Drawing on junior high home ec

Generalized competence as a baseline for a flourishing life

A typical Sunday at the LHH finds TLW and I heading out early for a walk through town that usually leads us to the bagel shop where we get breakfast and chat over coffee, then walking home. When we get home, we usually sit down and make a meal plan for the week. The meal plan is just for our dinners - we’re on our own for breakfast and lunch. We have a fat manilla folder stuffed with recipes we have clipped from magazines or printed from the internet over the years. Based on the meal plan and what we want for other meals, we make a grocery list, and one or both of us go grocery shopping. I like grocery shopping because I inevitably find something that wasn’t on the list. And I like cooking, as you probably know if you’ve been reading this newsletter for any length of time. So that’s a part of how we roll. It’s a part of how we keep things stable and minimize the chaos that life otherwise throws at us. 

When I was in 8th grade, about forty years ago, we were required to take a semester of wood shop and a semester of home economics. As a teenage boy, wood shop was pretty cool, but I was not at all pleased to be in home economics. I might have been a little difficult. I remember we had to learn some basic sewing by making a stuffed football, we learned how to do laundry, and we learned some basics of cooking by making pancakes. Looking back over the last forty years, the lessons that the beleaguered home ec teacher was trying to convey to a room full of 13-year olds were far more valuable than learning how to use a bandsaw. Of course there is a value to being exposed to woodworking as it gives the idea of a possible career in the trades for a kid who might not otherwise be exposed, but we’re all going to do laundry, cook, and maybe even do a little sewing now and then. I have to admit, I haven’t done any sewing. With regard to sewing, we’re pretty gendered in our household - TLW every now and then fixes loose buttons for me - but that’s about all the sewing we do in house. (We have a sewing machine in the basement that hasn’t been used in a couple of decades. Not sure it even works.) Cooking and laundry, on the other hand, I do all the time. 

I get that not everyone likes cooking, but I do. I choose to do it even when I don’t have to. On the other hand, I don’t think anyone actually likes doing laundry. Maybe there’s a certain satisfaction to it, the way doing yard work has a sense of completion and accomplishment. I don’t mind doing it, but if I never had to mow the lawn again, or separate whites and colors, I would not be sad. Housework, yardwork, and other basic household maintenance tasks like balancing a checkbook, form a baseline of home economics that has been jokingly called adulting. It’s all the boring stuff we have to do to keep the wheels from coming off of our lives and inviting chaos in. The term works because wouldn’t it be great if we could be kids again and have someone else do all the boring work of maintaining the house, getting food on the table, and providing clean clothes? Yet, most of us would not want to give up the autonomy implied by refusing to be adults. Children do not have responsibility, but they also do not have agency. Adulting is not always particularly fun, but the alternative is to be a ward, and that is not a worthy way of living.

To live a worthy life, one must have agency and autonomy. To achieve autonomy, and thus agency, one must achieve a degree of what I call generalized competence. I’ve been writing about success and seeking mastery for particular tasks, specific competence, but I haven’t expounded on generalized competence recently. Generalized competence is what it takes to keep your life on track and the chaos at bay. TLW is better at establishing routines than I am, but routines are powerful for minimizing effort. If you can routinize things, you can reduce your decision making effort. Our typical Sunday morning is an example of that. We don’t really discuss the plan much beyond confirming the morning will follow the usual routine. That also extends to our meal plan - unless something important comes up, we’re going to stick with the meal plan and not go out to eat, which saves us money and is a healthier option. The dinner decisions are already made, so it’s easier to just follow the plan. 

Having chunks of the week routinized, especially around household management, makes homelife easier to manage. TLW was really good about this when the kids were little. Kids need routines. When they’re lives are predictable, they feel more in control, more self-efficacy, and safer. Kids who live with a lot of chaos tend to act out and have a hard time feeling in control. Now with our kids gone, we’ve made our own lives more routinized (because kids inevitably bring a degree of chaos to a household). Less chaos means more control, which means more head space for more important (and interesting) tasks. You’re also less likely to make bad decisions when you are following a routine, which is really the core principle outlined in The Power of Habit and in Tiny Habits. 

Generalized competence measures how effective you are at keeping your day-to-day existence in control and keeping chaos minimized. People who have solid generalized competence manage their money well, living within their means. They manage their personal relationships in a way that minimizes stress. They take care of their health with simple routines like regular exercise and flossing your teeth. It’s an accumulation of a bunch of small decisions that all add up to a well-controlled life. 

My argument here is that a well-controlled life leaves space for adventure. Adventure is invited chaos. If your regular life is well-controlled, you have room to invite some adventure into your life. For TLW and I, at this stage of our lives, that’s a preference for travel. I’d say we have pretty solid generalized competence, and that creates a lot of space in our lives for us to live more richly and deliberately. We’re not perfect by a long shot - I could do a lot better about my diet, for example - but we are good enough to be stable. 

Having good generalized competence, as manifested by a stable, safe, and supportive home life, also creates more space for effort at specific competence, like excelling at your job, or for children, excelling at school. Your home becomes a platform from which you can launch other projects, and a safe haven to retreat to if a project goes poorly. People often ask me, “how do you find the time to do all the things you do?” I half-jokingly answer that “I have a good wife”, which sounds like typical misogynistic humor, but it’s actually true. We share pretty evenly the household maintenance tasks, but TLW is really good at keeping us organized, and I appreciate that about her. 

Generalized competence forms the baseline of a worthy, flourishing life. Much of it comes down to the basic skills that used to be taught in junior high home ec class. There’s more to it than that, of course, but most of it is pretty simple. It requires building good habits, and then it is both simple and relatively easy. Then you can choose the chaos you want in the dose that you want it.