The Profound Pleasure of Physical Tasks
Craft makes us human.
For the past year, my father has been helping build me an office in the backyard. It’s a little 12’-by-8’ accessory building with a modern-style flat roof that has slowly taken shape over the weekends when he is able to make the four-hour trip from his home in Muskoka. The interior is finally finished, with beautiful prefinished birch plywood walls and a heated black slate roof, but now we have to tackle the exterior.
That’s where my labour comes in. I’ve been assigned the task of sanding and staining (two coats!) all of the siding for the office, which is only 700 linear feet, but it looks like a mountain of wood in my garage. For the past several days, I’ve spent several hours each morning on my feet, manipulating these boards and transforming them into the final products that will adorn the outer walls and protect me from the elements all winter long. I’m not even close to being done.
What I feared would be a long, tedious job has turned out to be deeply pleasurable. Maybe it’s because the novelty hasn’t worn off yet, but I think that I am simply enjoying the satisfaction that comes with doing a physical task. I work slowly, steadily, methodically, sometimes listening to podcasts, sometimes enjoying the silence. My husband poked his head in yesterday and said with surprise, “You’re actually enjoying this.” It was a statement, not a question.
My days are typically spent staring at a small laptop screen and stringing together words that get flung into the Internet void. Sure, it pays, but there’s nothing real to show for my efforts—apart from my book, Childhood Unplugged, which I was motivated to write precisely because I wanted something tangible to show, in case someone pulled the plug on my archive of 4,000+ online posts. It’s draining to work on nonphysical projects for years on end.
I am not the only writer to feel periodic frustration at the nebulousness of our work. In January 2022, I saw a series of tweets by an editor at Grist who quit his job to become an electrician. He wrote, “Over the last few years I’ve found myself feeling increasingly jealous of the people I interview—foresters, power plant workers, farmers—in short, people who interact with physical atoms rather than bits.”
When I googled him this morning, I found a piece he’d written about the pleasure of his new craft: “I could just actually see things getting done bit by bit, as opposed to working really hard putting words together and then sending them off into the void and wondering if it made any difference at all.”
I know exactly how he felt. I think that’s why I enjoy cooking so much and even look forward to “relaxing” in the kitchen at the end of the workday. It’s a form of physical labour that involves my hands and my body in ways that writing does not. And there is always a physical, visible product that results at the end of my efforts—a delicious meal on the table for my family to enjoy.
Related: Cooking Lessons From My Mennonite Grandma
It's the same for the gym. I am hyper-committed to attending CrossFit classes 4-5 times per week (and have done so for 11 years) simply because I long to move my body and throw heavy weights around after a day of sedentariness. It’s not about achieving a certain level of fitness; I just crave the stark contrast of physicality. If I had a different profession, I might not be as interested in working out.
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Gary Rogowski is a furniture maker from Oregon who wrote a book called Handmade that defends the value of craft in humans’ lives. “People have the need to put their hands on tools and to make things. We need this in order to feel whole.”
It’s not just the satisfaction of a tangible result that we’re seeking, but an actual need to use our hands. He wrote, “We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at screens.” Leaving a digital world to work in a physical one allows you to live “truer to your primal potential.” Craft makes us more human, to quote Cal Newport in Digital Minimalism, where I learned of Rogowski’s work.
“We live in a world that is working to eliminate touch as one of our senses, to minimize the use of our hands to do things except poke at screens.”
Newport also mentioned the philosopher-mechanic Matthew Crawford, whose work I’d heard of before but was intrigued to learn more about. Another writer-intellectual who left the thinktank world of D.C. to become a motorcycle mechanic, Crawford too is a proponent of using one’s hands to live better. When screens replace craft, “people lose the outlet for self-worth established through unambiguous demonstrations of skill.”
I can assure you that, once my siding is installed, I’ll be admiring it every single day as an unambiguous demonstration of my sanding and painting skills! They may be menial skills, doable by anyone, but the fact that I did it and contributed to the construction of my private space will feel profoundly satisfying.
We should not underestimate the value of physical labour on our emotional wellbeing. The same goes for kids, who need to use their hands and bodies in new and challenging ways to create things, not just sit passively and consume screen-based media and call it a childhood.
Newport goes deeper into this concept, explaining that it’s possible to create impressive things digitally, but it’s an inferior experience overall. Computer interfaces are designed to “eliminate both the rough edges and the possibilities inherent in directly confronting your physical surroundings”:
“Composing a song in a digital sequencer misses the pleasures that come from the nuanced struggle between fingers and steel strings that defines playing a guitar well, while fast twitching your way to victory in Call of Duty misses many dimensions—social, spatial, athletic—present in a competitive game of flag football.”
This week, whenever I feel computer overload, I shut my laptop and head to the garage to tackle a few more boards. I don’t know what I’ll do when the job is finished. I’ll miss it. Maybe I take up woodworking as a secondary career. My father would be delighted.
In Other News:
Apperance on national TV! On Monday night, I was reading a bedtime story to my son when I got a call from a producer at CBC The National, Canada’s flagship news broadcaster. They asked how soon I could be ready for a segment on social media and teens. Thirty minutes later, I was FaceTiming the show host and chatting about my favourite topic for a country-wide audience. You can check out the 4-minute interview here on YouTube (min 29:48).
More Book Talks: I had a great presentation at a library in Mildmay, ON, this week. As always, parents were eager to talk about their own experiences with kids wanting phones, using phones, and always, always pushing those boundaries!
In two weeks, I’ll be off to B.C. for a presentation in Whistler. There’s still room in the schedule for more talks in the Vancouver area on November 29-30, so if you’re there and interested, please reach out!
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