Competence Looks Good On Everybody

Chapter 28

This post is a chapter of the book It Ain’t Gonna Lick Itself: Housekeeping In Spite Of It All) by Hanne Blank Boyd.

Click here for the full table of contents.

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Absolutely anybody who has the physical and cognitive capacity to do household tasks can become at least competent at doing them. The bar, in terms of what’s required for competence at household tasks, is usually not super high. This isn’t true for a lot of things we humans do, so many of which require more in the way of fine motor skill or balance or dexterity or flexibility or a steady hand or some particular kind of talent or acumen. You or I might never have the innate capacity to be even a tolerable trumpet player (I have never been able to make my lips do the bzzzzot thing, I’ve tried) or any kind of gymnast or even a bus driver. Those are fairly complex activities and they take some specialized talents and capacities that not all people are going to possess.

Photo by Ian Flores on Unsplash

But most household work isn’t complex. A lot of it, if you boil it down, is simply a matter of physically moving things from one place to another. That’s why anybody who is physically and cognitively capable can take trash and put it in the trash bin, sweep a floor, put away a clean pair of pants, or wash a plate. All these things just different forms of moving matter around in space to create greater order.

Absolutely everybody who is capable of these things should be at least competent at doing them.

Why? Because it’s valuable work that improves the quality of human lives. Everyone benefits from them. It follows that everyone who can be competent at making them really ought to be, for the greater good and for their own.

Being competent at domestic labor makes you more self-sufficient. It makes you less dependent on other people. Being competent at something that you can use to improve or maintain your own quality of life is pretty damn valuable. Being competent to feed yourself and keep your living space in a condition where it enhances your life rather than detracting from it gives you a huge amount of freedom and flexibility to make your life better as you see fit, on your own schedule and in your own way.

Being competent at household work also gives you a valuable thing you can share with other people. Perhaps you want to show people that you care for them and want them to have good things in their lives. Maybe you want to give someone the gift of a break from doing those things themselves. Maybe there are people in your life who don’t have the physical or cognitive capacity to do that work, who are temporarily or permanently unable, but you don’t want them to suffer because of it. Being competent at household work is something with which you can extend kindness and generosity and care and even mercy.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

Because living spaces are necessary and valuable, being capable of the work of making them happen also gives you a valuable thing you can perform as a service for some sort of compensation. I’m one of innumerable people who’ve made money doing that work or traded it for other things of value, like room and board.