Ask HN: Essential life skills to function as a human being?

- Get a job (including something as simple as getting a summer job mowing grass)

-Manage your money in a budget

-Practice saving money in a savings account

-Plan meals

-Drive a car

-Go grocery shopping

-Prepare food / cook

-Perform basic house repairs with hand tools (hammer a nail, use a screwdriver, understand how a tape measure works)

-Be in relationship with yourself (journaling, learning new things, going to therapy / counseling for unresolved issues)

-Be in relationship with others (communication / conflict resolution / counseling for unresolved issues)

-Be generous with your time / money / life

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I'm reminded of Maslow's hierarchy of needs -- which might be a good outline for 'essential skills to function as a human': https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

-Robert A. Heinlein

However I have two things that I think I do know enough about to add here:

- Presenting. Doing work is not sufficient is no-one knows about it. In most work contexts being able to present your work is important for getting recognition for it. This doesn't necessarily mean formal presentation with slides etc., but being able to speak up for yourself in a group setting is a good minimum. It's also useful for interacting with govt officials like the police.

- Maintaining your body. Know enough about your body to keep it working well (exercise, stretching, and so on) and recognise common problems before they become big issues (e.g. identifying skin cancers)

Finally, I think any answer is going to be biased by context. As someone has already noted in this thread, driving is an essential skill in some places but not in others. It would be better to give context for the people who you might be teaching.

If you live in the middle of the jungle, essential life skills will be much different than in SF.

I think we should divide skills into three types and then into three categories and adapt for your situation.

You should be very very good at 3 things:

- something that makes you money (programming, accounting, etc)

- a physical activity (lifting weights, soccer, etc)

- something you do for fun (woodworking, cooking, etc)

(for some woodworking can be making money and programming the fun part, switch as needed)

Then you should do the same but have 2/3 in each category but just as an ok/good level (can cook a normal veggies a steak meal or fix an electrical socket)

Then again, do the same for each category but for a very minimal understanding about it, but have as many as you can. You may not know how to so a butt joint, but can saw a piece of wood or drill a hole, etc etc.

This way, you are a more rounded human being, but also open your mind to other activities you wouldn't normally which may even go up in the hierarchy, but even if not, it may help you with other ones.

It also means you will almost always have something to talk about with anyone.

This will give you superpowers.

Just about every resource you might ever want is controlled by someone else. Every interaction you have with someone else to acquire resource is a negotiation, whether you think about it that way or not. Most other skills are learnt through others.

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The rest can be derived.

The path to happiness is not always the highest paying job or early retirement. Sometimes the most efficient solution is realizing that the problem is not worth solving. Sometimes there's a low hanging source of wealth that nobody has ever tried for. Sometimes you're always tired and burnt out because your source of entertainment is not entertaining.

It's a key skill to always check yourself. Are you really staying in late at work to do work or is it because you're used to doing 8 hours of work in 15 minutes? Do you really want the soda over the bottle of water or is it because the water is unfairly priced?

And from that self-awareness, actually build your own identity instead of having your identity built by others.

As a technical person growing up, I always put mental-health stuff in the "soft-science" mental-basket, right next to marriage counselling and green tea for weight-loss. These days(i'm 38 now) I'm appalled at how "for granted" I took mental health(depression, focus, motivation, work-life-balance) and spend a great amount of time looking into it and trying to better mine.

OH and as a 2nd skill it will be "communication" also something I neglected as a "super-tech-nerd". Writing good code in teams, is as much an exercise in social-structure and etiquette. Doing code reviews I've noticed I'm more or less critical depending on who the author is of the code and if I like them or not. We really should be doing code-reviews anonymously.

Coding in a multi person team can be hard if you can't get your point across or get social buy in from your team and of course when the differences happens, you need some kick-ass communication skills. I younger me would have just sworn and walk away calling everyone stupid :)

I've been saying for years every comp.sci program should have at least 2nd year communication courses, right next to calculus.

Edit:"Super-tech-nerd" refers to me being really really into tech. Not that I'm on equal footing of say Linus Trovalds or Jeff Dean in terms of tech-skills. Afrikaans is my first language. English very-far-distant second.

find out what makes you happy, obvious but difficult in practice.

Once you figure out a little bit about why you do what you do, then you can begin to motivate yourself, react less fearfully, etc.

We can’t affect where we are, but we can affect in which direction we go. There is a space between stimulus and response, as Viktor Frankl said.

Some of the feelings and thoughts we have are automatically generated by our mind based on previous experience. They are the homo sapiens equivalent of speculative execution. To the extent that we choose to listen to them they will continue to weave the story of our life. Some of our neural networks are pattern matching for an environment that no longer exists. We should accept their presence for what they are, optional perspectives with an uncertain basis in reality.

I remind myself of this daily. Knowing that I have the ability to grow, cope, and learn new things. This wisdom has given me the courage and temperance to adjust the patterns in my life that are no longer serving me.

Does anyone else think like this? Comments are much appreciated.