David McElroy

On April 1, a teacher in Quebec had a surprise for her students. She told them that the government had imposed a new rule requiring them to wear shower caps in the classroom. She told them it was an additional safety precaution.

You won’t be surprised to find out this was an April Fool’s Day joke. The gag was posted on Reddit Thursday afternoon and most people seemed to think it was quite funny. I’ll admit there’s something mildly amusing about a bunch of teen-agers wearing shower caps in class, but I couldn’t really laugh at it.

All I saw was a classroom full of young people who have been so brainwashed that they’re willing to do anything an authority figure tells them to do — in the name of their own safety.

To me, this “joke” reveals the dangers of living in the conformist bubble that we call the modern school system, where good little boys and girls learn that obedience to government is required — whether it makes sense or not.

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Katie and Cullen seemed like perfectly normal people when I met them six years ago.

They lived in an upscale neighborhood of a Birmingham suburb. She had been a child psychologist. He had been a software developer. But they had both left their secure, high-paying jobs. Why? They had become YouTube stars — and they were making enough money that they didn’t need jobs anymore.

I had a freelance photo assignment in March 2015 from a magazine to shoot pictures of the family for a cover story. They had nearly 100,000 subscribers on YouTube at the time and their popularity was rapidly growing. The story was all about their unlikely success.

They seemed like genuinely nice people. There was no air of pretentiousness about them. They didn’t even really seem that impressed with their sudden fame. I liked them.

But when I watched their YouTube channel — and read the comments from their adoring fans — I was absolutely baffled. I couldn’t figure out why anybody wanted to watch videos about their lives. Today, they have more than half a million subscribers to their channel, so I seem to be the odd one.

As I keep pondering whether there’s a media opportunity for me — on YouTube or something similar — I keep coming back to the puzzling realization that the public wants something which I don’t yet understand.

And how could I possibly be successful in a medium which I apparently don’t even understand?

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People rarely change. Not really.

Our movies and novels and self-help books all seem to be based on the idea that personal change is common. Without serious character development in fiction, movies and novels would be boring. If a self-help book said, “Don’t bother, because you’re probably not going to change anyway,” nobody would buy it.

We’re culturally conditioned to believe that substantial change in a person is common, but reality is far different. And it’s even more rare when a person changes someone else — because humans aren’t puppets who can be controlled on the inside.

If I try to change someone else — even if we both agree the change is for the better — I’m very unlikely to succeed. It’s a foolish thing to try. Even if you do succeed, the person who’s forced the change will always hold a superior position — and that will never allow for a healthy and equal relationship.

Even though I know all this, I’ve tried it anyway. Not consciously, but I’ve done it, thinking I had the best of intentions. As recently as about five years ago, I tried to change a woman I dated — and it was a miserable failure for both of us.

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