The tremendous societal journey from manual labor to 9-5 desk work (or retail work) resulted in a reduction in average weekly work hours and increased leisure time worldwide after World War II. America, more or less, invented the consumer spending-driven economy (i.e., the post-industrial economy).
In our leisure-focused society, most people work to bring home lifestyle income, not necessities. Most of us could spend vastly less than we do on many things. We choose Whole Foods and Safeway for groceries when all those items are vastly cheaper at ALDI—roughly 60-70% cheaper.
We moderns could earn less and still live pretty nicely by premodern standards, which featured drafty homes, poor heating, outhouses, loads of unmanaged viral disease, inadequate sanitation, and high child mortality rates.
Many of us forget that we are comfortable doing silly work for 35-40 hours and sprinting back to our leisure time. Leisure is so abundant that we can compartmentalize ‘work’ in a way the blacksmith probably could not. He probably worked at least ten-hour days (not all of it at the forge). The more he worked, the more metalwork he completed, delivered, and got paid for.
Ironically, though, all this modern leisure and increased standard of living did not dispense with the drudgery of so much pre-modern work. The numbing dullness of so much modern desk work is too depressing to describe in detail here. All we did for our better-paid, modern desk workers was introduce a screen-bound, climate-controlled, and seated version of ‘factory’ work in return for college degrees. Early management theory even stemmed from studies of factory assembly line efficiency!
Labor economists tell me that the college-educated desk worker is technically a skilled worker. What? If you have ever viewed a shoddy PowerPoint presentation, like a really bad one, you know they’re right. But no one admires a PowerPoint wizard, do they?
Many of us admire the romanticized village blacksmith, the creator of physical goods from crude lumps of raw material. We admire these artisans because these skills are scarce today. Unlike Excel, PowerPoint, or Word, we have no clue how to do what the metalworker does.
Even though the world today has more specialized, desk-bound skill sets than ever, this specialization does not necessarily lead to deep, emotive satisfaction with work.
David Graeber’s famous take on “bullsh*t jobs” was a critical call-out. His research focused on jobs with no real need internally or externally—the pointless jobs that could evaporate and no one would notice, including inside their company. For example, the social media manager whose organic Instagram posts only get seen by maybe 4% of the company’s meager 6,000 followers. Or even unethical jobs, such as paying people to post fake reviews on your Amazon product pages.
I have seen these bullsh*t jobs up close, unlike Professor Graeber. A former CEO I knew once paid an executive assistant $60K a year to read novels because he couldn’t find enough for her to do. He let this go on for 18 months! I can tell you that the novel-reading executive assistant did not feel the slightest discomfort in her bullsh*t job. She loved it! Leisure societies do not prioritize a strong work ethic. It prioritizes doing enough to keep getting the paychecks. (I suspect this is why we notice and admire those with solid work ethics today).
I have seen client companies hire overlapping marketing roles that led to - wait for it…lots of power struggles. Talk about pointless. Do not believe anyone who tells you that most executives or founders know how to structure efficient organizations with maximum productivity. Modern, rapid hiring remains pegged to a subjective understanding of the necessary roles. This can lead to desk work with little depth or scope of possible impact.
A measurable % of desk work jobs in corporate America are about shoving dull sh*T work onto someone else that a “manager” or “director” absolutely has time to perform (if they didn’t waste time posturing in meetings).
Assistant eastern regional sales director?
Director of brand creative?
Social media manager?
I have even interviewed a COO who described himself as a manager! Talk about low impact. Of course, he might enjoy being “overtitled.” There is much less stress if you have transferred responsibility to the CEO. Not making decisions may be “pointless” for an executive role, but it is vastly less stressful. This is what over-achieving, workaholic academic and writer David Graeber perhaps failed to appreciate.
But one other thing hasn’t changed since the advent of modern desk work around World War II. Most desk work jobs do not result in completed tasks that directly impact anyone outside the organization’s workforce. The external impact is wildly indirect, if there is any at all. There might be ‘feedback’ inbound to our offices, but that is from ‘strangers’ using comment forms or anonymous e-mail inboxes. Pleasing your colleagues and immediate boss becomes the only social impact you can touch and feel. So, desk workers chase bureaucratic outcomes, not inter-personal ones, from an ancient human perspective. Desk workers do not get anything near the emoji feeling that a Viking blacksmith got delivering a new sword to a proud customer.
Don’t believe me? Think of the architectural team contracted to build an airport terminal.
Who is the end user? It’s not the government bureaucracy. They are just the buyer who purchased the building and paid the architects. The end user is the general public. However, the architect has no personal relationship with the ‘general public.’ There may be pride in good work, but there is no human interface similar to the local artisan making everyday tools for local use by people the artisan knows and probably knows well. Often, the public works architect, like my brother, is from out of town. They have no way to know anyone who will use the airport. The architect’s social impact is generalized and bureaucratic. Impersonal. And it feels so. The experience of the job is very much about the work process itself, full of endless stakeholder meetings with which to suck every last shred of your soul out of you, all of which is amazingly tedious and surprisingly academic in nuance (if you believe my brother who does this for a living). Smart architects focus on enjoying the academic nuance, not the meetings, the client, or the end user. Keep your head down.
The Viking blacksmith engaged in intimate craftsmanship and selling within his social network, not far beyond into an impersonal marketplace of strangers. And perhaps it’s too easy to romanticize the smithy on our 21st-century laptops.
One of the ironies of my former career in market research is the simultaneous occurrence of two phenomena that compete directly for the prize of Most Enervating Corporate Nonsense - the low-impact, bullsh*t nature of most market research inside corporate bureaucracies (i.e., the researcher never knows what the information leads to and no one follows up) and the surreal delight with which brand teams ‘get in touch’ with some detail of their consumers’ daily lives. A good market research presentation is like ‘office entertainment’ to these people. The fact that it takes an expensive research process for the corporate producer to meet their consumer and feel the impact of their brand is what we might call corporate alienation. Without professionally mediated ‘consumer insights,’ the brand team is simply pulling pipe organ handles in front of an empty church. Without measuring things and collecting market data, brands ship products to a distribution void. If measuring impact requires its own project, do I need to say more about the modern desk worker’s condition?
Knowledge workers suffer from the greatest interpersonal impact void in many ways. Yes, there is a client, but what do they do with the knowledge we impart? Often, there is simply no follow-up. Reports get archived. Who looks at them?
I was told to take pride in the production of the document. In the research, I told myself. OK, that works for weirdos like me who require very little social feedback to start or persist in anything. I’m the bizarre type who will absolutely wake up the day after the apocalypse and sit down to write my Substack. It will take me thirty minutes to realize there is no power, no internet, and no more Substack.
But most people crave interpersonal impact. I even get boosted by direct messages about my business book or other writings. It’s lovely to know that something you created directly and emotionally impacts real people.
In the internet age, creators reign supreme partly because they have this direct impact/feedback on consumers of their creations. The rest of us just log into corporate intranets and proceed through the latest Gantt chart at a sloth-like pace, attending meeting after meeting after interminable meeting.
There are modern jobs that provide a direct consumer feedback experience - most of them in the hospitality and restaurant sector - the front-of-house staff. Yet, increasingly, even this is not satisfying to employees in part because the ‘need’ being served is so obviously trivial, unnecessary, and, in some cases, pretentious.
Offering amazing table service at Alinea. What is really at stake for anyone involved in this kind of consumer performance?
The village artisan of yesteryear might not have won awards or had Instagram Reels to market himself globally to random acquirers of hand-wrought axes. Still, he was a pillar of the local community. Every household in the community depended on him for basic metal items, not trivialities like an overpriced dinner at Alinea for their wedding anniversary.
The blacksmith performed intimate work with intimate emotional outcomes that fed and sustained networks of the well-known. Being an artisan was not a typical job back then (as a % of the active labor force), but it does not appear that work with this kind of interpersonal impact has grown with modernity. I’m going to guess it has declined because we simply don’t know many people in our networks well at all. And we don’t serve them with our trans-local, impersonal work outcomes.
Yet so many of us crave the pre-literate blacksmith’s humble impact. Explaining the latter's rise is a mystery for another essay.
PS—I have really bad hand-eye coordination, so I can safely promise not to quit this Substack and become a TikTok Metalcraft influencer.
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I really appreciate the good waiters after bad ones. I spent a bit of time in the restaurant business and a well provided meal does matter.
I spent a bit of time as an expat in the UK and the shopkeepers and staff seemed to have a bit mire pride then when a Tesco/large grocery store came to
town. The function of dispersal of goods was the same, but I think the pride felt in the work by the local shop staff was worth a lot that got taken away.