The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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Maintaining a car used to also be more accessible (e.g. carburetors you could tune with hand tools vs fuel injection that's computer-controlled), more necessary (design changes have increased the average car's expected lifespan from like 100k to 200k miles, so these days why try to eke out an extra 5% when it'll be so old you'll want a new model anyway?), and more valuable (average mileage and horsepower have gone up enough that it's no longer as big a deal if they decay a bit from more lax maintenance) ... but if you learned to be a "car guy" back when it was practical, you're probably still going to be one today now that it's just fun. I'm not quite old enough to be in that category, but I sympathize; I still upgrade computers component-by-component, like I learned to when options were more limited and I was more poor, even though "just buy a new one" would make as much sense these days.
I don't know why "maintaining a house" has declined in status, though. Construction quality hasn't gone up a lot, and land prices have, so I'd think that maintaining the quality of your home should be a bigger deal now that the cost of doing so is a smaller fraction of the home's price.
I think it's more that people are older when they get their first house. You aren't allowed to do much work in rental places.
So DIY home repair skills are completely useless for your early life and by the time you need them you're financially established enough that you can just hire someone.
Also illegal immigration has collapsed the price of minor handyman tasks, so it's not a huge deal to hire someone.
General male (coded) competence doing/fixing has become a long lost art in some quarters. My dad built a motorcycle out of a bicycle in his teens. He could pretty much repair or at least find the problem and learn to repair anything--or so it seemed to me at the time. Computers would of course be his undoing and late in life he'd end up having ordered a bunch of stuff online, or acquiring viruses, and so on and so forth. But in his day he was the definition of a competent male, taught of course by the model of his own father. I am far less handy but I'm surprised by the phenomena you describe here, particularly noticeable in Japan, where sometimes it seems general maintenance and repair goes the way of just hire someone to replace anything that one has allowed entropy to destroy.
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