Many people have a negative attitude about manual labor. In the age of information, prestigious jobs do not require getting your hands dirty.
The push toward processing data and away from making things comes from “a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy,” Matthew B. Crawford wrote in The New York Times Magazine.
But the downturn has brought into sharp relief that the road away from material reality does not necessarily lead to a utopia. Many “knowledge workers” are looking anew at the prospect of working with their hands. Some are making political statements through their jobs, while others are preparing for the worst in a dismal economy.
The goal is to develop skills that cannot be outsourced. “You can’t hammer a nail over the Internet,” Alan Blinder, an economist at Princeton University in New Jersey, told Mr. Crawford.
You can’t raise chickens over the Internet, either, which is one reason farms are attracting young workers in the United States and Japan.
“I had nothing much to lose, and in times like these, I felt I needed to learn to make my own living,” Shinji Akimoto, 31, a former information technology worker, told The Times’s reporter Hiroko Tabachi.
Mr. Akimoto is part of the Japanese government’s Rural Labor Squad, which is training 2,400 jobless young people to work on farms.
The new agrarians often have political motivations. Alex Liebman, 19, an American biology student, is on his third farm internship. “I’m not sure that I can affect how messed up poverty is in Africa or change politics in Washington, but on the farm I can see the fruits of my labor,” he told The Times’s Kim Severson. “By waking up every day and working the field and putting my principles into action, I am making a conscious political decision.”
In Pakistan, a group of college students meets every Sunday to pick up trash in the streets, usually a job left to the poor and uneducated, according to a Times article by Sabrina Tavernise. The group, called Responsible Citizens, hopes to set an example for its discontented neighbors.
“Everybody keeps blaming the government, but no one actually does anything,” Shoaib Ahmed, 21, one of the organizers of the group, told Ms. Tavernise. “So we thought, why don’t we?”
Some employees in troubled industries like banking and media think about a backup career plan, or at least talk about it. “Plan B typically offers less money and prestige than Plan A, but promises a more hands-on, stress-free and fulfilling existence,” wrote Alex Williams in The Times. He then tried his hand at three of those jobs - dog masseuse, chocolate maker and organic farmer - and learned some lessons along the way.
Mr. Williams discovered that wrestling squirming dogs, botching a recipe for chili-flavored truffles and struggling to pull out warm, bloody chicken innards with his bare hands quickly lost their luster. Romanticizing the manual life is a lot easier than living it.
A growing number of people are also learning the pitfalls of doing work around the house on their own, according to a Times article by Susan Saulny. With the economy in a slump, more are seeking to save money by fixing things themselves.
Carol Taddei, a retired paralegal, tried to install a new toilet herself. She ended up with a leaking toilet, a collapsed ceiling and a $3,000 repair bill.
While there is much to be said for a fresh look at manual labor, some things are best left to the professionals.
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