Very well written. I think the personal stories really drive the points home too.
As an engineer turned coffee shop owner, it was a shock to me when I went from not knowing my customers to seeing them everyday. Suddenly I knew the consequences of a job poorly done. Similarly, when I do my job well, I can see the joy that it brings to my customers. And not just in terms of good reviews (though that helps!), but I can actually see the smiles on their faces. In the end, I think we all want our jobs to be personal. Many people go home from work everyday feeling like they are just another cog in the machine, like their work doesn't make a difference. And while their work does make a difference, it's hard to see the difference when you will never see the people you are serving. A job well done doesn't translate to a visible smile. You don't know the person who will benefit (or suffer) because of your work, and you, in turn, leave work everyday feeling like your work doesn't matter.
I love this line: "you go home and place your head on your pillow blissfully unaware that your failed part has halted a real ambulance, delivery truck, or tow truck and that real people with real names and families have been failed by that part." This really hits home how crappy work has real consequences.
Richard Sennett discuss this idea in his book The Corrosion of Character in his idea of abstraction. That work is becoming increasingly abstract and seperated from real human beings and real human problems. May be part of burnout culture
Love that. "It's hard to see the difference when you will never see the people you are serving. A job well done doesn't translate to a visible smile."
I think this goes both ways too. We should at least at times give some thought and consideration to how this item ended up in our hands and all the people it took to get it there. Nothing, really, is insignificant.
Thank you for talking about the journey of repair. I live in the Netherlands and volunteers in different cities run the repair café as a way to fight throwaway culture and objects. I refuse to discard my luggage because they still look new and function like new. Samsonite and repair shops in the Philippines stopped repairing them. My last resort was the local repair cafe. I was amazed how much I learned about handles and how they retract. Most of all, I am amazed by the patience and curiosity of the volunteers who never said no when they saw the object for the first time, and simply said, "let me see..." I'll open it up so I can study it. In the end, both him and I learned how luggages were constructed and they are repairable. We fixed the retracting mechanism, Gave it a new screw, taped it up and finally had it working. I was amazed that with patience, anything can be repaired.
Thank you so much for that personal testament of repair. I have recently read about some of these repair cafes. I really want to look into them more. Amazing idea on so many front, and particularly I imagine a great place of cross-generational interactions too.
I hope to write a reflection on that and my personal relationship to old things in particular. I feel the agony of letting go over stuff that are old but I feel could be repairable, including shoes. There are hardly professionals around here but I've seen more of them in France and Spain and I do bring items to have it repaired over there at reasonable cost too. I found a watchmaker at a local market in Madrid. It was amazing. He even repairs alarm clocks?!
So grateful I stumbled across this post… it resonated deeply. A friend and I were just discussing how materialism is often thought of in negative terms, and that the common response is to distance oneself from that materialism. We arrived at a different conclusion, that really we need to embrace a sort of ‘deep materialism’, one that acknowledges the miracle of things, and yes, this includes an ethic that seeks to repair and reuse and not simply throw away. I loved your concept of a ‘spirit of repair’… that is very good. Thanks for writing this.
Yes that seems quite right. Walker Percy argued that many of our contemporary problems is the crashing back and forth between what he called this the angelic and the beastial. The point is not to choose between the two but to integrate them. That's what persons are.
Yes. I hope to write a little more on this soon. I think we've lost a certain sacramental view of our things. Especially with old, handmade goods, they were tools but also represented relationships resonating down through time. There does seem to me to be a metaphysical quality about this that we lack today, which is hard to put words to, but that we feel everywhere--an ungroundedness of Being. Perhaps if our goods have gotten cheap and replaceable, they are only physical manifestations of our own degraded qualities in the modern world. Making and repairing things has huge existential benefits, among all others mentioned.
Workers, highly skilled or learning new skills, can develop the “muscle memory” that helps do a task right. I still remember (50 years later) the exact motions needed to install and adjust the front casters on Everest & Jennings wheelchairs that I helped put together on a relentlessly-moving assembly line. 🛠️ (And I can still feel the burn of the boss’ glare as I used the ten seconds I’d saved to turn around to read the next sentence in my electronics textbook.) Good times! 😄
The economics which undergird all of this are a poor cardboard replacement for the iron bonds of a community and its craftsmen. One wonders about the suicide pact we are on.
One of the things I enjoyed about living in Chicago, is that you could get just about anything repaired. Everything from shoes, vacuum cleaners, plaster, and electronics. I still remember the smell, walking into the vacuum repair shop. I could smell the cigarettes from 30 years ago and the dust from hundreds of different homes. It was such a good feeling to know that I would not have to add an almost perfectly fine vacuum cleaner to the landfill. Not only that, but I was also contributing toward a man's livelihood. There are innumerable ways I felt better about getting this machine fixed vs. throwing it away. I yearn for the opportunity to purchase more products that are designed to be repaired, and to hire the people needed to make those repairs, and to forge new relationships with all these people. I think one of the things that made all these repairmen possible in Chicago is the density of the city. There were plenty of customers to keep these very specific repairmen in business. I wonder if the lack in density in many parts of the country make these kinds of professions impossible. I suppose a vacuum repair person could also learn to repair other items to make it work. Do we have any idea what kind of a population size it would take to support specific repairmen? For example, I have a friend who is in the dry-cleaning business, and he said you basically need a dry cleaner for every 5000 people. It makes it pretty simple to figure out where the needs are when you have specific numbers like that. Of course, even in a place like Chicago, I did hear that there were not enough plaster experts to keep up with demand. The skill has not been passed down to the next generation. Most of the people left are very old and there are very few to take their place.
Where does care for material things stop and nostalgia begin? As a test case, what do y'all think of computer operating system maintenance (maybe the wrong term)? I don't know anything about software engineering / coding, but I kinda pride myself on my ability to use and troubleshoot the tools of the user interfaces that computers and the web provide. Just yesterday our printer stopped working and I was able to figure out that it needed a firmware update and wifi router reset. I keep my files well organized and backed up using Google Drive and Mac's Time Machine. I keep my various email inboxes thinned out and regularly unsubscribe to junk. I have a junk email address and a junk phone number (through Google Voice) that I use to interact with the commercial internet. Etc., etc. My college students, by contrast, know very little about their operating systems / UX and I encourage them to learn how to keep cloud backups and organize their files. Would this be an example of stewardship of things, of responsible repair? Granting that the technological shift to hiding the physical machine make this era substantively different, is this contrast different in kind and degree to the shift from, for example, horse-powered transportation to the combustion engine? What would Rousch say?
Ryan- Will take a first stab at this and then let Brandon respond as well. I have 3 thoughts.
1. The first thing I will say is that I don't have a negative association with nostalgia. I think it has very important social functions. Clay Routledge wrote this interesting little book about the importance of nostalgia. I actually think nostalgia is future oriented in that it helps is maintain and recover what was important from the past so that we can imagine a better future. So, even if this was nostalgia, I was say "good."
2. I do think that there can be a helpful repair orientation to computing. I think what you do is a sort of repair and maintenance. So, to the extent that we must have computers and I reluctantly agree that we do (as I type this on my computer), it is best for us as persons to exercise some fleeting agency over the Machine. But, as our devices get more complicated, I think by necessity we lose agency. We lose control over them. This is necessarily true. I don't think there is any way around it. This is why I don't have a gas mower. I like the fact that my reel mower has about 6 parts and I conceptually understand how they work and I can plausibly fix it if need be. I think this is a good to maintain as much agency as possible to the extent possible.
3. I do think that something is different in the deeply ephemeral, abstract nature of this industrial revolution. It seems to me deeply abstract. It's really hard to see and make sense of the ways in which our ways of life are being overtaken because as you say there is a certain remove from the observable world. I recently finished "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant. One nice thing about being a Luddite is that you atleast knew what and who was threatening your self-sufficiency and agency. It was those damn looms and those damn factory owners. You knew what so smash and who to threaten. The forces threatening writers exist in a server somewhere in the clouds and the strings are being pulled by someone you will never see on the road. This feels like a real difference.
This is all so true. This is a big part of the central theme in the novel COURIERS -OFF GRID by JAY SWANSON. This novel came out in 2018 and in less than two years it went from being 'futuristic' to 'how we live now'. A big part of the theme of the book is tech that no one knows how to repair or make new. Linking to the question "who runs Society" - an elite who feel entitled by right,or The People who have worked out they are being used. I try to buy as little as possible and make as much as I can for my home. It's surprising what you can make in the way of storage from plastic garden mesh,stiff fabric and strong sewing thread.
Very well written. I think the personal stories really drive the points home too.
As an engineer turned coffee shop owner, it was a shock to me when I went from not knowing my customers to seeing them everyday. Suddenly I knew the consequences of a job poorly done. Similarly, when I do my job well, I can see the joy that it brings to my customers. And not just in terms of good reviews (though that helps!), but I can actually see the smiles on their faces. In the end, I think we all want our jobs to be personal. Many people go home from work everyday feeling like they are just another cog in the machine, like their work doesn't make a difference. And while their work does make a difference, it's hard to see the difference when you will never see the people you are serving. A job well done doesn't translate to a visible smile. You don't know the person who will benefit (or suffer) because of your work, and you, in turn, leave work everyday feeling like your work doesn't matter.
I love this line: "you go home and place your head on your pillow blissfully unaware that your failed part has halted a real ambulance, delivery truck, or tow truck and that real people with real names and families have been failed by that part." This really hits home how crappy work has real consequences.
Richard Sennett discuss this idea in his book The Corrosion of Character in his idea of abstraction. That work is becoming increasingly abstract and seperated from real human beings and real human problems. May be part of burnout culture
Love that. "It's hard to see the difference when you will never see the people you are serving. A job well done doesn't translate to a visible smile."
I think this goes both ways too. We should at least at times give some thought and consideration to how this item ended up in our hands and all the people it took to get it there. Nothing, really, is insignificant.
Thanks for reading!
Thank you for talking about the journey of repair. I live in the Netherlands and volunteers in different cities run the repair café as a way to fight throwaway culture and objects. I refuse to discard my luggage because they still look new and function like new. Samsonite and repair shops in the Philippines stopped repairing them. My last resort was the local repair cafe. I was amazed how much I learned about handles and how they retract. Most of all, I am amazed by the patience and curiosity of the volunteers who never said no when they saw the object for the first time, and simply said, "let me see..." I'll open it up so I can study it. In the end, both him and I learned how luggages were constructed and they are repairable. We fixed the retracting mechanism, Gave it a new screw, taped it up and finally had it working. I was amazed that with patience, anything can be repaired.
Thank you so much for that personal testament of repair. I have recently read about some of these repair cafes. I really want to look into them more. Amazing idea on so many front, and particularly I imagine a great place of cross-generational interactions too.
I hope to write a reflection on that and my personal relationship to old things in particular. I feel the agony of letting go over stuff that are old but I feel could be repairable, including shoes. There are hardly professionals around here but I've seen more of them in France and Spain and I do bring items to have it repaired over there at reasonable cost too. I found a watchmaker at a local market in Madrid. It was amazing. He even repairs alarm clocks?!
Brilliant. 👍
So grateful I stumbled across this post… it resonated deeply. A friend and I were just discussing how materialism is often thought of in negative terms, and that the common response is to distance oneself from that materialism. We arrived at a different conclusion, that really we need to embrace a sort of ‘deep materialism’, one that acknowledges the miracle of things, and yes, this includes an ethic that seeks to repair and reuse and not simply throw away. I loved your concept of a ‘spirit of repair’… that is very good. Thanks for writing this.
Yes that seems quite right. Walker Percy argued that many of our contemporary problems is the crashing back and forth between what he called this the angelic and the beastial. The point is not to choose between the two but to integrate them. That's what persons are.
Yes. I hope to write a little more on this soon. I think we've lost a certain sacramental view of our things. Especially with old, handmade goods, they were tools but also represented relationships resonating down through time. There does seem to me to be a metaphysical quality about this that we lack today, which is hard to put words to, but that we feel everywhere--an ungroundedness of Being. Perhaps if our goods have gotten cheap and replaceable, they are only physical manifestations of our own degraded qualities in the modern world. Making and repairing things has huge existential benefits, among all others mentioned.
Thanks for reading! Glad you found us too!
Workers, highly skilled or learning new skills, can develop the “muscle memory” that helps do a task right. I still remember (50 years later) the exact motions needed to install and adjust the front casters on Everest & Jennings wheelchairs that I helped put together on a relentlessly-moving assembly line. 🛠️ (And I can still feel the burn of the boss’ glare as I used the ten seconds I’d saved to turn around to read the next sentence in my electronics textbook.) Good times! 😄
Hopefully bosses will begin glaring at their employees as they turn around to read the next sentence of the Savage Collective!
“This is such a great post! Clear, concise, and informative. (and genuine congrats to you!)”
Well done, Brandon.
The economics which undergird all of this are a poor cardboard replacement for the iron bonds of a community and its craftsmen. One wonders about the suicide pact we are on.
One of the things I enjoyed about living in Chicago, is that you could get just about anything repaired. Everything from shoes, vacuum cleaners, plaster, and electronics. I still remember the smell, walking into the vacuum repair shop. I could smell the cigarettes from 30 years ago and the dust from hundreds of different homes. It was such a good feeling to know that I would not have to add an almost perfectly fine vacuum cleaner to the landfill. Not only that, but I was also contributing toward a man's livelihood. There are innumerable ways I felt better about getting this machine fixed vs. throwing it away. I yearn for the opportunity to purchase more products that are designed to be repaired, and to hire the people needed to make those repairs, and to forge new relationships with all these people. I think one of the things that made all these repairmen possible in Chicago is the density of the city. There were plenty of customers to keep these very specific repairmen in business. I wonder if the lack in density in many parts of the country make these kinds of professions impossible. I suppose a vacuum repair person could also learn to repair other items to make it work. Do we have any idea what kind of a population size it would take to support specific repairmen? For example, I have a friend who is in the dry-cleaning business, and he said you basically need a dry cleaner for every 5000 people. It makes it pretty simple to figure out where the needs are when you have specific numbers like that. Of course, even in a place like Chicago, I did hear that there were not enough plaster experts to keep up with demand. The skill has not been passed down to the next generation. Most of the people left are very old and there are very few to take their place.
Where does care for material things stop and nostalgia begin? As a test case, what do y'all think of computer operating system maintenance (maybe the wrong term)? I don't know anything about software engineering / coding, but I kinda pride myself on my ability to use and troubleshoot the tools of the user interfaces that computers and the web provide. Just yesterday our printer stopped working and I was able to figure out that it needed a firmware update and wifi router reset. I keep my files well organized and backed up using Google Drive and Mac's Time Machine. I keep my various email inboxes thinned out and regularly unsubscribe to junk. I have a junk email address and a junk phone number (through Google Voice) that I use to interact with the commercial internet. Etc., etc. My college students, by contrast, know very little about their operating systems / UX and I encourage them to learn how to keep cloud backups and organize their files. Would this be an example of stewardship of things, of responsible repair? Granting that the technological shift to hiding the physical machine make this era substantively different, is this contrast different in kind and degree to the shift from, for example, horse-powered transportation to the combustion engine? What would Rousch say?
Ryan- Will take a first stab at this and then let Brandon respond as well. I have 3 thoughts.
1. The first thing I will say is that I don't have a negative association with nostalgia. I think it has very important social functions. Clay Routledge wrote this interesting little book about the importance of nostalgia. I actually think nostalgia is future oriented in that it helps is maintain and recover what was important from the past so that we can imagine a better future. So, even if this was nostalgia, I was say "good."
2. I do think that there can be a helpful repair orientation to computing. I think what you do is a sort of repair and maintenance. So, to the extent that we must have computers and I reluctantly agree that we do (as I type this on my computer), it is best for us as persons to exercise some fleeting agency over the Machine. But, as our devices get more complicated, I think by necessity we lose agency. We lose control over them. This is necessarily true. I don't think there is any way around it. This is why I don't have a gas mower. I like the fact that my reel mower has about 6 parts and I conceptually understand how they work and I can plausibly fix it if need be. I think this is a good to maintain as much agency as possible to the extent possible.
3. I do think that something is different in the deeply ephemeral, abstract nature of this industrial revolution. It seems to me deeply abstract. It's really hard to see and make sense of the ways in which our ways of life are being overtaken because as you say there is a certain remove from the observable world. I recently finished "Blood in the Machine" by Brian Merchant. One nice thing about being a Luddite is that you atleast knew what and who was threatening your self-sufficiency and agency. It was those damn looms and those damn factory owners. You knew what so smash and who to threaten. The forces threatening writers exist in a server somewhere in the clouds and the strings are being pulled by someone you will never see on the road. This feels like a real difference.
This is all so true. This is a big part of the central theme in the novel COURIERS -OFF GRID by JAY SWANSON. This novel came out in 2018 and in less than two years it went from being 'futuristic' to 'how we live now'. A big part of the theme of the book is tech that no one knows how to repair or make new. Linking to the question "who runs Society" - an elite who feel entitled by right,or The People who have worked out they are being used. I try to buy as little as possible and make as much as I can for my home. It's surprising what you can make in the way of storage from plastic garden mesh,stiff fabric and strong sewing thread.