Skipping the Tutorial

Beginner mind is valuable

Here’s a common argument:

Aggrieved Woman: My boyfriend/husband/coparent is abysmally bad at basic domestic tasks, to the point of weaponized incompetence.

Defensive Man: Actually, men are less neurotic than women, so your requests to him are less reasonable than you think; if you didn’t dust the baseboards, he would never notice or care in any way.

Ok, it’s not that common. Because it’s usually just people screaming into the void in vaguely one of these two directions, rather than a reasonably warm discussion. But in fantasyland where the discussion remains civil:

Aggrieved Woman: Yeah, sure, maybe I’d prefer the household cleanliness be at a 7/10, and he’d be happy with a 4/10, so there’s some level of differential effort I should accept. But he conspicuously fails at tasks that are unambiguously necessary. Like, he’ll break a dish almost every time he washes the dishes. It’s not intentional, but it does feel if he cared he’d learn, and if he didn’t have me he’d have to learn, and fast.

I think aggrieved woman is basically just correct.¹ And indeed, rejoinders from Defensive Man here tend to be pretty ugly, things like:

Defensive Man: Well, statistically men work earn more money doing jobs that women are unwilling to do, so if anything women are getting a free lunch here.

And at that point, the surface-level civility of the interlocutors does no good, and we’re in full on gender war. The proper reaction to finding oneself in gender war is to stop immediately, and go far away to a different social bubble, because gender war only thrives in awful places.

Fortunately, I’m not here to wage gender war.² Instead, I’m going to focus on a more general mechanism, that I’ve never seen discussed. Specifically, that it’s uniquely hard to be expected to perform at an intermediate level, without ever having gone through a learning-heavy beginner phase.

Beginner Mind

Whether you’re in a sink or swim situation, or an exciting and deliberate period of learning, developing a new skill is an intense experience. A little kid who’s excited to help wash the dishes will find breaking a dish profoundly stressful, but will be highly motivated to learn from the mistake. Likewise, a punk in a group house desperately trying to eradicate the cesspool of disease that is their sink will rattle off expletives as they figure it out, but they will figure it out. What these cases have in common is a person with no expectation they’ll be any good at the task, starting from zero and necessarily learning from mistakes.

And really basic mistakes will be very common! When learning to do dishes, you should fully expect to:

• Drench yourself by washing a spoon incorrectly

• Use a sponge way past the point it has become disgusting, because the idea of switching to a new sponge doesn’t occur to you

• Totally fail to get encrusted gunk off a cooking dish, and set it aside for days or weeks in a state of resignation

• Put dishes away when they’re still wet and, if the place they go is wood or otherwise vulnerable to water, cause mild water damage

• After the previous mistake, fill up the dish rack and leave it full indefinitely, barring the ability to wash more dishes, because “put away dishes” isn’t a separate task you think of as necessary

These are all charming childhood stories if you were trained to be domestic from a young age (girls being so trained is a big source of this particular gender war dynamic), and funny anecdotes if you had to rough it as a 19-year-old with roommates.

But if you never are excited to learn the skill, and you’ve never been forced by circumstances to master it, it’s easy to fall into a treacherous state. Specifically, one where you occasionally have developed the skill a little bit. Maybe it was your chore to wash dishes once in a while, but you never did it enough to smooth out the rough edges, so you can only do it one specific, brittle way. Or maybe you almost always ordered takeout as a young adult or ate free pizza at work,³ and only washed dishes on the odd occasion that your roommate cooked for you and you wanted to help out. In any case, you end up without the plausible deniability of being a total beginner, but without (almost) any of the skills of someone proficient.

Stereotypically, I’ve found myself in this trap for a lot of household tasks. Dishes I’m actually fine, but e.g.

• I tense up at the idea of moving furniture around to vacuum under it, because when I vacuumed as a kid, it was a narrowly-scoped chore I only ever learned to do in a half-assed way. So I feel like “I can vacuum”, but my actual proficiency level is very low.

• I panic when I have to shop for clothes, since I’m enough of an adult that I should be able to intuit when a pair of pants will fit, but in fact I’ve done it few enough times that all new pants feel wrong and I can’t evaluate if they look okay, either.

• I enjoy cooking simple dishes where I can do all the cleanup as I go, but get really uncomfortable with complex cooking setups where there are a lot of weird/complicated dishes at the end.

On the other hand, my wife got it when we were in college together, and she was learning to play video games! I tried to teach her, but my expectations of her were too high and stressed her out; I’d been a beginner when I was a little and highly neuroplastic kid, while she was as a young adult when it was more embarrassing.

I think the “expected to be intermediate, when you haven’t had enough of a chance to be a beginner” is one of the great challenges of the human experience, actually. In cases where I got to be a beginner and figure stuff out without expectations, I’m great, even for tasks that are theoretically harder than the ones I struggle with:

• I’m good at scooping algae out of our pond, because I learned from scratch

• I’m good at and enjoy taking apart the dryer to get lint out, for the same reason

• I’m good at getting clogs out of the sink with a little mini plunger I bought myself, in part because I’m still proud of the (extremely beginner level) agency that led me to make that purchase

Prevailing as a beginner feels great! It can build long-run circuits that feel good and fuel future achievement. When you skip the beginner stage, on the other hand, it’s hard to capture that healthy mindset. (And if others around you expect you to be properly intermediate, you’re instead likely to end up with an ugh field.)

The Baby Case

I’ve thought about this a lot, since I had a baby. Because if you’re not careful, all the ingredients are there:

• A breastfeeding mom is tethered to the baby logistically, such that all else equal she’ll get more reps for baby care tasks

• Women usually get more parental leave, strengthening this tendency

• Some explicit tutorial spaces are woman-exclusive (including for good reasons); e.g. you can get general parenting advice at a breastfeeding workshop

So without strong efforts to avoid it, the default is a mom who goes through an extensive, trying, and rewarding beginner phase, and a dad who just sort of wakes up one day having missed it. Of course this leads to dad trying to clean up a poop stain with a paper towel, getting chewed out, and just alerting mom to the problem next time. Is dad blameless in that situation? No. He should figure it out. But an ounce of prevention - figuring it out at the same time as mom, in the early beginner period - is worth a pound of cure.

So I’ve been trying hard to keep up with baby tasks since our baby was born, even when baby would prefer mom for practical reasons. The beginner phase is a fleeting thing; once you miss it, it’s not easy to get back!

1. A beautiful bald eagle broke free from the wallpaper, Professor Defensive Man exploded himself microwaving a fork like a bozo, and everyone clapped.

2. Ok, fine, the reason I think Defensive Man’s dubious slam dunk isn’t very good is that any given man or woman can easily try to form relationships with whatever priorities they want, so e.g. men can (and sometimes do!) try to partner up with women who make as much or more money than they do, and if they are breadwinners it’s largely by choice. Meanwhile, it’s harder to make long-run predictions/negotiations about the full spectrum of domestic labor, especially since events like having children changes both the amount and type of work required. If Defensive Man is the breadwinner of his household, he chose that to a greater degree than Aggrieved Woman chose to be the household manager. The fact that this is disputable and catnip for multiple kinds of damaged people is not a coincidence.

3. Underrated frugality benefit/health cost of test prep tutoring.