The Masculine Urge to build something Real
A YouTube video made me rethink my life...no, seriously...wait, where are you going...
For a number of years now, I have been cultivating an interest in architecture and urbanism. Not sure when it started, but it's been a welcome respite from endless political debates or 2am musings about the world and my place in it.
About 6 months ago, I stumbled upon a YouTube video about a rock climber spending a year during COVID buying an abandoned house in Catalonia, Spain and painstakingly renovating it. I was hooked. The house is gorgeous, the landscape is gorgeous, and I was jealous.
But I wasn't just jealous because I felt that he had a nice house and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Techno-Babylo-, I mean, New York City.
I was jealous because he built it.
I think there is something primal-ly satisfying about creating something that can be passed down through the generations. To know you imagined something with your mind and then gave it form with your hands; that this thing you created has sufficient value that it can be passed down to your children, and then their children, and so on. To know something has a life that goes beyond just you. To take part in the grand landscape of human ancestry and tie yourself to the past and future.
Compared to the house-building rock climber, my work generates nothing of lasting value. I'm an excel monkey, staring at spreadsheets and proprietary databases for 12+ hours a day in an attempt to explain to rich people how to get richer.
Just incredibly meaningful work.
There is a scene in the movie “Margin Call” (think a more dramatic, better version of “The Big Short”) where Stanley Tucci’s character delivers a monologue to Paul Bettany about a bridge he built and the immense material impact it had on the lives of the people who used it:
Of course, the subtext in the scene and its context in the movie is that Tucci’s character feels that his time as an engineer—when he was poorly compensated compared with his job on Wall Street—was when he had more meaningful effects on the lives of people. There was an immediacy. He could see what he had done.
On the other hand, in our hyper-bureaucratic and obfuscated world, it isn’t particularly clear what we are doing. Do financial markets actually work toward “proper” capital allocation, or is it all just a game, divorced from its underlying purpose? (My guess is Tucci’s character would argue the latter.)
For 40 hours a week or more, we are taken away from our families, friends, and community in order to do work that does not seem to contribute much at all. All around us there seems to be a massive proliferation of "Bullshit Jobs." Actual production/value created seems to take a back seat to busywork, bureaucracy, and rent-seeking.
And this isn't just a workplace phenomenon. As early as high school, busywork and useless assignments seemed to take up so much time, at the expense of actual learning. Bullshit Work is built into the system from an early point. When we evaluate the activities that take up so much of our waking hours, we need to be able to substantively answer the question "what are we contributing towards?" Today, we seem to just shrug and accept the grandiose Ponzi scheme that is the American economy.
Meaningful Work for a Meaningful Life
Part of a fulfilling life, of proper human flourishing, is making a meaningful impact/contribution to the world. This has been robbed from most of us, as we drown under layers of debt, sterile hedonism, and alienation.
Considering this, I must stress that GDP is a worthless measurement, as likely (if not more likely) to mislead us as it is to bring us greater understanding of the world and better predictions of the future.
It's time to focus on building an economy focused around human flourishing and stop making the patently absurd assumptions that either a) the market will allocate resources towards human flourishing, or b) that participating in the market is a more important element of human flourishing than being able to make a meaningful contribution to the world and being connected to your ancestors and descendants and your community.
This begins by looking at real, concrete measures of HUMAN conditions: "How many hours of work at minimum or median wages does it take to afford median rent in this town?", "Are people getting the medical attention they need?", "How healthy is the populace?", "Are people satisfied with their lives?", etc.
Next, we need to use these real, concrete measures to make clear distinctions between real productivity (creating value, etc.) and rent-seeking & busywork. If work improves concrete human conditions, one can reasonably consider this to be productive. If it simply extracts value from the commons, then it clearly is just rent-seeking. There's a whole lot of gray area in here, but I think that we can identify some rather massive financial parasites in the system.
And so we need to ask, do our economic activities actually improve our ability to live full lives? What does "human flourishing" mean, and how do we achieve it? The home that Nate Murphy built is one that he could pass down to his children. Each day he can wake up and look around at the product of his own hands. Even if not everyone is cut out to build their own home, I believe there is a longing for more meaningful work than what we have today. Re-orienting ourselves around human flourishing instead of vulgar productivism, around measures of human conditions instead of GDP, will require us to consider how we incentivize production in our economy and how we ensure that we build the healthiest society possible.
Even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction— purpose and dignity—that afflicts us all.
Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. . . .
It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.
And so, if we want to address the poverty of purpose and dignity that Robert Kennedy so eloquently described, we need to focus on building a society that truly allows for people to build lives worth living.
In the coming weeks, I will be devoting a number of posts towards tackling the issue of real productivity vs rent-seeking in the abstract, and applying this distinction to a number of areas (notably, housing, healthcare, and education). I hope to engage in fruitful discussions with readers, so please leave comments with your thoughts.
Join the email list to not miss any of my posts, and consider a paid subscription if you would like to support my work.
(Thumbnail image source: The Spruce Crafts)
Same boat. I hang on to my overpaid / under-fulfilling job on account of the relatively comfortable life & flexibility it provides, as well as a suspicion going anywhere else would be more or less the same, and increase my workload as the "new guy who has to prove themselves." I consider work to be a tolerable means to an end, which I have come to regard as a product of having fallen deep into the comfort trap.
That said, last year I moved to Alaska to help build a cabin on some land I purchased with my sister brother-in-law (he is a carpenter and knows how to do this stuff). I am basically unskilled labor, but learning a lot.
Obviously it is extremely hard work. Our building season is short, and we have try to cram a lot in where we can find time. I am sore, it is admittedly NOT what I usually want to spend my weekend doing, but getting closer to family, learning a craft, camping on that land and waking up on property that is MINE, and seeing the product of labor is a truly glorious feeling that provides a species of satisfaction that my job - nor any other job I've ever had - has ever come close to offering. And this is an endeavor of pure sacrifice; "all" I get in return is that feeling (and, eventually, a badass cabin).
Ultimately though, I believe that rather than building individual structures, the ultimate posterity we are capable of & arguably should be creating is the cultivation of communities that understand & emphasize their connection to the world and the history the next generations are born into. A recognition that the "glue" that brought all this stuff into existence in the first place was people giving a sh*t about it, and trusting and caring about each other enough to cooperate and build it. That, as young people, they are not just "inheriting" a pre-made world that was always here and which can simply be taken for granted, but that they are custodians of these values and need to recognize the social value of keeping those connections active. Moving out of the Denver metro area, which, over the last decade+ looks increasingly like somebody just used the photoshop cloning tool to stamp a bunch of giant, cheaply-made, drab & lifeless townhomes virtually on top of each other, virtually wringing every ounce of character out in the process, I find these things on my mind a lot, but unsure of what to do beyond try to set the best example I can in a place I care about, and with people I care about.
Long comment aside, all this is to say that a lot of what you're doing here resonates, and with regard to this post in particular, I say if you get the opportunity to do something like that - it is very hard work, but rewarding in proportion.
If you want to build something real, join civic tech. I build stuff everyday that has real material impact on people. And it requires the same skills you already have.
It just means taking a pay cut and having to deal with a lot of bullshit politics. But it's worth it.