ReadThis #4: Making Things for the Soul
One of the things that has been really amazing to see about this lockdown is how many people have taken up new creative hobbies: baking bread from scratch, gardening, finally getting around to that list of DIY projects. Maybe it's the extra time (if you have it), maybe it's a way to cope with the stress. Regardless, it seems like making and fixing are on the rise.
Making Things for the Soul
My book recommendations this week are about why making new things and fixing old things feels so satisfying.
Think about this: at some point in our history, we couldn't find shelter, so we made it; we couldn't find food, so we grew it; and we couldn't find water, so we built a way to move it.
The common theme in these books is the idea that making new things and fixing old things feels good. But, deeper than that, it may be a part of who we are.
Beyond a way to kill time, the taste carbs, and the satisfying smell of fresh bread, the loafs of sourdough you see on Instagram may get at something fundamental about what it means to be human.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work
This book is in my Lindy library (the small collection of books I keep returning to).
I read the British printing, which I think has a more fitting title: The Case for Working with Your Hands or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good. It's a mouthful, but it better describes what this book is about and why you might want to read it.
The author (a PhD in Philosophy) leaves a high-paying office job in consulting to run a motorcycle repair shop. He discovers that manual labor is more intellectually engaging than any office job ever was, which kicks off a philosophical exploration of manual work and a sociological reflection of why manual work is so poorly regarded.
To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design
To Engineer is Human provides a set of engineering principles that can be applied to any form of engineering, which to the author, simply means making something. Many of these engineering principles have been adopted by other disciplines and so may be familiar to you: margin of safety, trade-offs and opportunity costs, inversion, redundancy. The author argues that these principles aren't just engineering principles but human principles.
Where Shop Class as Soulcraft is reflective, this book is practical. The author also makes the argument that engineering is part of what it means to be human, but in his exploration, provides a collection of engineering principles or mental models that can be applied (and indeed have been) to the construction of anything: a building or a bridge, a startup, a book, a loaf of bread.
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
Once again, the thesis of this book is that building things (i.e. engineering) is a fundamental part of what it means to be human. It pairs perfectly with Shop Class as Soulcraft because both raise the same two points:
Building things and working with our hands is fundamental to being human
We don't build things or work with our hands anymore.
But where Shop Class as Soulcraft is philosophical and To Engineer is Human is practical, The Existential Pleasures of Engineering is historical. The author provides a history of what he calls the Golden Age of Engineering and provides a historical thesis on why we stopped building things.
My favorite part of The Existential Pleasures of Engineering is that it points out this astounding historical fact about humanity:
In 1900, our most reliable form of transportation was a carriage pulled by horses and we were just starting to figure out how to make cars powered by gasoline engines instead of steam; by 1969, less than one lifetime later, we put a man on the moon.
Just imagine being a kid and who enjoyed the rare thrill of seeing someone ride a bicycle to work instead of a horse and then, later in your life, sitting in front of a TV with your children and grand-children as Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon.
Maybe pulling a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven is a micro-dose of whatever that experience must have felt like. Whatever that feeling is, maybe chasing it is what makes us human.
Happy reading,
Zakk
p.s. Think you know someone who might appreciate these book recommendations? Please forward it to them.