So today my car battery died, couldn't even be revived with a jump. I was able to walk to an auto store to get tools and a new battery (damn that mfer was heavier than I expected). I had never had to replace my own car battery before.
I screwed the fastener nuts the wrong way for like 5 minutes, cut my hand, and ultimately accidentally crossed the positive and negative terminals with a wrench that exploded in sparks. I don't even know what stopped me from being electrocuted but I didn't feel a thing.
While I'm happy I was able to take care of it myself and will be able to in the future, I also feel like such a dunce for not knowing wtf I was doing and almost shocking myself
At some point a few years back I decided that if something can be done by regular people, I can learn how to do it. Every individual skill starts with several mistakes that would be obvious to a professional, but I'm not one, or at least wasn't. We have an opportunity that no one in history had, though. We have the ability to learn anything from real masters with a simple search. Forums and YouTube have endless information from every kind of craftsman, mechanic, programmer, designer, and engineer willing to give anyone the great advantage of being able to skip the majority of dumb mistakes we would all make. In the last two years I've learned welding, tiling, server programming, flooring, building code, gun making, cabinet building, and anything else that arose and needed done. I just finish milling a pile of rough boards into lumber before checking Lemmy.
You have to start somewhere, and there will always be mistakes, but if the car could end up being an ongoing problem, you just found a reason to learn mechanics.