Sufficiently, proficient - too arbitrary. There’s “skill” associated with all work and therefore all work is skilled work. There’s value in people being good at virtually every kind of work (excluding vulture capitalism, etc.)

EDIT: Also FWIW, if think there’s no difference between the 1 hour vs. 20 year nail puller, my guess is you’re never been even REMOTELY close to this kind of work in your life.

I think a much better definition of a skill is “anything you can get better at”. Take the other commenter who pulled nails out of boards. Sure a random guy off the street could probably do it, but compared to someone whose been doing it for years theyd be a total schmuck. If you watched that experienced worker you’d see how much faster they are, the efficiency and precision in their motions, their ability to instantly analyze the best way to her each and every nail out. There’s a whole genre of online videos of these types of people - experts in seemingly “menial” work and they do numbers because they make people stop and marvel.

First, you can achieve a whooooole lot outside of a job. I hope for your sake your entire sense of achievement isn’t related to your job.

Secondly, even from the quote you pulled they said they don’t want to learn anything new “for a job.” If they said they weren’t interested in learning anything new period I would maybe consider that limiting themselves, but that’s not the case. In fact its much more limiting if everything you learn is only in service to a job.

OP sounds like they’ve figured out the balance they want in life and they want more time for things that aren’t related to making money and I applaud them for that.