In recent weeks, you’ve likely come across a lot of lifehacks that purport that we’ve been doing certain things wrong all along. And of course, these tend to be embarrassingly basic things that we’ve been supposedly messing up without realizing it.
What makes me so sure you’ve seen these? Well, it’s hardly lost on me that you can find a hefty deposit of them on this very website .
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And sure, I have to admit that some of them do actually live up to that description. If there’s a really simple way to make opening cans easier or to use a lighter without burning your thumb, who’s going to turn it down?
But sometimes these lifehacks aren’t so simple and they don’t always produce results that we actually like.
That’s not to say that it’s impossible for me to understand why someone would want to follow them, but they’re a little overhyped if they’re supposed to be the “right” way to do things.
For instance, I can already tell you that there are easier ways to reheat a pizza than this.
This method of pouring water into a frying pan and putting a top over it to give a slice a “steam bath” is supposed to be the happy medium between the sogginess that can come from microwaving pizza and the risk of burning it that comes from the oven.
And sure, I don’t doubt that the pizza tastes perfectly fine when you do it this way. But I find the oven works even better because I don’t have to watch it the whole time like I do here.
Honestly, the only thing you need to prevent an oven from burning your pizza is an egg timer. What a game-changer I am!
It’s also hard to call some traditional methods “wrong” when the alternative strategies just come down to personal taste.
For example, some will hail this as the “right” way to cook beans because “slow cooking” them reduces the water in the sauce, which both caramelizes them in a sense and doesn’t make the toast soggy.
However, others will simply call this overcooking the beans until they’re mushy to an unappetizing degree. From their perspective, the bean sauce is supposed to soak into the toast.
These are really just different styles of making a dish and you’re not going to convince either side that they’re doing it wrong.
After all, is New York going to force Chicago to make pizza their way or vice-versa? Good luck with that.
And while some of these hacks could help a lot in indivudal situations, they often aren’t as all-encompassing as people tend to make them appear.
If you need to make an egg salad sandwich or a similar sandwich with messy yet integral ingredients, putting those components in the center like this is an honestly ingenious way to keep everything together.
But if you’re making something simpler like a BLT or a ham and cheese sandwich, this step is going to be pointless at best and not really possible to do at worst.
Also, if you cut the sandwich in half as people tend to like doing, this hack really isn;t going to make any difference.
So it’s an excellent trick on a situational basis, but it’s hard to say that anything else is the “wrong way” to do it in most other contexts.
It’s also worth noting that lifehacks rarely come without some drawbacks of their own.
For instance, this idea to open the entire side of a ketchup package allows people to dip fries into the ketchup without making a mess. Again, that can help a lot in certain situations.
But at the same time, there’s something of a catch. You’re less likely to make a mess with this method than with most ones that only require opening a small part of the package, but that’s assuming that nothing goes wrong while you’re eating your lunch.
If the car you’re in hits a bad bump or something, that ketchup has a much bigger hole to escape from and is thus a lot more likely to go everywhere.
So if someone tells you you’ve been doing a simple and inconsequential thing in your life all wrong, it’s probably best to take it with a grain of salt.
