Timothy thinks about how poorly prepared students often are for life after school.

I’d even love to see a life-skills course at the college level in a liberal-arts environment. Why not? We have a swim test here, rather infamously. Here’s what would make my list of concrete skills that men and women will find useful to know as adults, some of which I’m still awkwardly trying to pick up now in mid-life, a few of which I’ve never picked up. The key thing here is to insist that both genders have to be exposed to all of this stuff, that nobody gets to opt out on the argument that it’s not manly or feminine. It’s ok if later on people divide these chores according to facility or preference.

He and his commenters are constructing a list - from basic cooking to computer setup and minor repair - of things that every human should know. I'm for it, especially when I read things written by those who have little insight into real life.

If you have a typical American house, you have a typical lawn in front of it, a lawn that is in need of occasional trimming. Unless you contract out for lawn services, you almost certainly own a lawnmower too. Most likely it has a cheesy, loud, polluting little engine.

You only use this for an hour every other week, or 1/336 of the time. OK, you don't want people mowing lawns at night, so say 1/168 of the available daylight time. So you and your 167 nearest neighbors own 168 times too many lawnmowers. If you could coordinate your lawnmowing, you would need to spend 1/168 as much on a lawnmower. Similar calculations apply to every other household tool you own that you don't use intensively in your work or your principal hobbies. . .

This is part of the trend to substitution of information for materials. Knowing where to borrow a lawnmower is actually better than owning a lawnmower: it saves you some storage. Substituting information for materials decreases impact on the environment; the impact from the manufacture of 49 lawnmowers in this case.

It will also greatly reduce employment in the manufacture of nasty little two- four-stroke engines. According to almost all economists and almost all politicians, this is a bad thing. Obama has as his first priority re-employing all the people who until recently were diligently employed creating, servicing and financing a huge housing glut. The public agrees. They are wrong. . .

Of course it is no pleasure to lose your main income stream, especially when your savings are crumbling too. The response to this shouldn't be to "revive" the economy, especially the manufacturing sector which has obviously overproduced. The response should be to make it less of threat to be unemployed: public health care, decent housing and food standards provided for everybody. Losing income should not be an existential threat. Calm, underemployed people can be a huge source for creativity and restoration of the social fabric. Desperate underfed people can't. . .

Don't work too hard to keep your job. Apply your extra efforts to find out how you can contribute to the informal economy.

Don't replace your lawnmower. Meet your neighbors.

Relaxation is progress. Take advantage of the Great Unwinding, and unwind.

Everything said here is wrong. The reason that this sort of thing isn't done is that it has been tried so many times and failed. Those with no practical knowledge occasionally make this mistake again. I'll leave it as an exercise to list the hundreds of thought errors in such ideas, and focus on just one aspect: the idea that work is bad, something that you would rather not do, preferring to while away your life in a relaxed daze.

There are slackers who prefer to lay about, but they aren't very interesting. Even their thinking is lazy and sloppy. They can be congenial company sometimes, drinking buddies, but it's best to keep them at arm's length so that they don't end up sleeping on your sofa, borrowing your tools and losing or breaking them, or just hanging around when you aren't in the mood for their hazy banalities. You really do need strong drink before their meager charms become apparent. When everything is brilliant or funny, then they are at last brilliant or funny too, just as the girls become prettier at closing time.

For those who are fully, intensely, joyously engaged with life work is often a blessing, not a curse. And acquiring things, such as tools, makes it possible to do more and better work. Better work, more creative work. Time is spent planning and executing plans rather than scurrying about, waiting in queues, or other wasteful and expensively non-productive activities.

This does not preclude socializing and sharing with neighbors, and often increases it. Work parties spring up opportunistically, sometimes because someone got a new tool and everyone wants to play with it. Rather than having a fussy disdain for tools - "a cheesy, loud, polluting little engine" - many admire them as the sophisticated technologies that they truly are. If you have trouble grasping these ideas try imagining yourself showing up in a developing world village with a truck full of such implements and observing the wondrous joy of the locals as they twig to the possibilities that such technologies enable.

If Timothy's notion of a "life-skills course at the college level in a liberal-arts environment" could introduce youngsters to such ideas and teach them some of the rudiments of productive work we might be able to move past the sterile notions of regimented leisure being proffered as "progress".