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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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
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I look at such activities moreso as pursuit of self-reliance than romance. In my early 20s my lack of hands-on car repair experience partially contributed to me getting robbed in a parking lot. In my early 30s working on my old Jeep makes me less worried about getting stranded.
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Sure it's going to change between cars but now I understand the total system a lot better and how to avoid failure modes, which failure modes to care a lot about etc.
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