Competency Porn

The Strange Comfort of Watching People Who Know What They’re Doing

There’s something quietly reassuring about watching people who know exactly what they’re doing. In a world that often feels chaotic and uncertain, competence carries its own kind of calm. This piece explores why that feeling has always drawn me in and how I eventually realized it shaped my own love story.

I learned a new phrase on the playground recently: competency porn.

The moment began with me standing after school with a group of parents from my youngest son’s class. I was forty-one when he was born, which means most of the other parents are younger than I am. That dynamic has its perks. Every now and then I learn something new about the cultural landscape from them.

One afternoon a dad asked casually if anyone had been watching The Pitt. I lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Yes,” I said immediately. “It’s one of my favorite shows.”

He laughed and said he’d recently heard someone describe it as “competency porn.”

The phrase made everyone chuckle, but it also made me pause.

Standing there on the playground, I realized I’ve been drawn to competency porn for most of my adult life.

Competency porn refers to the particular pleasure of watching people who are very good at what they do, like a physician running an ER or a White House staffer managing a crisis. Really, anyone who walks into chaos and makes things work.

I’ve always taken pleasure in watching people who know what they’re doing. People working together to solve real problems. In a cultural moment like the one we’re living in now, where incompetence sometimes feels like it’s running the show, there’s something deeply satisfying about watching competence unfold. It’s calming to watch people think clearly, move decisively, and handle complicated situations with skill.

The funny thing is that I’d been seeking out competency porn long before I had the words for it.

I’ve watched The West Wing all the way through more times than I can keep track of, especially during periods of political turmoil. There’s something almost medicinal about watching fictional public servants who are thoughtful, articulate, and committed to doing their jobs well. The dialogue is sharp, the stakes are high, and the people at the center of it all are competent enough to effect positive change at almost every turn.

My first real love in the genre, though, was ER.

I watched it when it originally aired, and then I watched it again during one of the lowest stretches of my early adulthood. My college boyfriend had just broken up with me and broken my heart (https://becomingreal.substack.com/p/knitting-school-dropout). I’d recently dropped out of my first attempt at graduate school and was job searching, which meant I suddenly had long, empty days and a lot of painful feelings I didn’t know what to do with. For about a month I parked myself on my friend’s couch and watched episode after episode of ER.

It wasn’t pretty, and it’s embarrassing to admit, but I loved those characters. They were messy and flawed and made plenty of personal mistakes, but when it came time to do their jobs, they were extraordinary. In the middle of chaos, they knew exactly what to do. The trauma bay would fill up, alarms would start ringing, and suddenly everyone moved with this focused, practiced competence. It was mesmerizing.

George Clooney was my favorite.

Eventually, after weeks of lying on that couch in my sweatpants, my heart began to heal and I started dating someone new. He was ten years older than me. He worked in hospital medicine and had salt-and-pepper hair and a look that reminded me of George Clooney. It wasn’t immediately obvious that we were a perfect match, but I was smitten with him.

On our first two dates he carried his hospital pager. Every so often it would buzz and he’d quietly return the call. I would sit there pretending not to listen while he spoke into the phone, asking calm, practical questions and making decisions in real time. Each time he hung up, I felt a little more drawn to him.

Looking back now, I realize I’d stumbled into my first real-life experience of competency porn. He was thoughtful, hardworking, and calm in a crisis. The kind of person people naturally turn to when something goes wrong because they trust he’ll know what to do. Watching him move through the world carried the same subtle reassurance I’d felt watching those fictional doctors on television. Problems didn’t disappear, but they became manageable in the presence of someone capable.

Twenty-four years later, he’s still my partner, my husband, and the father of our three kiddos. Until that father on the playground used the phrase competency porn, I’m not sure I could’ve fully explained what drew me to my husband initially, besides the George Clooney resemblance.

Attraction is complicated, of course. There are a thousand invisible threads that pull two people together. But when I look back across the years of our life together, one thing stands out clearly: he shows up.

Of course he has his flaws. We all do. Marriage guarantees you’ll become intimately familiar with another person’s rough edges, their strange habits, and the small ways they drive you crazy. Underneath all of that, there’s something steady and unmistakable about him. He’s thoughtful, he works hard, and when something needs to be handled, he handles it well.

Competence, it turns out, is deeply attractive.

And apparently it’s always been my favorite genre.