Work with your hands

In grad school I had a brilliant literature professor who loved to cook because, he said, it was hands-on and gave an immediate reward, unlike his professional life. He needed something concrete.

I understood that. About that same time Jonathan and I were both longing for children, longing for something to balance the cerebral world in which we spent most of our waking hours. Too much thinking, we'd learned, can drive you crazy--and I mean that literally. Too little contact with physical reality, with flesh and blood, laundry, dishes, gardens, and so forth, allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that everything is amenable to our clever manipulation, our spin doctoring, our slant.

Don't get me wrong: Ideas are real and have real consequences, but we have to exercise moral and intellectual integrity to remember that, to treat them as if they're real, logical, and not just malleable fodder for a publishable article. The physical world insists on its immutable truth more forcibly. When the washing machine breaks, it is broken; either you can fix it, or you can't.

This guy--Matthew B. Crawford--writes about this sort of thing. In discussing the benefits of hands-on, physical labor, he notes:

Work forms us, and deforms us, with broad public consequences.

The visceral experience of failure seems to have been edited out of the career trajectories of gifted students. It stands to reason, then, that those who end up making big decisions that affect all of us don’t seem to have much sense of their own fallibility, and of how badly things can go wrong even with the best of intentions ...

In the boardrooms of Wall Street and the corridors of Pennsylvania Avenue, I don’t think you’ll see a yellow sign that says “Think Safety!” as you do on job sites and in many repair shops, no doubt because those who sit on the swivel chairs tend to live remote from the consequences of the decisions they make. Why not encourage gifted students to learn a trade, if only in the summers, so that their fingers will be crushed once or twice before they go on to run the country?

There is good reason to suppose that responsibility has to be installed in the foundation of your mental equipment — at the level of perception and habit. There is an ethic of paying attention that develops in the trades through hard experience. It inflects your perception of the world and your habitual responses to it. This is due to the immediate feedback you get from material objects and to the fact that the work is typically situated in face-to-face interactions between tradesman and customer.

Crawford has a Ph.D. , but repairs motorcyles for a living (and, obviously, writes). Here's another one of his articles, this one about medication:

The semantic shift wherein “unhappiness” is replaced by “depression” has real consequences: Our self-understanding becomes infected by medical categories that may not be appropriate, issuing in a kind of moral inarticulacy. With this comes a different disposition toward one’s own experience.

Theodore Dalrymple, a former prison psychiatrist in Britain, suggests that an overly broad concept of depression implies that dissatisfaction with life is itself pathological, a medical condition, which it is the responsibility of the doctor to alleviate by medical means. Everyone has a right to health; depression is unhealthy; therefore everyone has a right to be happy (the opposite of being depressed). This idea in turn implies that one’s state of mind, or one’s mood, is or should be independent of the way that one lives one’s life, a belief that must deprive human existence of all meaning, radically disconnecting reward from conduct.

Gotta love a man who quotes Dalrymple.

And Crawford has a book just coming out: Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.