a midway bikelog

Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford. Here’s an essay at the New Atlantis that was later expanded into the book.

Essentially, it explores the worth of physical work, and the value of working in the trades. Factory work has dumbed down the worker, replacing a broad array of manual and troubleshooting skills with the monotonous repetition of the assembly line. He also draws the comparison of the modern-day white collar tech worker and the assembly line, and this is where the bells start going off for me.

I took shop class in high school. Wood shop, electric shop and metal shop, where i learned to weld and braze, and we were able to cast aluminum and operate lathes and mills. I loved doing these things, but there was a stigma to the work too, it was assumed to be the sort of work you did if you couldn’t go to college. I went to college.

I build websites and various digital things for my living, and it’s been a good field for me. Most of my skills are self-taught; building on years of tinkering and exploration into coding, design, databases, and logic, They’re all things that have interested me for years in different ways, but strongly enough to learn the language and how to build my own things from the various pieces. There are ties into music and engineering and journalism too, so you’d think that a field that ties all of that life experience together should be ideal. And so it was, but now it bores the shit out of me.

I’ve tried to take on new side jobs to spark some creativity, and those are great in their own ways, but they also reveal the limits of my knowledge, and i’ve found over the past year that the more i push on those limits within computer work the more my brain rebels. I sit down to make or fix something that i should be able to figure out, that someone will pay me to do, but that i have to force my mind to stay with. Sure, hard work isn’t always fun, but here’s the thing: this used to be fun. I used to revel in the challenge of making computers do nifty things and took the time for such trivialities as having clean code and finding elegant solutions where brute force would get the job done just as quickly. I approach jobs with a craftsman’s sensibilities, and when the details i care about don’t matter to the client, well, maybe i don’t bill them for the hour it took to research the missing link i wanted to use (but didn’t need), but i’m happier with the result.

Lately, the computer work just isn’t doing it for me. The challenges don’t inspire the craftsman in me to care, i just want them dispatched quickly. My drive for good work in the daily job has been replaced with a drive for a small inbox.

What inspires me lately is making things; physical, holdable things that have a purpose for being. I’ve always liked to figure out how things work, and how to make things, and i enjoy some measure of self-sufficiency from doing those things. But this curiosity doesn’t pay the mortgage or feed the kids, so i cast about for something that both inspires and has some income potential. It’s a fun journey, but i’m ready for some sort of new direction. Anyway, it looks like a good book.