This is kind of a tangent, but some of your examples (patch my roof, fix my plumbing, paint my house) touch on a topic I think about often. I think there's been a decline in "handiness" and self-sufficiency, at least among white-collar workers. But I'm not sure it's entirely bad; I think it's just a different mindset.
I'll use myself as an example. Growing up, I helped my dad do most of the maintenance on our house & 7-acre property. We brought in experts sometimes, but we'd typically take a crack at it first and could usually handle it ourselves. So many weekends and evenings were spent on these projects like replacing toilets, installing hardwood floors, building sheds, painting, cutting down trees, etc.
I've noticed that as an adult with a house and family, I am much more likely to call in a professional. I'll still do the quick and easy stuff, like replace a ceiling fan or maybe a bathroom faucet, hang some blinds, etc., but once a project looks like it'll take more than, say, 2 hours, I'll find a professional. For example, I use a yard service for my yard that is about 1/15 the size of my childhood yard.
Sometimes I feel stupid paying others to do things I can do. I know my ancestors (especially male ancestors) would find it ridiculous for me to pay someone else to do something so basic. But it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
For example, I recently paid someone $800 to install flooring. It took him and his helper 2 days to complete the job. I could saved that money by doing it myself, but to me, it was totally worth it. They're pros; so what took the two of them ~14 hours probably would have taken me at least 30-40 hours. That's roughly 4-5 days of non-working time, weekends or PTO. Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid, or I could spend that time working and at my billable rate, make a substantial multiple of $800. And the pros almost certainly did a better job than I would have.
If I had done it myself, I would have learned/honed a skill, but how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
Of course, my dad was a c-level exec, and he came to a different conclusion. I can respect the self-sufficient approach, but I don't place a ton of value on it. And that shifting mindset seems to be true for many of my friends and acquaintances who are under 40 or so.
> Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid,
You just got done saying how you spent all this time with your Dad fixing stuff, but you don't want to spend 4-5 days fixing stuff because you want to spend time with your wife and kid... Why not just work together? Jobs like that have lots of different parts, from demolition to making lunch. It's much more fun as a family than for Dad to go off and do it alone.
> how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
If your work involves creativity you'll use that experience thousands of times. Every detail of the process is a metaphor for all kinds of things. There's no border in my head between coding, business, gardening, and homebuilding. All of those practices self-reinforce. Things I learn in one domain constantly solve problems in others.
There is this idea in the tech world that the most stimulating environment for solving coding problems is a sterile office with a bunch of computers, and non-stop exposure to the concrete problem space. But I find a few minutes in the garden, a long walk, a break to cook lunch... these are often much more fertile areas for me to solve challenging questions.
Most software management processes just value "did today's widget do it's behavior", and don't encourage people to solve the higher level challenges in their codebase. Those are opportunities which can offer 100x increases in productivity, but most tech managers would rather get 20 widgets built than suffer watching an engineer smoking pot and making elaborate meals in the kitchen for two weeks and then two weeks refactoring things that already worked into a (seemingly arbitrarily) different shape.
My kid is 3. Try installing flooring or doing any type of home repair with a 3 year old running around. Good luck.
Sure, it's good to have hobbies. I like to forage mushrooms, cook, hike, photograph, etc., and I agree they are stimulating, creative, whatever. Who's arguing otherwise? I don't follow. My dad's only real hobby was working on the house and yard. One could argue that's less stimulating than having hobbies spanning a more diverse set of skills. Also, maybe parents should occasionally consider what hobbies their children want to do.
I have installed flooring a few times in my life. I have never consciously used that experience in other facets of life. All it taught me is that I would rather spend my time doing something else. I don't find it particularly satisfying or enjoyable. Let's say I have 5 more instances of wanting new flooring in my life. What I'm saying is I'd prefer to have 25 days where I can choose how I want to spend time rather than spend those 25 days installing flooring to save $4000. I think most of my peer group thinks similarly, whereas I think many middle class people would have made the opposite decision a generation ago.
My point was not that you should only be coding or sitting in an office or something. I don't know where you got that idea. My point was that I don't inherently value self-sufficiency when it comes to home/yard/car maintenance – at least not to the same degree that previous generations did.
And obviously all of this is on a spectrum, right? I think it's important to know how to change a tire or jump a battery, if you drive often. I know how to change my own oil but rarely choose to. I don't know how to, say, change my brake pads. It's probably easy, but it's not something that comes up often enough that I care about learning – and not an area I want to test my amateur abilities.
EDIT: Anyway, I'm not trying to argue, though I acknowledge I am bristly in the text above. I actually agree with most of what you said. You're totally right that as my daughter gets older, there's more opportunity for the family to do projects together, and if she enjoys learning how to install a new light fixture or whatever, that can be a hobby for us to do together. Though I still wouldn't view it as inherently much more valuable than other hobbies, like camping or painting, and that's where I think my viewpoint differs from my parents' or grandparents'.
I'll use myself as an example. Growing up, I helped my dad do most of the maintenance on our house & 7-acre property. We brought in experts sometimes, but we'd typically take a crack at it first and could usually handle it ourselves. So many weekends and evenings were spent on these projects like replacing toilets, installing hardwood floors, building sheds, painting, cutting down trees, etc.
I've noticed that as an adult with a house and family, I am much more likely to call in a professional. I'll still do the quick and easy stuff, like replace a ceiling fan or maybe a bathroom faucet, hang some blinds, etc., but once a project looks like it'll take more than, say, 2 hours, I'll find a professional. For example, I use a yard service for my yard that is about 1/15 the size of my childhood yard.
Sometimes I feel stupid paying others to do things I can do. I know my ancestors (especially male ancestors) would find it ridiculous for me to pay someone else to do something so basic. But it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis.
For example, I recently paid someone $800 to install flooring. It took him and his helper 2 days to complete the job. I could saved that money by doing it myself, but to me, it was totally worth it. They're pros; so what took the two of them ~14 hours probably would have taken me at least 30-40 hours. That's roughly 4-5 days of non-working time, weekends or PTO. Like everyone else these days, I work a lot; so my personal free time is precious. $800 is worth less to me than 4-5 days of time to spend with my wife and kid, or I could spend that time working and at my billable rate, make a substantial multiple of $800. And the pros almost certainly did a better job than I would have.
If I had done it myself, I would have learned/honed a skill, but how many times will I need to install flooring in my life? I'm glad I could do it in a pinch, but it's not a skill I really care about mastering.
Of course, my dad was a c-level exec, and he came to a different conclusion. I can respect the self-sufficient approach, but I don't place a ton of value on it. And that shifting mindset seems to be true for many of my friends and acquaintances who are under 40 or so.