Work with your hands
In a recent Times Magazine article Matthew Crawford makes the argument that we have become, as a nation, completely lost on the subject of work. We get in line early on in our educations for the conveyor belt taking us through high school, college, and ultimately into careers as “knowledge workers,” where we sit at desks for 8 hours a day, dealing with the abstract, number crunching, or just killing time, and leaving the office with no sense of accomplishment for “work” done. This sucks, and I see the process unfolding before me in academia as well. You work so hard to garner greater academic credentials, honing your skills in the lab, but then most phd scientists spend most of their time sitting at a desk chasing money. There’s something fundamentally wrong with a system that trains so many people to spend most of their time doing unsatisfying things. The thing with knowledge workers is that they are so easily outsourced/replaced. Crawford points out that you can’t “hammer a nail through a phone line.”
