Today I have something to say.
From everyday activities to the heights of craftsmanship and technology, working and creating with our hands defines our humanity as much as mind and language do.
Our ancestors came out of the trees and stood upright, freeing their arms and hands to be used for more than locomotion — toolmaking became our ticket to survival and thriving as a species, language and consciousness perhaps a consequence as much as a cause of that newfound capacity. Hands are not just the manipulators of tools, but full partners with the mind and the eyes in the way we learn, understand, and communicate with each other.
The prejudice against the capabilities of the hand in favor of the mind has a long history. All developed societies distinguish blue collar from white collar professions. While such specialization and hierarchy have given us many advantages and accomplishments, it has also left our professions more at odds with our nature. Judging hand work to be menial, simple and easy does all of us a huge disservice as it fractures our basic humanity into intellectual managers and manual laborers. We give up half our humanity when we are allowed to think but not make, or make without thinking.
Consider the rates of depression, anxiety and general dissatisfaction with life in our modern world. Consider the size of the self-help book section of your local bookstore. Are you perfectly happy with your life, work and role in society? If you are, you’re a statistical rarity. Or, like the majority do you live with constant stress, uncertain of your place in a company and your role, perhaps unhappy in the knowledge that you could do your job better, but can’t for various reasons? It’s not so much the question of whether you have stress, but whether you can find truly satisfying and enduring ways to relieve it.
Hobbyist (and many professional) gardeners, cooks, woodworkers, mechanics, knitters, and musicians know the profound satisfaction of creating beautiful, useful and unique things--not just in the accomplishment but mainly the process itself. Many find their work gives them a different perspective on life, unavailable otherwise. Their work is often deeply connected to their identity, even the defining term. To create involves the expression of individuality within a community—we make objects that are unique and yet designed to be integrated within another person’s life. It also involves knowledge through problem-solving—the “handy” person we love to have around the house seems to have a magic relationship with objects: able to fix them, coax them into cooperation, and make them contribute rather than detract from our lives.
To create also involves an understanding of the importance of beauty and usefulness, esoteric concepts that we nevertheless consider in everything we do. Usefulness is the primary quality of an object toward survival, or simply living easily, and the fundamental quality of any tool (and what object is not a tool of some kind?). The beauty of an object is a more elusive idea, found in its pleasurable presence and easy use. Beauty speaks to an object’s seamless social integration. While these qualities are difficult to name, we all know when something “feels” right, looks right, or is “the best”: the graceful teapot that’s a pleasure to use, the perfectly balanced kitchen knife, the shawl that’s both warm and beautiful. Living with well-designed things is a pleasure; however, creating them leads to knowledge and understanding that can’t be obtained otherwise.
The satisfactions involved in making something go well beyond simple pride in accomplishment. The use of our hands creates a feedback loop of learning, delight and understanding. That is, the joy of working with your hands doesn't just improve your ability to create what you make, it also leads to finding (or is) a sense of integrated yet individual purpose that I call thriving, an enduring kind of happiness in the knowledge that you create unique useful objects that give people pleasure.
Few corporate positions offer this kind of feedback loop, or satisfaction. Few manual labor jobs offer either.
Enduring happiness is a byproduct of thriving, which comes from successful engagement with our environment and fellow humans. To thrive in life, we need to integrate both hand and mind work in our everyday lives. In short, what makes us human is inseparable from our hands — thriving in life is simply a matter of being fully human, accepting it, and getting on with it. Define happiness as a mental and hopefully static state — just how we feel at any given moment with no relation to what we learn, do and make — and we will forever wander the self-help book aisle looking for a new fix.
This is the seed idea for a book on acknowledging our basic humanity, both physical and mental, as a platform for living well. The book will be about adversity, problem-solving, individuality and creativity as great sources of happiness. It’s about the satisfactions of community, common enterprise and friendship. It will be about life as learning, growing and engaging — not towards some static state of perfection, but as an iterative process. It will be about dissociated modernity and what we can, as the clever little apes that we are, do about it to have our cake and eat it too. This book is from what I’ve learned and how I got there. It’s from what good friends and others have learned and how they got there — by working with our minds and our hands. I hope it opens doors to find ways to thrive in life.
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