Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work

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 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).

Similar but more modern follow up to “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. My problem with the book is that it seems to claim you can't derive the same sort of satisfaction of doing good work when you're doing knowledge work for an employer with a strong profit motive. In my experience I'm not sure this is true, vs doing a “traditional” craft job where you can easily see the impact on your neighbor of the work you're doing. That said, the book was well written and an enjoyable read. I loved the depiction of the lower-level manager who finds himself caught in the position where he to show his employees that he's really “fighting for them” emotionally while having to turn around and show his higher ups that he's really “getting their goals accomplished” in rational presentations.

Short review: This is an interesting look at the value of physical labor. Not as ditch digger, but the jobs that are manual but bring fulfillment in a particular way that “knowledge worker” jobs might not. Crawford has a PhD, was the head of a Washington Thinktank, but left it all to start his own motorcycle repair shop. He has also been a bunch of other things, from electrician to journal abstractor. The parts where he talked about his own relationship to work were the best. I appreciated the parts where he delved into the more philosophical aspects of our relationship to work and the employer, but I think that many people will check out of those portions. I think that Christians that have thought about a theology of work would probably benefit from his thoughts about work, but this is not a Christian reflection on work. Not a perfect book. I think there are several places where he over thinks or under-thinks his point, but he raises a lot of good questions and proposes some good answers as well. This would be an interesting book to read as a group.

My full review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/shop-class/