Conversation

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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Replying to
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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Replying to
It depends on exactly what kind of tasks you mean, but I find that a work rhythm of splitting logs or working a lathe is more relaxing than those of coding or writing, which for me can be pretty frenetic or anxious. Agreed that household maintenance is not the highest calling.