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I'm actually curious, what exactly is the brag here they were making? I've encountered people who can't change their own flat tires, but I've yet to encounter one who was anything less than sheepishly ashamed of this, much less proud enough to brag about this lack of ability on their part. Is it just that they enjoy such a luxurious life that they can just throw money at people to do this for them, even in unplanned emergencies?
I'm reminded of anecdotes I've heard from teachers mentioning that their students today don't understand computer filesystems. Everything is just done via app, and the idea of using a browser to download a file to a folder on their hard drive, then navigating to that folder in an explorer program, copying the file to another folder where it needs to be, and opening it with another application or whatever is completely foreign to them. It sort of makes sense given the environment in which they grew up and learned computers, and it seems similar to my own attitude towards cars, which is that they really are just
a black boxmagic, and if something goes wrong, I go to my localmechanicmagician to get it fixed. Because learning the magic myself just seems like more trouble than it's worth. When I was learning computers, I had to learn the filesystem to actually accomplish anything. Now, kids don't have to, so they don't.I'm not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing or either.
Imagine you grow up in an conservative area where boys & man are all interested in cars, and being able to change tires is seen as the bare minimum of manliness. You're an awkward nerd that doesn't like cars but is good with computers.
20 years later, all the kids that made fun of you in school for not caring about cars are at best suburb normies and at worst still live with their parents. You went to google and now make literally 5x as much as the majority of them, while still not being able to change a tire.
It's not about the thing itself, it's about what kind of person you are. And young people pick this up as well, they see that being able to change tires is basically meaningless and anyone being proud of it is probably a loser at everything that matters, so they countersignal how bad they're at it.
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It went something like this - I had flat tire (due to stupidity on my part), the girl I was in the car with posted some kind of story on the social media. Some fuckboy wrote something among the lines her - hey hun, do you know how to change a tire. Her answer was - no, you? . His answer was - no I have guys for that.
For the other part - it was the damned iphone. Because android was open for learning and still is. But apple are actively hostile towards viewing their device as something different than magic.
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