I think a lot of this problem comes down to a loss of locality in work. It’s easy for a baker who sees his neighbors coming in to get their bread for the day to recognize how his work is meaningful. It’s a lot harder for an insurance agent to see that sort of meaning when the people they do help are so disconnected from them. (And, of course, plenty has been said about the good and bad of insurance over the past week)
I imagine being a mechanic is one of the better professions to keep that sense of locality—you’re probably still working with people you know from communities you’re part of.
I am reminded of your recent piece that referenced "It's a Wonderful Life" in relation to locality. George Bailey doesn't foreclose on his debtors when they get a little bit behind because he sees them every day. A faceless bank today, though, has hundreds of people deciding on foreclosures who have absolutely no relationship to those who their decisions will affect. I think this takes a great deal of the meaning out of one's work.
I think that even beyond locality we have lost our connection to what "production" is. In writing this piece, and otherwise, I have done a lot of thinking about the relationship of goods to the Good. So may jobs have no concern for their tangible results in the world other than stock price and profits.
I greatly, greatly enjoyed this essay. I've just finished reading Matt Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft, and this did a great job of applying the same ideas to what journalism's cubicle monkeys call "timely issues." My next essay may well be a response. I endured a year in a state university admin job and was shocked at how low the bar was set. I had to invent tasks to do, which included teaching myself basic web design so I could update the department's ag econ blog from looking ca. 2001. It wasn't so I could get a raise (the state system ensured raises were infrequent and minimal). It was boredom.
Funny. I too just finished Shop Craft, and also work in a university. My first 6 months were spent twiddling my thumbs while I awaited the right permissions in the manifold systems they used.
This is superb. Check out Laborem Exercens by Pope John Paul II, if you haven’t already. Very similar perspective, but from a theological point of view.
This is great! I actually did read that in preparation for this piece, and we relied a great deal on those philosophical underpinnings. I'm glad it came through.
Good post. To do the same specialized work 8 hours or more a day all the working week all your working life is akin to being enslaved. This is not a denigration nature of the work, it's merely pointing out just how divergent the whole model of how we conduct work today is from how human beings were meant to live. That is, doing varied work of limited duration to completion in its proper time and place and scale to the benefit of the household economy and local community.
The whole 9-5 thing doing the same specific thing each and every day arose as a substitute to the open slavery we'd outlawed in order to maintain the same result as the system of slavery created and drove - a society of extreme luxury. With, in modern times, more people benefitting from this work for the fact of oil energy being sustituted for the bulk of the slave energy, oil being the equivalent of each one of us having 300 slaves it has been estimated. Yet even with that we still needed people working akin to slaves, even if they were being paid to do so now. Without some form of enslavement at the root, you don't get societies of luxury, you get subsistence living, a tribal situation.
To the same point, and to Grant's follow-up: I heard an argument recently that mechanization has not actually reduced the total number of people needed to do particular tasks (or at least not the total amount of work). Think of digging a trench. I could do it myself, or with the help of some friends and it would be a great deal of work, but not impossible. On the other hand, I could rent an excavator, in which case I involve the work not just of myself and my friends, but all of the people who built the parts of the excavator, assembled them, all of those who drilled and refined the motor oil and gasoline, the guys at the rental place who load it on a trailer and bring it to me, etc. etc. While my life is easier I'm not sure that less total work is involved.
Oh indeed! Embedded “invisible” energy. The reason it’s invisible to us being thanks to a fundamental false premise of Adam Smith’s, his Wealth of Nations of course being the (mistaken) foundation of all mainstream modern economics. That is, his assertion that the root of the modern economy is labor. It is not, it is energy. If you’ve ever wondered why economists seem so out to lunch so much of the time, this is why - Smith. Another example of what you point out here, when agriculture was powered by horses with grass/oats as the energy source, we got a vastly smaller crop at 1 unit of energy in for 2 units return. Today, with mechanised agriculture? We get vastly larger returns at 10 or in cases many more units of energy in for 1 unit out. We portray this as being more rather than vastly less efficient (the latter of course being the reality) once again on account of being energy blind thanks to the false teachings of Smith.
Atavist- I've been thinking a lot recently about how much contemporary Machine societies rely on some form of slavery though a bit different than you are saying it here. I mean literally, like slave labor that mines lithium and picks tomatoes. We've just outsources actual slavery to different countries rather than in our own fields. But I also think of forms of pseudo-slavery and labor exploitation in our own country. I think of some arguments against mass deportations. One is that we shouldn't do this because the entire construction and agricultural system will collapse. I am not arguing for or against mass deportations, but this seems like a weird implicit recognition that our system relies on vulnerable people with no legal status who will accept low wages. This is not chattel slavery but feels like something similar.
I grew up rurally in an area where wealthy farmers whose spreads were built in the 18th and 19th centuries by indentured Irish servants who in cases were housed in stables brought in in modern times batallions of blackfolk from abroad to work the fields, paying them subsidized minimum wages and housing them in rows of little white shacks. In ‘enlightened’ Canada no less. (A theme in a novel i am serializing on here.) I worked there myself one summer in my teens, the only white fella on the crew. On account of this and my love of history, i have come to the conclusion that for there to be an entitled class there must be an exploited one. The only way for things to work otherwise is for all of us to greatly curb our expectations. I don’t think the latter will happen. I think we will go on being what we’ve already seen through history. It’s the nature of the beast and i’m ambiguous over it. At any rate, agriculture is going to collapse anyway. It is as one pundit put it “a huge piglet on the petroleum sow” with petroleum not only being a finite, non-renewable resource but one for which the economics are right now souring. The cost of drilling an oil-well in America for instance has tripled since just before covid. Our civilization, agriculture included, is headed so deeply into the red it will no longer pencil-out.
The most impactful act of resistance against the capitalist machine would be for workers to simply stop working at their jobs, and start working at non-marketable use values instead. Ivan Illich is a guiding light for me.
I don't disagree though that requires us to reduce our consumption expectations since we live in a consumer market where we need cash. We'd need to figure out some way to aggressively avoid debt and produce as many of our goods as possible. Or are you suggesting something like quiet quitting? Still get the money but refuse to work.
Yeah, I think quiet quitting is a step in the right direction, almost like a general strike of labor across all sectors. I continue to work remote jobs to feed my family, but we're working on getting out of debt and devising a plan for a lifestyle that is more interdependent and productive.
The long term effects of the fertility crisis and geopolitical multipolarity basically guarantees that current levels of consumption cannot be sustained, and thus individual economies and the system as a whole will eventually have to falter. It's inevitable,I think, that we are going to have to accept living with less consumption and gaining resources through those within our family and community networks. How hard the crash is depends on many factors that are too complex to model, and the landing could be softer than expected, but I don't see how it's avoided.
Thanks for featuring this. The non-locality and invisibility of office work is a significant part of its alienating nature. And in many, the goal is to automate your own job as much as possible: remove skill or decision-making because that might lead to error, or to "undocumented processes." Doing nothing seems to be the very goal.
Great work.
I think a lot of this problem comes down to a loss of locality in work. It’s easy for a baker who sees his neighbors coming in to get their bread for the day to recognize how his work is meaningful. It’s a lot harder for an insurance agent to see that sort of meaning when the people they do help are so disconnected from them. (And, of course, plenty has been said about the good and bad of insurance over the past week)
I imagine being a mechanic is one of the better professions to keep that sense of locality—you’re probably still working with people you know from communities you’re part of.
Thanks so much. I completely agree.
I am reminded of your recent piece that referenced "It's a Wonderful Life" in relation to locality. George Bailey doesn't foreclose on his debtors when they get a little bit behind because he sees them every day. A faceless bank today, though, has hundreds of people deciding on foreclosures who have absolutely no relationship to those who their decisions will affect. I think this takes a great deal of the meaning out of one's work.
I think that even beyond locality we have lost our connection to what "production" is. In writing this piece, and otherwise, I have done a lot of thinking about the relationship of goods to the Good. So may jobs have no concern for their tangible results in the world other than stock price and profits.
https://vocationproject.substack.com/p/its-a-purposeful-life
I greatly, greatly enjoyed this essay. I've just finished reading Matt Crawford's Shop Class as Soul Craft, and this did a great job of applying the same ideas to what journalism's cubicle monkeys call "timely issues." My next essay may well be a response. I endured a year in a state university admin job and was shocked at how low the bar was set. I had to invent tasks to do, which included teaching myself basic web design so I could update the department's ag econ blog from looking ca. 2001. It wasn't so I could get a raise (the state system ensured raises were infrequent and minimal). It was boredom.
We're looking forward to reading that piece.
Funny. I too just finished Shop Craft, and also work in a university. My first 6 months were spent twiddling my thumbs while I awaited the right permissions in the manifold systems they used.
This is superb. Check out Laborem Exercens by Pope John Paul II, if you haven’t already. Very similar perspective, but from a theological point of view.
This is great! I actually did read that in preparation for this piece, and we relied a great deal on those philosophical underpinnings. I'm glad it came through.
Good post. To do the same specialized work 8 hours or more a day all the working week all your working life is akin to being enslaved. This is not a denigration nature of the work, it's merely pointing out just how divergent the whole model of how we conduct work today is from how human beings were meant to live. That is, doing varied work of limited duration to completion in its proper time and place and scale to the benefit of the household economy and local community.
The whole 9-5 thing doing the same specific thing each and every day arose as a substitute to the open slavery we'd outlawed in order to maintain the same result as the system of slavery created and drove - a society of extreme luxury. With, in modern times, more people benefitting from this work for the fact of oil energy being sustituted for the bulk of the slave energy, oil being the equivalent of each one of us having 300 slaves it has been estimated. Yet even with that we still needed people working akin to slaves, even if they were being paid to do so now. Without some form of enslavement at the root, you don't get societies of luxury, you get subsistence living, a tribal situation.
To the same point, and to Grant's follow-up: I heard an argument recently that mechanization has not actually reduced the total number of people needed to do particular tasks (or at least not the total amount of work). Think of digging a trench. I could do it myself, or with the help of some friends and it would be a great deal of work, but not impossible. On the other hand, I could rent an excavator, in which case I involve the work not just of myself and my friends, but all of the people who built the parts of the excavator, assembled them, all of those who drilled and refined the motor oil and gasoline, the guys at the rental place who load it on a trailer and bring it to me, etc. etc. While my life is easier I'm not sure that less total work is involved.
Oh indeed! Embedded “invisible” energy. The reason it’s invisible to us being thanks to a fundamental false premise of Adam Smith’s, his Wealth of Nations of course being the (mistaken) foundation of all mainstream modern economics. That is, his assertion that the root of the modern economy is labor. It is not, it is energy. If you’ve ever wondered why economists seem so out to lunch so much of the time, this is why - Smith. Another example of what you point out here, when agriculture was powered by horses with grass/oats as the energy source, we got a vastly smaller crop at 1 unit of energy in for 2 units return. Today, with mechanised agriculture? We get vastly larger returns at 10 or in cases many more units of energy in for 1 unit out. We portray this as being more rather than vastly less efficient (the latter of course being the reality) once again on account of being energy blind thanks to the false teachings of Smith.
Atavist- I've been thinking a lot recently about how much contemporary Machine societies rely on some form of slavery though a bit different than you are saying it here. I mean literally, like slave labor that mines lithium and picks tomatoes. We've just outsources actual slavery to different countries rather than in our own fields. But I also think of forms of pseudo-slavery and labor exploitation in our own country. I think of some arguments against mass deportations. One is that we shouldn't do this because the entire construction and agricultural system will collapse. I am not arguing for or against mass deportations, but this seems like a weird implicit recognition that our system relies on vulnerable people with no legal status who will accept low wages. This is not chattel slavery but feels like something similar.
I grew up rurally in an area where wealthy farmers whose spreads were built in the 18th and 19th centuries by indentured Irish servants who in cases were housed in stables brought in in modern times batallions of blackfolk from abroad to work the fields, paying them subsidized minimum wages and housing them in rows of little white shacks. In ‘enlightened’ Canada no less. (A theme in a novel i am serializing on here.) I worked there myself one summer in my teens, the only white fella on the crew. On account of this and my love of history, i have come to the conclusion that for there to be an entitled class there must be an exploited one. The only way for things to work otherwise is for all of us to greatly curb our expectations. I don’t think the latter will happen. I think we will go on being what we’ve already seen through history. It’s the nature of the beast and i’m ambiguous over it. At any rate, agriculture is going to collapse anyway. It is as one pundit put it “a huge piglet on the petroleum sow” with petroleum not only being a finite, non-renewable resource but one for which the economics are right now souring. The cost of drilling an oil-well in America for instance has tripled since just before covid. Our civilization, agriculture included, is headed so deeply into the red it will no longer pencil-out.
The most impactful act of resistance against the capitalist machine would be for workers to simply stop working at their jobs, and start working at non-marketable use values instead. Ivan Illich is a guiding light for me.
I don't disagree though that requires us to reduce our consumption expectations since we live in a consumer market where we need cash. We'd need to figure out some way to aggressively avoid debt and produce as many of our goods as possible. Or are you suggesting something like quiet quitting? Still get the money but refuse to work.
Yeah, I think quiet quitting is a step in the right direction, almost like a general strike of labor across all sectors. I continue to work remote jobs to feed my family, but we're working on getting out of debt and devising a plan for a lifestyle that is more interdependent and productive.
The long term effects of the fertility crisis and geopolitical multipolarity basically guarantees that current levels of consumption cannot be sustained, and thus individual economies and the system as a whole will eventually have to falter. It's inevitable,I think, that we are going to have to accept living with less consumption and gaining resources through those within our family and community networks. How hard the crash is depends on many factors that are too complex to model, and the landing could be softer than expected, but I don't see how it's avoided.
Thanks for featuring this. The non-locality and invisibility of office work is a significant part of its alienating nature. And in many, the goal is to automate your own job as much as possible: remove skill or decision-making because that might lead to error, or to "undocumented processes." Doing nothing seems to be the very goal.
Thanks so much for this comment and being such an engaged reader. We are grateful.