Guttermouth's Useless Little Checklist

is useless (except maybe to Guttermouth)

A Substack writer known as Guttermouth has compiled a list of arbitrary skills and claims that people without these skills are useless. This is especially true, she indicates, for people over the arbitrary age of twenty-one who do not have the skills she outlines. Here is the article in reference:

You Useless Little Shits

Guttermouth’s position, which I assume is motivated by good intentions, puts economic ignorance on full display. It is a heap of indiscriminate criteria derived from her personal view of competence. It is a list based on subjective ideals masquerading as a one-size-fits-all value set she uses to her advantage by situating herself early in the article as one of the useful ones as she conducts a performative eye-roll at the expense of anyone who does not make the cut based on rules she herself has designed. She does this despite her section on manners. Tsk-tsk, Guttermouth. Tsk. Tsk.

This essay will address how Guttermouth’s views on what constitutes competence are distorted with regard to the status quo, praxeology, opportunity cost, scope, and even harm. Finally, a framework for building resilience will be described.

The Status Quo vs the Speculative Future

In the West, we have inherited an incredibly high standard of living. And to understand why Guttermouth’s claim is vapid, only an elementary understanding of what this is and how it has liberated the masses from arduous do-it-yourself to-do lists is needed.

A high standard of living can be very simply described as an ability to spend the majority of one’s life with enough time and money to pursue things that are pleasurable or of great interest, or a combination thereof, rather than dedicated to carrying out tasks which are necessary for survival and/or maintenance of one’s capital. Even the poorest in North America are generally able to find safeguards against utter homelessness. And although it is generally still necessary to develop enough competencies to complete the tasks necessary to earn a living, the range of such required competencies has been narrowed substantially by the accumulation of wealth in the free world.

A high standard of living means that individuals can spend their time actively engaged with developing skills which suit their natural interests and talents, and delegate other tasks needed to support daily life to people who enjoy doing those things, or have at least found a way to profit from doing these things to such an extent that they choose to spend their time doing them. In turn, yet more people are able to follow suit focusing on what they have the capacity to excel at, and this is one mechanism by which capitalism promotes societal wealth.

The relative high standard of living broadly enjoyed in the West today may very well vanish. But any future collapse of the Western empire is speculative. What will it look like, exactly? That is the big question - if anyone had the answer to that, they could profit immensely. Will knowing how to change a vehicle’s oil or respond to an opioid overdose be a viable skill in the foretold collapse? No one knows for sure.

All that can really be done with respect to answering any of these questions is to speculate by taking purposeful action in accordance with your best guess as to what allocation of time and effort will benefit you the most in the always uncertain future.

Opportunity Cost

The skills outlined in the post are highly suited to very specific situations which may never arise. It is a faith based list consisting of items that take time to learn. Taking the requisite time to learn them necessarily takes time away from learning other skills that may provide more immediate relevance and utility to one’s own life. Even though we cannot know the future, there is someone who is in a great position to speculate as to what skills will be most useful here, namely, the individual in question.

Fans of Guttermouth’s list may find this point to be shortsighted, but time is a limited resource. If one spends their time dedicated to developing skills on this list, many of which arguably take years to hone in any meaningful sense, rather than developing whatever specific skill they perceive to be most useful, they risk the unintended consequence of wasting time - head banging against the wall style. Put another way, when deciding how to develop oneself, it is clearly more efficient for one to focus on skills that seem to be the most useful to them as opposed to skills that seem generally or potentially useful.

Breadth vs Depth

There is nothing wrong with any of the skills on the checklist, but a person who has developed them in part or in total is not powerful without also having achieved excellence in at least one skill that has some economic value. Since the future is unknown and the present day standard of living in the West remains high relative to the rest of the world, at least for now, the opportunity to pursue excellence in an area in which a depth of meaningful knowledge can be achieved also remains. The breadth of knowledge inherent to the checklist is not, by itself, particularly marketable without excellence in at least one item, and not even particularly useful except for in very specific situations. Even learning the easy items on this list takes time and cognitive resources away from what one can meaningfully absorb in a day in the pursuit of specialized competence in a given skill.

On the surface, Guttermouth’s list looks perfectly reasonable, but many fallacies hide behind specious framing. Ironically, I have a couple of boomers in mind who meet most of the bullet points on this list, or at least think they do, and this mistaken notion often gives rise to their hubris manifest as Gell-Mann Amnesia¹. In a sense, Guttermouth’s entire article is arguably a lesson on how to be lulled into a false sense of preparedness or knowledge.

A man of personal familiarity comes to mind. He is a man of incredible ability. He is a master outdoorsman, capable with a firearm, considered charming by his peers - including the ladies he has courted in his life - has an extensive medical background, and otherwise gets an A on this little cheatsheet of life skills. But he has a difficult time accepting that many of America’s major historical events have been false flag operations, making him a failure on the "know your history" part of the list. I would not call him useless though, unless I was prospecting a specific kind of history lesson.

The takeaway here: many of the items on this list cannot be useful without a depth of knowledge that is not so easily acquired as Guttermouth insinuates it should be for anyone under the age of twenty-one, much less people who struggle with many of them for decades only to come up short. The point she aims to hit is not exactly that the things on her list are necessarily easy to acquire, but that they are useful. But this is still a swing and a miss when you consider that the utility of these skills in many cases directly corresponds to the discernment one applies to them. Yet this is not mentioned anywhere. Perhaps that is because “know how to think,” is a skill everyone is presumed to be proficient in already…

Items on the list often remind me of the scene in The Matrix where Neo asks Trinity if she can fly a helicopter and her response is “Not yet,” followed by a request for an immediate upload from Tank back at HQ. Tank uploads the file and Trinity says, “Let’s go.” While there are some skills on the checklist that are straightforward and would take very little effort to learn, like memorizing the names of the states that border one’s own, there are others that are very, very nuanced and rely on a depth of self-awareness and judgement despite these prerequisites being completely glossed over in Guttermouth’s post.

Know how to set appropriate boundaries and clearly and explicitly express them in an intimate situation. Know what your own preferences and boundaries are BEFORE entering an intimate situation.

Sure would be handy to know all of your intimate preferences before entering the very situations in which it is most likely that you will learn these preferences.

Ready for that upload, Tank…

Hey, you know what else would be useful? Never breaking up with someone. Better get on that before Guttermouth cusses at you.

Value and Incentives

It may be tempting to follow the threads of the argument that individual items on Guttermouth’s list or the collective set have inherent value. After all, they seem valuable. But the science of human action informs the stance that each only has value with respect to an individual’s own needs and preferences. Considerations of value made without this helpful lens result in the all too common mistake of conflating subjective utility with objective value.

Not only is value subjective, but the schedule of values held by a given individual are subject to change in accordance with shifts in preferences, and/or the need to recalibrate one's priorities to optimize for specific desired end states. As it is explained through praxeology, humans are rational actors. Please take care to note that the application of the term rational here is in the Misesian² sense and is concerned with understanding human action, not the process of evaluating for whether a given actor is behaving in perfect or intelligent alignment with their values or goals. It is from this vantage point it becomes clear that human behavior is motivated by incentives which arise from subjective preferences and that any attempts to establish objective value on to, in this case, particular skillsets, cannot be proven logically.

It does follow logically, however, that if a man does not have an incentive (whether it is the type that arises from personal desire or external imperative is immaterial) to learn and execute that which he can afford to and prefers to pay another to do, he is unlikely to do it himself. To propose that a lack of specific competencies which a man is not incentivized to possess indicates his uselessness or incompetence amounts to clickbait at best.

The lack of know-how Guttermouth is criticizing is merely the product of incentives.

Here is a quote from the referenced article:

I can say plenty about why so many people are useless little shits nowadays, but it’s nothing extremely insightful and doesn’t offer any solutions in itself. I’d rather focus on a solution: a helpful compilation of concrete life skills that people who give a crap can strive for or encourage young people in their lives to acquire.

Perhaps basic economic understanding should be added to this list, for without it, it is easy to make the mistake Guttermouth makes here in claiming to have identified a solution where the word tradeoff is more apt. But this is being charitable, because, as we have already discussed, the future is speculative. As such, the “problem” Guttermouth is solving is one of her own manufacturing. Nevertheless, conceding arguendo that proficiency in the skills she outlines will turn a useless shit into a…useful shit, these pursuits still come at a cost. And so what can be done to motivate these millennials to pay the cost of admission in the name of learning any of this? Nothing at all except a change in incentives.

What Does Not Help Can Still Harm

What harm can it do to spend time neurotically focussed on checking off the things on Guttermouth’s list? A lot. It is easy to fall for the trick in the words, “maybe it won’t help, but at least it won’t hurt.” Many fell for this with respect to masks during the peak of the COVID insanity. With respect to masks, there ended up being untold amounts of harm done to the health of millions of individuals around the globe, kids included. Countless opportunities were lost: the freedom to socialize properly, breathe fresh clean air, feel a sense of bodily autonomy, experience new things rather than resort to avoidance out of dislike for mask requirements, and, perhaps worst of all for many, a false sense of security in the usefulness of masks in preventing illness. The list goes on and is a classic example of the effects of the seen vs. the unseen inherent to any intervention. While millions were donning masks under the mistaken “won’t hurt” mindset, what alternatives were lost to them, never to be regained?

Opportunity cost is a very important consideration to make when deciding how to set one’s priorities and take purposeful action. It may seem innocuous to accept the premise that the checklist Guttermouth provides will, at least, do no harm, but this assumption is totally baseless. It may seem overblown to assert that devoting oneself to lists such as this in the name of preparedness can cause unintended negative consequences. But doing so randomly without due consideration to whether any task therein presents a relevant benefit to one’s own life amounts to a fantastic way to spin one’s mental wheels into a false sense of the very preparedness one had hoped to achieve, perhaps even a worse overall outcome by some important personal metrics.

Action Axiom

Most of the things listed here are skills of daily life that are acquired as an accidental byproduct of existing and amount to nothing particularly special. If an individual reaches adulthood without having acquired any of these skills and is otherwise content in life, the skill itself might not be of great importance to them. Perhaps having the skills in question could add to such a person’s life, but that is entirely for them to evaluate, hopefully without being influenced into thinking they will be useless until they meet someone else’s specs.

The problem here is how this checklist and its presentation tap into the action axiom, an economic concept that describes the anxiety which drives motivation to act in response to an individual's need to perceive themselves as useful. Without this awareness, any of Guttermouth's readers currently feeling a pang of angst in response to stressors in their lives who subsequently take her recommendations risk neglecting many of the holistic factors that are immediately supportive of all areas of life and represent the bare minimum needed for psychological and physical wellbeing for all neurotypical humans. This effect is amplified by the way she criticizes people for not having these skills. The woman who falls for this rather than thinking her way through her own set of problems and how she can improve upon her own life might just find it is easier to justify being obese, for example, if she can delude herself into thinking she has not lost the weight because she is too busy being useful, or teaching her kids how to be useful, etc..

Communities, down to the family level, often divide labor according to areas of particular interest and ability. My own mother was very useful to our family in a variety of ways from her ability to function as everything from a chauffeur to a nail technician, but if the scary looking circuit breaker need to be touched, that was a job for my dad or one of my brothers. If none of them had been available, a trusted neighbor would have most assuredly been called on for help. Next in line would have been the fire department. As I recall, my mom operated under the assumption that she might cause more harm than good by taking on tasks outside her designated area. This may have been irrational fear at play, subjective preferences exerting themselves on her choices, or something else. Regardless, she may well have been right. The thought of her in her slippers handling anything electric besides a hair dryer or kitchen equipment is comical.

This example is not intended to veer the discussion into divisions of labor based on sex. (But feel free to leave your akshuallys in the comments section!) Rather, it is to further illustrate that often times, most especially in the absence of need, a person’s aversion to specific tasks associated with daily life are the result of their own self-assessment and may help them avoid causing more problems than they solve by attempting the jack of all trades feat.

Beware of the Critical Soft Competitor

This checklist is merely a collection of things it is possible to know that has been formatted in accordance with what Guttermouth thinks is cool. And by presenting it in the manner she does, she is engaged in the sort of soft competition that seeks to increase her status as one of the useful kind, and distinguish her from the inferior group of useless sorts. After all, she only lists two criteria needed to begin the process of making oneself useful, and takes care to note that one of these is that she is herself proficient in all, or working to remediate her deficiency. Why would this be relevant to anyone else besides Guttermouth personally? What is not on the list that Guttermouth does not or cannot know that would make her useless in some areas of life? We may never know, especially since she would not sound so badass if we did.

Guttermouth suffers life in a world full of useless little shits, and not only is she better than them, she is also very caring and just trying to help…by explaining that they should be more like her if they want to improve themselves.

I will be writing extensively about this kind of competition style. For now, suffice to say that when criticism of certain behaviors or attributes is abundantly proffered at the expense of another’s reputation, take care to note this form of indirect competition. Ask who benefits from it most and whether any of it meets the scrutiny of your own reason. Ask if any of it would hold up under the heat of direct competition. Be like Bruce Lee: “Absorb what is useful. Discard what is not. Add what is uniquely your own.”

Resilience Over Scatterbrained Prepping

Chris Voss³ has a great saying: “When the pressure is on, you do not rise to the occasion, you fall to your highest level of preparation.” Preparation for what? To be sure, this applies to the specific requirements of how one earns a living or parents his children, but adding a long list of random check boxes on top of this without cause just because they seem generally useful is asinine.

Having established that each individual has their own life with its own unique set of priorities and that the future is speculative, it becomes clear that I would be merely speculating on someone else’s behalf with any attempt to make specific recommendations about how to make them more broadly useful, and that the difficulty in this would grow unimaginably with each degree of separation between myself and another - not to mention the separation between myself and the community which they hope to impact with their usefulness.

What I can advocate for, however, is maximizing personal resilience in such a way that it will most likely seamlessly translate to flexibility against the unknown. Establishing habits that support one’s overall resilience will increase effectiveness in other areas of life and help one “fall” to a level of preparedness that will enable optimal responses to externalities.

To be more concrete, here is the basic framework needed to facilitate optimal physical and psychological functioning. These are the core elements of performance optimization that support all other aspirations. The stronger this foundation, the more immense a structure can be built upon it. They are not a random set of suggestions dependent on contingencies, and the only prerequisite for any of them is having a mind and body. This framework is more or less a lifestyle. Breaking ground on it can be started immediately, and it is less of a suggestion than a modality provably linked to fitness, and endorsed by mother nature. The elements of this framework are not presented in any particular order - they are each as important as the next and are mutually supportive. I highly recommend a ruck over to Dr. Grant Smith’s page as a great place for researching the concept of holistic health. He is a subject matter expert in this area and has already done the hard work of describing how to approach each of the building blocks listed below. Of particular note are his articles on nutrition, exercise, and building connection.

1. Exercise

2. Eat right

3. Get enough sleep

4. Get enough sunshine/vitamin D/time in nature

5. Form communities and socialize

6. Act purposefully

Final Thoughts

Guttermouth mentions upfront that her list is subject to change. Naturally. Because what it would really need to do to be useful is go on forever. The list’s hope of being useful was lost in the framing. There is no set of concrete skills that will maximize your utility except those you define as having relevance to your own life, your own preferences, and that you are adequately incentivized to commit to developing.

There is, to be sure, power in preparedness. But without knowing the future, all attempts to prepare above the call of maximizing your personal resilience are speculative, and the time needed to secure these advantages is precious. Even choosing a skillset with which to earn a living is a speculation. It is therefore critical to choose one’s pursuits wisely, realistically, and in accordance with what is likely to support one’s goals and desired standard of living. There is wisdom rooted in fundamental principles of economics in choosing to develop your strengths as opposed to being provoked into feeling useless because of your weaknesses. There is no list of random homework assignments that can guarantee value added to someone else’s life. No list of competencies is inherently superior to another or required for human beings to respond to their natural environment. As the saying goes: Necessity is the mother of invention.

Thanks for rucking with me. Please enjoy the music as you exit.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Gell-Mann

2. https://mises.org/profile/ludwig-von-mises

3. https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_voss_never_split_the_difference