Young Hoes Cook Everything on High

“Young hoes cook everything on high” is funny because it’s real.

A lot of learning today happens through watching outcomes, not through being walked through the process. You see what the end result looks like, not how long it took, how many times it went wrong, or what adjustments had to be made along the way. Psychologist Albert Bandura called this social learning: people copy what they see rewarded. And when the reward is attention, confidence, or visibility, what spreads is whatever looks like competence.

Cooking on high makes sense in our current environment. It reads as decisiveness. It looks like you know what you’re doing. Low heat doesn’t translate unless someone has already taught you how to recognize its purpose. In a lot of cases, people might even think you’re dumb for trying to do it. That’s where something deeper gets lost. There’s an idea called tacit knowledge, which is the kind of understanding you can’t fully explain, only pass on through experience. Meaning you don’t learn things from instructions alone. You learn it from standing there, watching, getting corrected, and messing it up enough times that your body starts to recognize what “right” feels like. The issue we’re facing is that this kind of teaching doesn’t really fit into what we culturally incentivize.

Teaching is slow and repetitive. It requires sitting in the “boring middle,” and we don’t reward that. The people who historically taught the in-between (teachers, coaches, and mentors) are underpaid and under-credited. Meanwhile, someone can post a 30-second clip that looks like mastery and get paid more than the person who’s been doing the actual teaching for years. So the message shifts and the explanation gets compressed. What remains is something that’s easy to imitate but hard to learn from.

This is called performance orientation. When environments reward looking capable over becoming capable, people optimize for appearance, and high heat performs well, whereas process doesn’t. This is how imitation becomes the dominant learning strategy. You copy the surface because that's all you can see. The posture, the confidence, the aesthetic, the finished plate. It’s not that people don’t care about learning; it’s that the system teaches them, over and over, that learning quietly doesn’t count.

French theorist Guy Debord described this as life turning into spectacle: representation replacing lived experience. Skill becomes something you display rather than something you build. The image of knowing overtakes the practice of knowing. That’s why “everything on high” shows up everywhere once you start looking. In work, where people rush to titles before skills. In fitness, where aesthetics matter more than longevity. In emotional life, reactions are immediate and unprocessed because slowing down doesn’t feel productive.

The joke works because it catches a real pattern in motion. A culture trained on outcomes, raised on clips, learning through imitation in a system that no longer consistently rewards instruction.