I saw some Olympic gymnastics routines the other day and I found myself feeling indifferent. Which upon self reflection made me feel odd and somewhat egotistical . These are professional OLYMPIC level athletes performing feats of athleticism I can never even hope to achieve. And yet, I was just, not impressed? This didn’t make sense to me. But then I realized I didn’t know anything about gymnastics. And I came to a following conclusion:

I think how impressed someone is by any given thing can be modeled with a normal distribution. The Y-axis is how impressed someone is. And the X-axis would be the familiarity with the subject. I don’t know anything about gymnastics. Therefore I have nothing to compare those gymnastic routines against. In my eyes, those are professional athletes who have dedicated their lives to their craft. I would hope they would be able to do something impressive. 

Allow me to explain using other examples. I used to partake in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild speedrunning. It was a hobby that kept me busy back in 2020 during the pandemic. The first time I saw a speedrun of the game, I thought it was cool. But I was more so impressed by the ending where the player beat the final boss without taking damage and essentially using only the equipment he found strewn around the final area. In other words, I was only impressed with the part of the speedrun that I was familiar with: fighting the final boss. The rest of the route involved complex glitches and routes that definitely looked cool. But I did not have context for why something was or was not impressive. Then I started to learn how to do the speedrun myself. I joined the community and started to learn about the process. This shifted my whole perspective. I had a newfound appreciation for all the glitch hunters that poured time and effort into researching and discovering new glitches and how they worked. I began to recognize which strategies and tricks were hard to do and how insane it is for someone to pull them off in a high stress environment such as in the middle of a run. I developed respect for all the creative people coming up with new routes and ideas for finding more efficQient ways to beat the game. So now when I see a player perform a frame perfect bullet time bounce off the head of a bokoblin and achieve enough speed to outpace the game’s ability to load shrine door collisions, I go “holy shit that’s impressive”. Whereas in the past my reaction would have been “oh neat I wonder what just happened there”. But eventually, I became good enough. I started to run individual level runs, which were a sub category for completing the shrines as fast as possible. I even got a few world records at some point (most of them are beaten by now but at the time I did manage to stay on the leaderboard for at least a while). At this point I’ve seen certain things enough and done them myself enough times to be familiar with them. Getting a vertical windbomb or clipping through simple walls became like second nature. So we are at that point in the bell curve where my ability to be impressed is once again decreased. But I don’t believe it’s at the same level as near the beginning of the curve. Because I still hold all that knowledge and appreciation of what makes something difficult or impressive to do. 

So that kinda explains it. Sometimes in life we’re just told professionals are good at what they do without knowing why. When I saw that gymnast do those cool flips I was kinda already expecting them to be able to do that since after all, they are Olympic level athletes. It’s to be expected. But if I let myself learn more about the subject matter, I’m able to appreciate it better. Since I wouldn’t just be seeing the end result, I would be comprehending the sum of all their efforts. So I think the moral of the story is that you should strive to try and understand things rather than dismiss them. Something might not feel significant to you but that might just be a matter of lacking perspective. At the end of the day I don’t think we can control whether we do or don’t feel impressed by something. But that shouldn’t stop us from trying to learn more.