Competence Isn't Amazon Prime

There are times when I really fucking hate people.

Seriously. Can't fucking stand them.

Now, before anyone gets their panties in a wad, let me clarify. Individually, people can be amazing. I work with brilliant people. I have incredible friends. My girlfriend continues to remind me that good humans actually exist. But as a herd? Holy shit. We are an embarrassing species.

I'm sitting in the breakfast area of a Holiday Inn, eating the "free" breakfast. Free, of course, being a relative term, because this room cost damn near two hundred bucks a night. It wasn't that fucking long ago rooms like this were eighty bucks. Somewhere along the way we all just shrugged and accepted that mediocre hotels should cost luxury prices.

So I'm eating my powdered eggs and mediocre sausage, writing while I people-watch.

And my God... the lights are off.

People shuffle around with these dull, vacant expressions, greedily loading their plates with second and third helpings of food that wasn't worth eating the first time. They've got this weird combination of dead eyes and absolute entitlement, like the universe personally owes them an unlimited supply of hotel breakfast because they successfully navigated Expedia.

Good God, go fuck yourself with a broken plastic fork.

Watching them got me thinking about something that's been bothering me for a while now.  Nobody is self-reliant anymore. And I don't mean nobody literally, because I know plenty of exceptions. Hell, a lot of you reading this are probably exceptions. But look around. Most people don't work on their own cars anymore. They don't work on their motorcycles. They don't remodel their homes. They don't build furniture. They don't fix appliances. Half of them don't even own a decent socket set.

Need a ceiling fan installed?

Hire somebody.

Need your brakes changed?

Hire somebody.

Garbage disposal quits working?

Hire somebody.

Need a shelf hung on the wall?

Apparently that's worth paying someone a hundred bucks now.

Somewhere along the way, the simple act of living became a financial transaction.

Need something done?

Open your wallet.

That bothers the everloving fuck out of me.

Not because professionals shouldn't exist. They absolutely should. There are jobs I'll gladly pay someone else to do because they have specialized knowledge I don't possess. But we've crossed a line somewhere. We've stopped asking, "Can I learn this?" and immediately jumped to, "Who can I pay?"

That's a tragedy.

Because real living happens in those projects. Real confidence gets built in scraped knuckles, busted bolts, and grease-covered hands. Real knowledge isn't something you buy. It's something you earn by screwing it up three or four times before finally getting it right.

I don't think that's an accident, either. We live in a world that's optimized for convenience. Groceries show up at your front door. You press a button and dinner arrives. Your phone tells you where to drive. Your watch tells you when to stand up. Your car tells you when your tires are low. Hell, AI can write your emails now.

Convenience isn't evil.

But convenience has a cost.

The less we do for ourselves, the less capable we become. Capability is like a muscle. Stop using it, and eventually it wastes away.

Maybe this has been on my mind because of the last couple of days I've had. I dropped my motorcycle. Then I picked up a nine-hundred-pound Harley by myself after spending twenty minutes learning the proper technique. Then I diagnosed a wiring problem on the side of the interstate with advice from a guy who called me after his shop had already closed. I didn't know how to do any of those things until I needed to.

That's how learning works.

You don't magically become competent.

You become competent by deciding you're going to figure the shit out.

I worry we've become a society that's forgotten that. We've become consumers instead of builders. Customers instead of creators. We pay people to solve problems we could probably solve ourselves if we'd just tolerate being bad at something for an afternoon.

And before somebody says, "Well, my time is valuable."

Sure.

Mine is too.

But sometimes the point isn't saving money.

Sometimes the point is becoming the kind of person who knows how to do things.

There is an incredible satisfaction that comes from standing back after fixing something with your own two hands. It's the kind of confidence you can't buy, because it wasn't purchased. It was earned.

I honestly wonder what happens if the wheels ever come off. We got a tiny glimpse during the pandemic. People weren't suddenly growing food or fixing things. They were fighting over toilet paper and hoarding bottled water like civilization itself had collapsed because Costco was out of Charmin.

Imagine if supply chains actually failed.

How many people around you could grow food? Fix an engine? Wire an outlet? Build a fence? Hell, sharpen a knife?

We've become incredibly wealthy as a society, and somehow incredibly helpless at the same time.

That's not progress. That's dependency.

And I can't help but think we're poorer for it.

Hell, at the rate we're going, I give Home Depot another ten years before they stop selling tools altogether and just become a contractor referral service. That seems to be what people want anyway. Why learn to build the deck when you can finance someone else to do it while you watch YouTube videos about "living your best life?"

I'll keep my scraped knuckles.

They're worth more than convenience.