By Ben Smith:
Big bass held out at arm’s length. Tailgates covered in slabs of Crappie. Grip and grin photos with giant whitetail deer and turkeys. It’s a steady stream of success, the kind that makes the outdoors look easy, predictable, even. And that’s the problem. Because the truth is, social media might be one of the worst things to ever happen to hunting and fishing. Not because it’s all bad, but because it’s just good enough to fool people into thinking they understand something they haven’t actually learned.
Spend a few minutes online and you can pick up a dozen “tips.” What bait to throw for largemouth bass. How to set up on a gobbling turkey. Where to hang a stand for early-season deer. It’s all right there, packaged into neat little clips and confident explanations. The problem is, none of it comes with context. You’ll see a man catch a five-pound bass, but you won’t see the ten empty trips that came before it. You’ll watch someone smoke a good buck, but you won’t see the time he spent learning that property. The wind directions that don’t show up on a map, the access routes that don’t leave a trace, the mistakes that educated deer long before that moment ever happened, all left out. I can write you two dozen “how to” articles but none of them will guarantee your success.
What you’re getting is the result, stripped of everything that made it possible. And over time, that starts to change how people approach the outdoors. Instead of learning the water, fisherman chase what they saw last night. A bait works in one viral video, so it gets tied on everywhere. A certain bank produces fish in a clip, so it gets crowded out by the weekend. Before long, everybody is fishing the same way, in the same places, for the same reasons and wondering why it’s not working like it did on their phone. It’s not that the information is wrong. It’s that it’s incomplete. Fishing has always been about observation. Water color, wind direction, temperature changes, how bait moves, how fish stack up. None of that shows up in a 30-second clip. And when you skip over those details, you’re not really learning, you’re copying.
That works for a little while. Especially when the bite is good. When Crappie push shallow or bass are feeding aggressively, you can get away with it. You can look like you know what you’re doing without actually knowing much at all. But as soon as conditions change, and they always do, that borrowed knowledge falls apart. Suddenly, the fish are gone. Nothing works anymore. But the truth is, the fish didn’t disappear. The easy version of them did.
Hunters aren’t immune to it either. Scroll through enough content and you’ll find no shortage of strategies. Hang your stand here. Call like this. Move at this time. And again, none of it is necessarily wrong. But without understanding why those decisions are being made, it turns into a kind of copy-and-paste approach to something that’s never been that simple. You can’t shortcut woodsmanship. You can’t fast-forward experience. And you definitely can’t learn how a piece of ground hunts by watching someone else succeed on a completely different one.
A man might kill a good buck on camera, but what you don’t see is how careful he was getting in there. How many times he backed out because the wind wasn’t right. How often he chose not to hunt at all. Those are the parts that matter. Those are the parts that make someone consistently successful. But they don’t make for exciting content. Failure doesn’t get posted. Long days without a bite don’t get shared. The quiet sits, the wrong decisions, the lessons learned the hard way, those don’t show up in your feed. And when people don’t see that side of the outdoors, they start to believe it doesn’t exist.
Because when someone new struggles, and everyone does, they assume they’re doing something wrong. Or worse, they assume they’re just not good at it. They don’t realize that what they’re experiencing is the most normal part of hunting and fishing there is. So, they bounce from tactic to tactic. From spot to spot. From one “tip” to the next, never staying in one place long enough to actually learn anything. Meanwhile, the people who get better are usually doing the opposite. They’re not ignoring information, but they’re not chasing it either. They’re spending time outside. Paying attention. Making mistakes and remembering them. Figuring out not just what works, but why it works. They’re building something that doesn’t disappear when conditions change.
Social media didn’t invent bad habits, but it’s made them easier to fall into. It’s made it possible to feel informed without being experienced and confident without being tested. And maybe most of all, it’s made people impatient. The outdoors has never been about instant results. It’s always demanded time. Time to learn, time to fail, time to understand things that don’t come easy. That’s part of what makes it worthwhile. You can’t skip that part, no matter how many videos you watch. There’s nothing wrong with picking up a tip here and there. Nothing wrong with seeing how someone else does it. But if that’s all you’re doing and your entire approach is built on what you saw someone else do, you’re always going to be one step behind. Because conditions change. Pressure changes. Fish move. Animals adapt. And the only thing that keeps up with all of that is real experience.
So, the next time you find yourself scrolling through a string of success on social media, take it for what it is, a highlight, not a blueprint. Then put the phone down and go figure it out for yourself.
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