You can't swing a hammer from India

I've been thinking about this for some time. Craftsmanship in a digital world. Maybe it's because I work with my hands these days and my brain less than I was [before the layoff]. I am a creative. I like to doodle, do things, make a tangible object whenever possible. I get such joy out of the finished product.



I heard part of an interview with the author of Shop Class is Soulclass on NPR sunday night. He posed the question, if all of our manufacturing and now our tech services can be outsourced cheaper overseas...what is left for us here in the US? I think he said something to the fact that "well you can't swing a hammer from India". Teaching the trades has dropped off and college is the aspiration for a white collar job, something respectable. But what happens when that doesn't fulfill you?

an excerpt from the book:
The wad of cash in my pants feels different than the checks I cashed in my previous job. Following a doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, I took a job as executive director of a Washington "think tank." I was always tired, and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all—what tangible goods or useful services was I providing to anyone? This sense of uselessness was dispiriting. The pay was good, but it truly felt like compensation, and after five months I quit to open the bike shop. It may be that I am just not well suited to office work. But in this respect I doubt there is anything unusual about me. I offer my own story here not because I think it is extraordinary, but rather because I suspect it is fairly common. I want to do justice to intuitions that many people have, but which enjoy little public credit. This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as "knowledge work." Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so.

you can read a longer excerpt from the book on the NPR site and hear the interview