At what stage in life do you call it quits on trying to improve a skill? I have never been a great typist, and after using keyboards for the past 43 years, you'd think I'd be good at it. But I'm still a basic two-finger typist, although my other fingers do join in occasionally when they feel like it, but a touch typist I am not.
In fact, I think I've probably gotten worse over the years, as I've become older, and try to avoid the joint pain in my finger knuckles that recurs when I have intense typing sessions. As life has become more hectic, and more demands on our time to multitask, proof-reading has also become an afterthought.
When I am in a discussion on Discord, I'm sure any readers are used to seeing me post something and then can watch over the next two minutes as they see my edits happen one at a time as I re-read what I just posted, and fix the mistakes bit by bit.
My biggest faux pas is transposing letters, as my brain/fingers never get the order of hitting the left or right key first. I'm chronically typing the word "the" as "teh". I think I've done it so much that my brain now thinks "teh" is the correct way to do it.
Thus we come to the crux of my existential crisis. Is it time to give up, stubbornly going back and correcting all these typo's, thinking that, in doing so, I'll retrain my brain to do it correctly, or do I just succumb to the fact it's a lost cause, and turn to automation to fix my nasty habits? My concern is that by relying on the crutch of automation, my skills will never improve. On the contrary, they will probably get worse, as the lack of having to self-correct will just ingrain the mistakes into muscle memory. This will be especially bad when those crutches are removed if, for example, I install AutoHotkey on my PC, to be my typing assistant, and then move to my iPad where AutoHotkey does not exist.
I believe it's probably time to concede defeat and install every assistant I can to just do it all for me, and save what precious time I have left in trying to fix my own mistakes when the robots can do it quicker and easier than I will ever be able to.
On a final note, I do have an AI tool on this blog to help me do all these things, and even make my article read better than I could probably ever write it myself while staying saying what I want to say. Sometimes I'll use it, sometimes I won't. I've stubbornly refused to in this article for changing what I've written, and have manually had to go back and fix at least twenty typing mistakes, although there were a couple of basic punctuation mistakes I let it find for me. There are probably even some bigger mistakes still here, as it's late, I'm tired, and I'm not going to re-read everything I've just written as it's a late-night brain dump just to get it off my chest.
Welcome to my world. Either live with it, laugh at it, or learn from it, but one day, you WILL understand it.