Can't Tie My Laces

For a long time I could not tie my shoelaces, or at least, not in a way that stayed tied. This was a source of great embarrassment and frustration, since "unable to tie their own shoelaces" is generally a symbol for stupid and/or incompetent, and also it's just really annoying when you're walking along and your laces are loose.

A couple of years ago there were a spate of YouTube videos called (variants of) You're Tying Your Laces Wrong, basically explaining that if you do both loops of your shoelace-knot in the same direction then any future friction will push the knot open, and you can fix this by simply doing one cross left-over-right and the next cross right-over-left.

Despite the fact that you would think this instruction is straightforward, and that just by chance if you went in random directions you would surely get it right about half the time, I was continuously unable to implement this and my laces continued indecorously untangling themselves.

HOWEVER. Recently I discovered a NEW spate of YouTube videos declaring a NEW way you're tying your shoelaces wrong, this time recommending a knot called Berluti. And reader, this one actually works for me:

I think in some way that I don't have words for, this knot is more robust and fail-safe than the other one: you can very immediately tell if you've done it wrong, and (once I got my head around the instructions) I found that by default it seemed to go right.

It was also just sufficiently different from the Classic Knot that I think it was in some way easier to internalize than a literal-and-metaphorical twist on something I'd been doing a certain way for years.

So. If you or someone you love are unable to tie your laces, check out this video (or its endless similar cousins). A better world is possible, in this as in so many things.