I will admit I hate doing handyman shit now. Used to be proud to be able to do basic stuff as a teenager but jeez it’s high effort, low (psychological) reward. I’d get bored to tears if I had to do full time handyman work like minor maintenance and repairs in a building all day.
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What makes blue collar work different from white collar work is not manual labor vs information work. Both are 70-90% information processing. It’s just the low inductive generalizability of the information work. Blue collar work is human big data work.
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The last lightbulb I changed was on a Toyota Corolla. This one was a Volvo S40. Very different. Iirc on the Corolla I had to change both left and right and the procedures were slightly different on the 2 sides because of asymmetries under the hood. Meatspace is all corner cases.
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Now I know why I’m also increasingly tired of building and running my own websites even with low/no code Wordpress. It’s digital blue collar work. You spend hundreds of hours on this shit and learn nothing interesting besides how to do the shit.
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Any romantic sentimentality I had about hands-on tinkering on such things is long gone. Gimme the turnkey SaaS thing and the Uber/lyft apps. Tinkering is only fun when there’s a good chance of unreasonably leveraged inductive generalization ahas.
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The more mature a tech stack, the lower the chances of breakthrough upsides from tinkering. I’m not going to invent a new spark plug by replacing lightbulbs and wiper blades. I’m not going to invent blogging 2.0 fiddling with theme CSS. Need advanced conceptual knowledge for that
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Never trust anyone who waxes eloquent about the poetic spiritual joys of working with your hands. They’re crazy. The goal is not to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit. The goal is to pay the other guy to achieve enlightenment fixing your shit.
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Not saying you should be contemptuous of or entirely avoid such work, but you shouldn’t fetishize or romanticize it, or develop a reactionary suspicion of leveraged conceptual-symbolic information work. You should try to minimize and automate it and level up as much as you can.
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Try to work at the highest abstraction level you’re capable of without becoming authoriritarian-high-modernist legibilist about lower level stuff. Retaining that connection doesn’t take much. Watching someone changing a lightbulb can be as good as doing it yourself.
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Another fabulously unsatisfying maintenance chore done. One more left for tomorrow.
And backlog for brave new world of dumbass digital maintenance stuff to take care of.
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List of things I’d have been excited to do as a kid but now just found tedious and annoying and wish had a butler to do: replace car battery
🤬 socket wrenches
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Here is a generalization on how to enjoy home chores: bundle them up, e.g. fix a sink and then assemble an IKEA chair.
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