Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work
Ratings20
Average rating3.2
15
Ratings20
Average rating3.2
In this wise and often funny book, a philosopher/mechanic systematically destroys the pretensions of the high-prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one’s handsShop Class as Soulcraft brings alive an experience that was once quite ordinary, but now seems to be receding over the cultural horizon—the experience of making and fixing things. Working with your hands, as Mathew B. Crawford describes it, connects us to the world around us. Those of us who sit in an office often have intuitions of something gone amiss, a sense of unreality accompanied by feelings of impotence. What, after all, do we do all day? In this wholly original debut, Crawford offers a brief for self-reliance and a sustained reflection on this problem: how to live concretely in an ever more abstract world. Shop Class as Soulcraft seeks to restore the honor of the manual trades as a life worth choosing for anyone who felt hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents. On both economic and psychological grounds, Crawford questions the educational imperative of turning everyone into a “knowledge worker.” This imperative, he explains, is based on a misguided separation of thinking from doing, the work of the hand from that of the mind. Crawford shows in precise detail how such a partition, which began a century ago with the assembly line, degrades work for those on both sides of the divide.But he offers good news as well: The manual trades are very different from factory work. They require a lot of thinking and may even give rise to moments of genuine pleasure. Based on his own experience as an electrician and mechanic, Crawford makes a case for the intrinsic satisfactions and cognitive challenges— the soulcraft—of manual work. The work of builders and mechanics cannot be outsourced. They tie us to the local communities in which we live and instill the pride that comes from doing work that is genuinely useful.Speaking squarely to a culture that continues to grapple for a way to reconcile work and life and to find fulfilling work of all stripes, Shop Class as Soulcraft offers inspired social criticism and deep personal exploration. It will change your understanding of the value of work and the work of bringing value and meaning to your life, whatever you do now or hope to do one day.
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while i appreciate the anecdotes that promote self-reliance and the importance of “blue collar jobs”, the rest of a book was a snooze-fest of elaborations on points that felt like they were made over and over again. pair that with some disagreeable takes on social politics and you end up with a book that seems more interested in confirming the biases of it's expected reader than breaking itself down to its most important parts. then again, if it were to do that, this would've just been a pretty decent article or essay.
I thought it was pretty good. Different from the books I normally read and I did get bogged down a couple of times, but overall I thought it was an interesting, valuable read.
I had huge expectations for this book. After all, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is my all-time favorite read.
Shop Class was a huge disappointment, probably due to my huge expectations. It reads with a mix of the stilted verbosity of academia and the incomprehensible (to me) vocabulary of mechanics. I kept reading, hoping to see why others liked it, but it did not happen for me.
Love to know what others liked about this book. It is the rare read that I trudged through, flipping ahead on almost every page, hoping to reach the end.
I agree with the author's thesis that a connection into more hands-on work is missing in the modern economy, and that this lack is a cause of a lot of unhappiness or disinterest with work. We see an increasing trend in a pushback against unsatisfying job in books like “Bullshit Jobs” and communities like r/antiwork. The increasing complexity of the technology-based economy leads more and more people to be disconnected from the consequences of their work. If you can't feel like what you do matters it's easy to be dissatisfied. Manual work is sort of an ultimate cure–you can directly feel what it is you did.
The author dislikes that these jobs are considered ‘low status' even though they can often be more fulfilling (and sometimes, like certain trades, very lucrative as well). Yet to some degree the emphasis on specifically manual work is overstated and seems based on the author's specific experience in some very low-value intellectual jobs. In particular, many non-manual jobs can also provide this type of fulfillment, for instance many service jobs involve directly helping people and seeing them improved. But I do think the general idea is right, that without having the feeling that what you do matters a job is going to leave you empty inside. This can be ok, and you can make up for it with other aspects of your life (hobbies, relationships), but for those of us that want to feel satisfied with our 40+ hours/week, it's something to consider when choosing what you work on.
However, I can't give it too many stars because of some things I found annoying and distracting:
1. The author is very focus on his own experience with work, in particular mainly that of repairing motorcycles (a large % of the book discusses this). I kind of think motorcycles are generally very negative for the world, emitting far more pollution and being much less safe. Thus I find it hypocritical the author is so condescending towards certain jobs, while himself participating in an industry with huge negative externalities.
2. Related to #1, the focus on very specific hands-on work diminishes the impact of other types of work, and this is sometimes tinged with sexism. While the author does admit that because his experience is primarily with male coworkers that the book focuses on that, it seems he regards traditionally female ‘work' like cooking or child care to be unimportant (at least it's not mentioned at all) and longs for the old workplace norms where offensive jokes and sexual harassment was par for the course. Additionally, much manual work is objectively very bad, and the author kind of ignores this fact. There's a reason no one wants to work in a coal mine or a sweat shop, after all.[1]
3. Some of the digressions are a bit weird. For example, the author seems to dislike stereos, because in an earlier age more people had to learn to play musical instruments (and created a more communal experience), whereas now everyone just has perfectly-recorded music available instantly. I can see a bit of argument to this, but realistically while this idyllic scenario probably happened occasionally, it was quite rare. More realistic is that in the past people simply didn't listen to music very often at all. This is pretty evident just by considering how sparse the musical landscape was before the wide availability of radio (and especially after recorded music became available). It's hard to take someone seriously that thinks that this hasn't been an unmitigated boon for human happiness and creativity.
[1] This reminds me a bit of Anders Ericsson's book Peak, in which he claims you can basically master anything with ‘deliberate practice', but all his examples are from very narrow and specific fields with well-established training regimens and easy objective evaluation. Any claim of the form “Always X” is almost certainly wrong (yes, I see the irony).
