When the instructor announced we’d do the “monkey bars” as a warm-up, I knew I was going to be bad at this.

This was bouldering. Eight years ago, I spotted an ad for a women’s bouldering class at a local gym and, on a whim, signed up.

Let me explain a couple of things before I move ahead with this story. First, “bouldering” is a type of rock climbing. Instead of climbing a tall rock wall (or the gym equivalent), a boulderer climbs—you guessed it—a boulder (or the gym equivalent). So in bouldering, routes tend to only go as high as 12-15ft. But what routes lack in height, they demand in strength, flexibility, and problem-solving.

Oh, and there aren’t any ropes. Outdoors, boulderers lay pads similar to cheap mattresses under climbers to catch them when they fall. Indoors, the floors around the walls are padded to make falling less dangerous.

Now, eight years ago, I had just started to make exercise part of my daily routine. So when I say that I signed up on a “whim,” I mean that signing up for this class was profoundly out of character. I had no idea what I was getting myself into—and it was probably best that I didn’t.

I showed up for the first class, nervous but ready to learn. Before we even got on the wall, the instructor led us—me and the one other woman in the class—over to the Ninja Warrior-style obstacle course in the gym to “warm up” on the monkey bars, as I mentioned earlier. This did not bode well for me. Even as a kid who was very active and athletic, the monkey bars were never my thing. As a woman nearing middle age who had just left a very sedentary era of her life, I was in way, way over my head.

When we finally approached the bouldering wall, the instructor went through some basics about how to use your arms, toes, and core. Most importantly, she taught us how to fall safely. Then, she pointed out a beginner boulder problem (in bouldering, routes are called “problems”—a not-so-subtle nod to the puzzle of it all). My classmate went first and made it about halfway up on her first go. Then, it was my turn.

I perched my toes on the first footholds and gripped the designated starting point with nervous fingers. I don’t remember how many moves I made on that first attempt—but it wasn’t many. I didn’t make it as far as my classmate, and I wouldn’t make it up the whole problem in that first class as she did. When I left the gym, I could barely clutch the steering wheel to drive home. My forearms and fingers felt like jelly.

Even though I had proven to be a completely incompetent and ungifted climber in my first attempt, I was excited to go back the next week. In the second class, I made some progress, but ultimately, I still didn’t reach the top. Undeterred, I finally prevailed in the third class.

At the gym I climbed in, the bouldering wall is set up so that “topping out” a problem requires the climber to not only reach the top hand holds but to climb over the top of the wall itself and drop down onto a platform a few feet beneath on the other side. So when you finish the route you were climbing, you can peer back over the edge of the wall and see just how far you came—literally and metaphorically. Add to that view a rush of adrenaline and dopamine, and you’ve got a recipe for embracing a whole new identity.

As my climbing instructor later confirmed for me, I started out as an unpromising student. She was a bit surprised that I stuck with it (as was I). But getting past that first seemingly impossible obstacle was a turning point. I made that climb once—and I could do it again. I went from being an unpromising student to being one of the top women climbers at my gym within a year. I started climbing the same problems my instructor was working on. Later, I would teach the same women’s bouldering class that got me started.

I’ve often said that bouldering taught me how to enjoy being bad at something. Until that point, I’d been one of those people who don’t do anything they’re not good at. Of course, that means that the list of things available to do is pretty small and tends to get smaller as one loses competency in activities one no longer practices.

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Strategic Incompetence

Philosopher Kate Manne recently wrote about her “summer of strategic incompetence.” Manne took up strength training and gardening—two things she was “supremely incompetent” at—because they were activities that interested her and also because she wanted “to experience and demonstrate [her] incompetence to [herself], and see and feel [herself] gradually getting better.” Toward the end of her piece, Manne delivers a bit of reflection that I can completely and utterly empathize with:

In seeking out a new hobby, I had to make a slightly confronting admission: I would rather experience growth as a beginner than regression as a more expert practitioner.

She contrasts her experience with gardening and strength training with how she feels when she sits down at the piano, an instrument she was once very competent at but has since grown rusty. She continues:

…the gulf between me then and me now reminds me how fleeting can be fluency; how skills live in porous siloes. Finding fresh sources of beauty and, with them, new and unfamiliar aspirations has hence been a balm.

New and unfamiliar aspirations, like learning to climb, can sites for practicing incompetence—important if you’re like Manne or me and prefer to do things you’re good at. But new and unfamiliar aspirations can also be a source of a less judgmental, lower-stakes competence.

I’m not currently climbing (the reasons include Covid denialism, misogyny, and poor management at my gym), not since 2021. But my sense of what my body is capable of is still mediated through the muscle memory of pulling myself onto the wall, executing perfect footwork, and contorting my body to reach the next hold. I've kept up with strength training, but I know if I were to squeeze my toes back into my climbing shoes, making to the top would be a struggle.

However, when I imagine that scenario, I don’t feel the frustration I feel when I sit down at the piano or try to play a scale on my trombone. I don’t really remember being bad at those things, though; of course, I was at one point. But I do remember being a completely incompetent climber, and that memory helps to remind me that I enjoyed bouldering when I was topping out difficult climbs as much as I did when I was falling off the easy stuff.

What Happens on the Wall

Climbing demonstrated to me that I had no idea what my limits were until I tested them. It showed me that falling down was a critical part of figuring out how to get to the top. And while those lessons are incredibly valuable, they don’t quite capture the transformational lesson I received from climbing.

Bouldering as a discipline is all about getting back on the rock—whether you fell on your previous attempt or sent the problem you’ve been working on for a month. You practice, learn, recoup, chalk up, and try again. You succeed and seek out your next challenge. You fall and try to figure out a different way to try the same move. Sometimes you climb the same problem over and over again simply because you like the shapes your body makes as you make each move.

Falling is part of that practice. But so is success. Crushing a challenging boulder problem is a rush—no doubt. Yet, it’s what happens on the wall that keeps you coming back for more.

We love to talk a good game about failure being a necessary prerequisite of success. We’re told to celebrate the setbacks, to “fail better” and “fail faster,” if we want to accomplish great things. And I’m not here to disagree with that, simply to point out that whether you’re talking about failure or about success, you’re focusing on a fiction. And you’re missing the best part of the story.

Projects, initiatives, and goals come and go. We can label their ends with words like failure or success, or we might take a more nuanced approach to describe what we accomplished or didn’t. Regardless of how we frame units of work, the work continues.

Whether that work is your job or business, whether it’s parenting or partnering, whether it’s climbing up a boulder or paddleboarding on a mountain lake, the work is the best part. That’s not to say that all work is enjoyable—but that it’s in the work that we create the spark of meaning, the fizzle of richness so often missed when we focus on the beginnings and endings of things.

The Spectacle of Competence

In the winter of 2018-19, I came down with the flu. It was the sickest I’d ever been in my adult life—that is until I finally got Covid in late 2024. During the long days of body aches and sore throats and sniffling, I watched documentaries. This was shortly after the release of Free Solo, which documents Alex Honnold’s no-ropes ascent up the sheer face of El Capitan. If I couldn’t climb myself, at least I could watch one of the best climbers in the world do one of the most batshit crazy things anyone has ever attempted.

The film climaxes at the moment Honnold hoists himself up on the top of the mountain. Of course it does. The ending was never really in doubt. Honnold’s accomplishment was relatively old news at that point—and, he was alive. There’s plenty of will-he-won’t-he drama, but the appeal of the film and the bulk of its runtime is his preparation for that one climb. The film elevates the years of training, study, and mental gymnastics he embarks on, along with how he navigates his relationships (or doesn’t), that make his success possible.

Free Solo belongs to an indistinct genre of media lovingly referred to as “competence porn.” “Competence porn” is media in which someone is doing their job (loosely defined) exceptionally well, often using niche skills or uncommon expertise. The term was coined by TV writer John Rogers because, as Rachel Ayers described for Reactor, he “wanted a shorthand way to talk about the very specific kind of satisfaction that we feel when watching folks competently handle complex situations using the kinds of specialized skills and expertise that we can all appreciate.”

Competence porn stories incorporate failure and success, but it’s the work itself that they elevate. The 2021 documentary LFG tells the story of why the US Women’s National Team sued for equal pay. Like Free Solo, there’s an understandable emphasis on the wins and losses along the way. But also like Free Solo, there is careful attention paid to the work of professional women athletes—on the field or court and off—as well as the work of building not only a legal case but public outcry. The grind shares top billing with the celebrity athletes the film follows.

Smaller screens play host to competence porn, too. YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram are full of it. I asked Sean about his favorite competence porn, and without a moment’s hesitation started to tell me about the pottery videos he watches. Oh, and the knitting videos. And machining, woodworking, and bookbinding videos. Some of these videos crossover with the how-to genre. But their primary purpose seems to be entertainment, the spectacle of watching people do things really, really well.

All Sensation, No Feeling

Competence porn is a good term for this type of media. Because it is porn. It’s all sensation, no feeling—to paraphrase Audre Lorde. Competence porn scratches the itch we have for being present, attentive, and ultimately skillful in whatever work we’re doing. But we remain spectators; it can never substitute for the richness of the real thing.

Lorde contrasts pornography with “the erotic:”

The erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

Following Lorde, bell hooks writes about the role of the erotic in the classroom. hooks explains that we can understand the erotic as a “force that enhances our overall effort to be self-actualizing,” paralleling the psychoanalytic framing of eros. She focuses on the erotic as a passion uniting theory and practice, knowing and doing—a force that transcends the mind/body duality that typifies much of white, western pedagogy.

This notion of ‘competence porn’ got me thinking about what it is that we're really craving. What is the feeling that we're looking for in all of this sensation?

Toward an Erotics of Competence

So while there is plenty of competence porn in the media today, what we might truly yearn for is an erotics of competence. We crave the depth of skillfulness and execution that can’t be fully appreciated when we focus on beginnings and ends, failures and successes. An erotics of competence must elevate the process, the feeling of being in the middle of a thing. Erotic competence is embodied, alive with and attentive to the minutiae of pulse and breath.

Competence porn depends on the expert, the master, the player at the top of their game. An erotics of competence is available to anyone and everyone willing to immerse themselves fully in their work, broadly defined. Competence porn does indeed elevate the work, but it may place it so high as to seem unreachable. An erotics of competence makes the richness of work well done accessible to anyone who would seek it. Competence porn trades in the currency of climax, while an erotics of competence invests itself in materiality, pleasure, and rhythm.

The rise of competence porn in both traditional media and new media might be due to the inaccessibility of an erotics of competence in our own lives. We reach for the spectacle of skillfulness because our opportunities to embody skillfulness are constrained by the imperatives of efficiency, mass production, and urgency. Borrowing from Guy Debord, competence porn “show[s] us a world that can no longer be directly grasped.” It is “the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.”

Look, I love competence porn—no kink-shaming here. I love watching people do things they’re really good at, whether that’s laying concrete, powerwashing a deck, preparing a meal, fighting for equal pay, or climbing up a sheer rock face without ropes. I will not be giving up this habit any time soon.

But I’ve learned that if I don’t find ways to exercise my own competence, I won’t be fully satisfied. If I focus on successes or failures at the expense of process and the profound immanence of doing the damn thing, I’ll always be chasing the next high.

That’s what bouldering taught me, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

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