A Useful Renaissance

Escaping apathy, modern meaning, and the forces that work against us

Lately I’ve been of the mind that I should be more handy. That I need to get back to making things and being useful.

My relationship with the physical world has grown uncomfortably abstract, to the point where I feel helpless with even the slightest inconveniences. But it wasn’t always that way.

When I was a kid, I used to love to take apart little electronic toys and clocks. I’d root around in their mechanical guts, and discover what went where, and why. I’d fix things, and build things, and do chores, and sell lemonade. I was an indisputed citizen of the physical world.

But today, things aren’t as simple.

You can’t just open a MacBook Pro and fiddle around. The objects that fill our lives are glossy, and smooth, and require custom tools and a Ph.D. to crack open. Because of this, I’ve grown fearful of interacting with the world around me. I’ve replaced my connection to the tangible, with an unfamiliarity of how to be useful.

So when things break around the house, I now feel lost. Sure, I have enough money to call a repair man to come out to fix the toilet. But nothing is more infantilizing than having another man come over your house, and fix your fence, or sink, or toilet, while you sit in the other room, hunched over a laptop moving numbers around on a screen.

I believe that reclaiming our usefulness is the antidote to many of the modern problems we experience today. Problems like nihilism, apathy, and a wayward soul. Problems that leave us feeling defeated, exhausted, and resigned. Problems that have disconnected us from each other, and the material world.

But to really understand why I decided to become more handy, I first need to talk about meaningless work.

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II.

I’ve been moving numbers around on a screen for quite some time now. As a matter of fact, it’s been nearly a decade since I’ve fixed, built, inspected, assembled, or created anything that wasn’t made of bits and bytes.

The same goes for most of my friends.

It’s as if our entire generation has become master architects in the digital world, and completely useless in the physical one. It’s something we all feel, but we rarely express. Instead, when we talk about our lives, a tired resignation washes over us. The naive dreams of deriving purpose from our careers, is long gone. At best, we feel a wayward apathy towards what we do, at worst, a complete nihilism.

And rightfully so. How could you feel anything but indifference, when you believe that how you spend your life, and your career, is mostly meaningless?

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III.

When I started thinking about the problem of meaningless work—and more broadly, the apathy we feel towards life in general—I realized it was more subjective than I originally suspected.

It turns out, the delineation between meaningful and meaningless work, exists only in our ability to convince ourselves. Therefore, the stories we tell ourselves about work, are much more important than the work itself.

So it’s possible to convince yourself that working on the supply chain team of Phillip Morris—the largest cigarette manufacturer in the world—is a meaningful career. But I think we can all intuit, doing so would be quite difficult.

However, if you were trying to persuade yourself that working as a grade-school teacher was meaningful, you’d probably have a much easier time.

Which means that, there are certain attributes that make it harder for us to believe a task is meaningful. These attributes require us to perform tricky mental contortions, to bend our beliefs to a desirable direction.

So what are they?

Incrementalism

Much of the progress of the 21st Century has been incremental progress. We’ve taken existing ideas and inventions, and spent thousands of hours making them just 1% better.

Just like the film industry, we’ve resolved to produce yet another unwanted sequel, rather than going out on a limb to write an original story. Instead of creating new things, or attempting to solve the world’s biggest problems—or even, much more humbly, trying to solve the problems of our own community—we exclusively seek the lowest hanging fruit.

As a result, we spend our careers trying to figure out how to make the packaging for Tide Pods infinitesimally lighter, so that we can fit more boxes in each shipping container, and thus make 0.05% more profit per transaction.

It’s very hard to convince yourself that this type of incremental work has any meaning.

Specialization

One of greatest legends of Americana, is the story of how Henry Ford took the complexity of the automobile, and broke it down into its elemental parts. This innovation made car ownership accessible to the masses, and made Ford one of the richest men in existence.

Other business owners followed suit, and assembly line manufacturing spread. It changed how we made airplanes, dishwashers, wine, and computers. Much of the world we know today is a byproduct of this restructuring of labor.

What Ford couldn’t have predicted, however, was that employees wouldn’t be able to stomach the drudgery. When he took the job of a single artisan, butchered it, and dolled out portions to the common laborer, he also did something else. He inoculated the American psyche with a pernicious virus. That virus of specialization.

Specialization robs us of the ability to see our work manifest. It robs us of the physical, and tangible, elements that make work so satisfying. When all we’re doing is driving a single rivet in the back bumper of a Model-T, it makes it very difficult for us to convince ourselves that our work has meaning.

What I didn’t know until recently about the story of Henry Ford, was that all of his employees quit when he switched production over to the assembly line. The only way he could get them to come back, with the monotony of their new specialized roles, was by doubling their salaries.

Abstraction

My favorite coffee mug, is a quirky little cup. It’s shorter and stalkier than your average store bought coffee mug, but it sits nicely in the hand. Drinking coffee out of it, is like drinking an Americano out of a small vase. It’s beautiful, it’s imperfect, and it’s mine. I made it with my own two hands.

You never really shake that elementary school pride, do you? The pride you feel when you make something in art class and then run back home, treasure in hand, ready to share with your parents.

When was the last time you felt that way about your work? When was the last time you came home, brimming with pride, ready to share with anyone that would listen?

I have a friend who worked tirelessly to bring the Apple Vision Pro to life. Yet, he shared with me that he feels more pride for an oil painting he made in high school, than he does for this feat of modern engineering. How can this be? How can we trade years of our lives for things we feel only a passing connection to—that we feel no pride for?

The answer is, abstraction.

We go into meetings, make decisions, generate numbers, organize them, email them, and schedule another meeting. Rarely is there something physical produced on the other end. Something we can take ownership of. Something we can hold and say “I made that.” And if there is, our contribution is buried under so many layers of abstraction, that the resulting product feels like a second-cousin.

Can we be sure we’re even really related?

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IV.

We all want to feel like what we’re doing matters. That we’re necessary. That our existence has meaning, or at the very least, it improves the lives of those around us. But we have strayed far from this path. As a result, the same forces that have permeated our work, have begun to bleed their way into our personal lives as well.

It has become a cliché in the past decade to equate your time to money, and to question if even the smallest inconveniences, are worth it.

I recall hearing a story of how, a famous tech billionaire refused to return items on Amazon, because the value of his time was so great, that it would cost him less to just throw out the item and by another.

When I was 19, and naive, I thought this was cool. Now, I can more accurately recognize this as hell.

Becoming a hedonic sloth—and refusing to do anything outside of what is pleasurable—is a real danger that many of us face. It’s the price of success. It’s the monster that our incremental, specialized, and abstracted work has created. This hedonic sloth is a temptation that lives inside us all, and threatens any semblance of meaning we can derive from our lives.

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V.

So how do we fight these forces? How do we reclaim some pride in our lives? How can we once again derive meaning from the work that we do?

I decided that a good place to start is by being useful.

To be useful is to cut through incrementalism, specialization, and abstraction. It’s to do something real, for someone real, with real effect. If you want to see the power of usefulness, look no further than new parents. Their lives are brimming with purpose.

Being useful is to reclaim the pride you once had for the things you made. To recognize that something built imperfectly by your own two hands, holds much more value than something mechanically riveted on the other side of the planet. It’s to salvage our physical connection to the world, and by extension, shed some insight about our place in it.

Start humbly. Start small. Take back a little bit here and there. Make a meal for someone you love. Change a tire. Cut your own lawn. Change a diaper. Make yourself a wonky coffee mug.

Whatever you do, it’s going to be flawed, especially if you’re out of practice. But in the end, you will have done something real. Something you can be proud of, and something that will nourish another human being.

Which would be hard to argue is an act without meaning.

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Epilogue

Another morning, forced awake before the sun. Before the birds, and the trees, and the worms. When the rest of the world was quiet and dark—I was awake again, and I was cold. The fire had gone out.

We were staying in a cabin on the other side of the world, and although we had planned for it to be spring, it was still clearly winter when we arrived. Warmth at night had become a luxury. So I took on the role of guardian of the fire.

Both Ash and I agreed that this felt like a man’s job. Which I believe was her way of saying she didn’t want to wake up at 4 am, gather wood from the shed, brush off the spiders, and sit shivering in front of an immature flame for an hour before a real fire grew. That, and she also had no interest in getting burned. I, however, did. I wanted all of it.

So each morning, I would walk over to the small iron box that sat just outside our bedroom door, and open the vent to the chimney. Slowly, I’d begin to crack open the glass door to the fireplace. The coals from the previous night’s fire would shine red with a fresh breeze of oxygen. Giving one last burst of heat, before they simmered out for good.

Just a week prior, I had never built a real fire before. Not one with any purpose, at least. I had only ever made those pretend fires we used to make when camping back home. We’d burn them big and bright, roasting marshmallows, and telling stories by the light. Haphazardly chucking dozens of logs, and twigs, and leaves in the heap to keep the flame going. These were fires for show, for ambiance. The ones I was now constructing in our cabin, were for life.

They were useful. They had a purpose.

—Zac

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