lives. We are stuck in a world that fundamentally (structurally, legally) detests the deconstructive mind. The modern landscape entirely favors the opaque, the disposable, and the impossible to repair. Devices are glued shut, proprietary code is locked behind digital walls, and infinite copyright extensions ensure that nothing we love will ever enter the public domain in our lifetime. The system criminalizes the urge to open the hood because opacity is highly profitable. If you can’t see how a thing is built, you can’t fix it, and you’re forced to remain a passive consumer who just buys a new one.

For a long time, I thought my approach to the world was unfair, or that I just missed the lesson on the right way to learn. But looking back at those useless educational pyramids on the wall, I realize that looking for a peer's version wasn't cheating -- It was just scaffolding. 

Staring directly at greatness can be completely blinding. You don't need to reinvent the world from scratch; you just need to see how someone else broke down the impossible. Damn those that stand in the way.

I fear we didn't learn the lessons intended from the stories of Pandora, Eve, and Persephone.