The Case for Working With Your Hands

Why we feel so burnt out and how manual labor is the cure

The other day, I was sitting at “work”, aka my computer screen, and I was simply unable to focus. And no wonder - it was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining, a gentle breeze was blowing, and I was inside staring at a blue screen, writing automated sales emails.

Back before the Age of Remote work, the outcome of the above scenario would have been a deep sigh, followed by perhaps a trip to the office coffee station, and “getting back to work”. But not on this day!

I said screw this, put an hour block on my calendar, and went outside and did another kind of work - manual labor.

And let me tell you, it was so dang satisfying! I swept. I reorganized. I threw things out. I pulled weeds. I planted a cactus. I watered plants.

It all took me about an hour, but when I finished, I stood there on our patio in a superman pose admiring the work I was able to get done with deep satisfaction.

The type of satisfaction that only comes from a job well done and being able to admire the outcome that your labor produced.

I googled what this feeling was and why it came from doing work with my hands (one of those weird Google searches that my modern-day brain couldn’t comprehend) and I came across a book called: Shop Class As Soulcraft. Now, I haven’t read this book (although I’d like to) as this all happened yesterday, but from what I’ve gathered in my search is that the author, Matthew Crawford, explains how we as a society have come to devalue what he refers to as “manual competence,” or the ability to understand, build, and repair the physical world around us.

I take that to mean that in today’s world, if our car breaks down, we are useless to fix it, much less even know what’s wrong. If we want to drink a craft coffee, we better drive to the coffee shop because only they know how to make a good one. If our lawn is full of weeds, better call a landscaping person because obviously the weekend is filled with catching up on our television series.

We Are Being Programmed To Live This Way

This got me thinking about society’s general lack of knowledge and skill around doing anything physically. Think about it - How many schools today still have shop class, home economics, or even P.E.?! Since the dawn of the assembly line and the public education system, we have essentially become artificial intelligence.

Warm-blooded, partially aware robots that go about our day going through the motions at our day job that isn’t satisfying to us, just to sit in traffic for 45 minutes, to finally get home and eat our microwave dinner or takeout in front of the TV that’s catching us up on all the opinion “news” that tell us how we should be thinking.

What’s worse, in today’s uncertain economic climate, we’re just replaceable cogs in the machine. Any one of us can be without a job in the blink of an eye and then what? What do you have to offer the world? Did you spend time building any useful skills to help you survive without a comfy 9-5 paycheck?

Even the modern workplace is making you more and more replaceable. I’ll use my job as an example - I work in sales for a tech company. We are always looking at new tools to make our jobs easier as salespeople, to “automate” more and more and it shows!

98% of the sales emails I get are so bad because you can tell the person pitching you slapped you into an automatic chain that they probably sent to 100 other people and thought to themselves “well, I hit my numbers today”. The human factor is being completely removed in a way that makes it so that any “salesperson” is replaceable because any average blockhead can type emails into a sequence and hit a big shiny send button.

Work Manual Labor Into Your Life

Now, I’m not saying you need to full on quit your well-paying jobs and decide to take up life as a carpenter. What I am saying is that you should try and insert a little “human” into a world that’s constantly trying to take the human touch out of day-to-day life. What does this mean? Well, if you’re in sales like me, instead of mindlessly just hitting send, take the time to actually make a connection with someone and try to help them.

If you work in an office, consider biking or walking to work (without headphones) and observe the world around you - take detours in fact, and see things you haven’t seen in your city or town.

If you want to make an even larger impact on your life, take up a hobby! I challenge you to ask anyone what they like to do for fun and watch them struggle to tell you. It’s funny but sad to realize how few people have hobbies that they are passionate about outside of their 9-5 job that doesn’t involve drinking or the television. Taking up a physical hobby is a surefire way to give your life a jumpstart.

Take Action:

Start small - this can be as simple as setting aside time every week to work on your backyard or clean the house because doing those things will give you a sense of a job well done.

Then maybe find a hobby you used to love as a kid that involved your hands. Maybe it’s sewing, maybe it’s woodworking, working on cars, or even writing - The point is, it doesn’t matter what it is so long as it involves you having to use your own brain to think, reason, use judgment, and at the end of it, gives you a sense of a job well done. Hopefully, you’ll be superman posing while looking back at something you just built soon.

-Sebastian