Heidegger and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

An excellent review of what seems to be a interesting book. I say this not just because "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" is one of my all-time favorites, but also because, as alluded to in this review, I have probably spent 75% of my day today as a physician today "clerking" for insurance companies, instead of engaging in the cognitive and interpersonal elements of my profession, which is what I love...and why I went into medicine..and which is what I am able to do when I work overseas on mission trips...
I would much rather be looking (literally and figuratively)into my patient's eyes than at charts--filling meaningless data fields for insurance companies and their high-flying CEO's.

When Matthew Crawford finished his doctorate in political philosophy at the University of Chicago, he took a job at a Washington think tank. "I was always tired," he writes, "and honestly could not see the rationale for my being paid at all." He quit after five months and started doing motorcycle repair in a decaying factory in Richmond, Va. This journey from philosopher manqué to philosopher-mechanic is the arc of his new book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work.
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While doing the work of a mechanic provides intellectual challenges and the intrinsic satisfactions of completing problems from start to finish, Crawford knows that working in the trades is seen as déclassé and too limiting for a college graduate. And then he goes on to show how stupid that viewpoint is.

The first piece of evidence to consider is a quote from the Princeton economist Alan Binder about how the labor market of the next decades won't necessarily be divided between the highly educated and the less-educated: "The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire (or via wireless connections) with little or no diminution in quality and those that are not." Binder goes on to summarize his own take: "You can't hammer a nail over the Internet." Learning a trade is not limiting but, rather, liberating. If you are in possession of a skill that cannot be exported overseas, done with an algorithm, or downloaded, you will always stand a decent chance of finding work. Even rarer, you will probably be a master of your own domain, something the thousands of employed but bored people in the service industries can only dream of.