I encourage everyone to develop at least a basic familiarity with the skills required to maintain the things that keep our modern lifestyle humming along but I was talking about making it to a substantially greater skill level than that.
You can change a water heater with two shark-bite fittings, an adjustable wrench (and a screwdriver if it's electric instead of gas) and maybe a little help from YouTube and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that. There's very little automotive maintenance you can't do with a basic socket set and some screwdrivers and pliers and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that as well. But those kinds of basic tasks can be gateway drugs into developing more and more skills and as you develop more skills you wind up wanting the tools that make application of those skills more efficient.
Eventually you wind up at a level of available skills and tools where your only sources of expensive problems are people and not things, you are more limited by time than money, you've considered registering an LLC so you don't have to do as much lying when purchasing from companies that usually only sell B2B and you've unsubscribed from the advice subreddits in several fields because you realize that they're just full of idiots who can regurgitate textbook advice but don't have sufficient understanding of the constraints the people asking the questions are likely working under.
You can change a water heater with two shark-bite fittings, an adjustable wrench (and a screwdriver if it's electric instead of gas) and maybe a little help from YouTube and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that. There's very little automotive maintenance you can't do with a basic socket set and some screwdrivers and pliers and there's a ton of bang for your buck in that as well. But those kinds of basic tasks can be gateway drugs into developing more and more skills and as you develop more skills you wind up wanting the tools that make application of those skills more efficient.
Eventually you wind up at a level of available skills and tools where your only sources of expensive problems are people and not things, you are more limited by time than money, you've considered registering an LLC so you don't have to do as much lying when purchasing from companies that usually only sell B2B and you've unsubscribed from the advice subreddits in several fields because you realize that they're just full of idiots who can regurgitate textbook advice but don't have sufficient understanding of the constraints the people asking the questions are likely working under.