[POST] Competency Porn
It's good to admire the experts and the skilled in whatever realm -- including the US Government
This is a reader-supported publication. I give it all away for free but could really use your support if you want me to keep doing this.
My spouse is a hospice social worker. During COVID, when a lot of in-person services to society’s most vulnerable were cut back or damn near eliminated, she volunteered to go out every single day. A lot of times, she was the only person standing between that client and their dying alone. She is present for people’s deaths on a regular basis, and, based on the relationships she forges with caregivers, she is often invited to funerals. She gets to play peacemaker in family after family during arguably the most pivotally painful moment in their shared history — the death of a patriarch or matriarch. She has dealt with celebrities and some very scary people, but she enters each home — however in turmoil and anguish — with the same calm and humble demeanor.
She needs to weep on a regular basis and — at times — weeps with her clients.
My wife is scrupulous about respecting her clients’ privacy and so only shares her day with me in the most anonymized manner. All I can offer in return is respect and a certain amount of incredulity at her ability to compartmentalize.
On her days off, my spouse scours thrift stores for comforting items she can distribute to those who have close to nothing of the sort. It is a form of self-care amidst a 60-to-70 hour workweek. She regularly goes on-call for 12-hour windows on the weekend because she doesn’t have small kids to care for.
Her job is not good for her health. Some days, when she feels near a breaking point, she’ll stroll through a cemetery trying to gather her strength from all those who’ve gone on before. More times than not, given her intense schedule, she can manage only a fleeting mental journey through some familiar graveyard from her past.
[SIDENOTE: That’s her equivalent of a rooftop moment from the HBO emergency-room drama The Pitt.]
I have no idea how she’s done this now for years. She grew up the minister’s daughter, experienced an extremely difficult adolescence, and has successfully raised six kids to adulthood — three she birthed and three she set her — and my — mind on adopting from overseas.
I remain in awe of her moral fiber, and endurance, and empathy.
She is entirely competent in one of the most difficult jobs imaginable — regularly experiencing the life-cycle traumas that the vast majority of us experience only in episodic blips across our years. On an average week, she is exposed to, and experiences, more loss than I have in a lifetime.
She has quote-unquote “lost” all of her patients — by design.
And she just does her job — not for the money and the work-life balance, I can tell you. She absorbs a lot of other people’s pain.
She is Gem from that classic Star Trek episode “The Empath” — my all-time favorite.
I have always greatly admired people who have difficult professions, to include working in the Federal government. They do not do it for the money or the prestige; they do it because they feel compelled to serve — despite the profound personal costs.
Noah Wylie, actor, producer, and writer for HBO’s The Pitt, has stated in interviews that the show is “competency porn.” It’s not a new concept and was coined in 2009 by another TV show runner, John Rogers (from Leverage).
Competence porn refers to movies, TV, or novels that feature characters who are exceptionally skilled and capable, especially when tackling difficult or complex tasks. The appeal? The specific satisfaction we feel when watching characters expertly surmount complex situations — i.e., we like rooting for the mad-skills hero.
But it’s more than that.
It’s about seeking out and telling those stories of the … I dunno … unrecognized and unacknowledged heroes in our midst. We admire their mastery of skills that seem beyond our reach. We marvel at their step-by-step success in problem-solving — i.e., no unexplained plot jumps. Oddly enough, the competency displayed doesn’t leave us feeling inferior but instead inspires us, oftentimes making us wish we had chosen that path if that much good could be achieved in such a selfless manner.
We all think we could be The Martian and survive.
My favorite movie growing up was Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and I realize now it was because I loved watching a story where the US Government was depicted as being competent and careful and dedicated — despite the unprecedented nature of the circumstances faced.
I love all those kinds of movies, like Deep Impact, Zero Dark Thirty, Apollo 13, Silence of the Lambs, Hidden Figures, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and so on. Frankly, that’s always been my enduring attraction to Star Trek — just imagining how competent “Federation” people could be in the future.
I simply adore competence and enjoy seeing it celebrated, which gives you a sense of how I abhor today’s American political scene.
HBO’s The Pitt and the Alex Garland/Ray Mendoza film Warfare are the two best examples of competency porn out there today, and both really stick with you mentally — not because of the horror or trauma involved but because of the characters’ ability to push through all that and — again — simply do their job while looking out for one another.
Having worked in national security for decades, I’ve long admired military personnel for their can-do attitude when facing the worst situations. Same for social workers like my spouse, my now-retired brother, and my sister-in-law. Same for my eye-surgeon little brother. It is just wonderful and amazing to see someone deal with such pressure and complexity and just muscle through it all, somehow processing the personal cost, which is never easy and can often lead to extreme coping behaviors.
These people are my living saints — examples to which I aspire and to whom I offer constant thanks and prayers.
And you know what impresses me most about such people? They typically do not hold themselves above others on that basis. They know full well they were drawn to such labors because that is who they are.
An audio clip from the final rooftop scene between Dr. Robby and Dr. Abbott on The Pitt:
Consider this my early Mother’s Day tribute to my spouse.
Great post. Thanks so much for sharing.
What a beautiful and heartfelt tribute. When my father passed (98, WWII veteran of the Pacific), I relayed a quote I love by the British politician Herbert Louis Samuel to the hospice doctor who had extended herself above and beyond for my Dad: “Death is not an injury, but rather life a privilege.” It didn’t make the passing easier, but it gave 98 years some deserved perspective.