I Am a Craftsman, and So Can You!

I Am a Craftsman, and So Can You!

I doubt that anything I will write in this post will be novel in terms of strict content. What I hope is a bit novel is talking about technology from the perspective of an old-world-craftsman-at-heart, which is partly how I approach my work and the world.

Madonna was wrong in many ways about us living in a material world. Material stuff seems to have always been a major desire and motivator of human behavior and endeavor. At the same time, I think that the depth of human relationship with material objects is subject to tremendous change. I would say that it is perhaps easier now than ever before for humans living in suburban or urban environments to develop shallow relationships with the stuff around them. I would also claim that this is damaging to individual life satisfaction and society’s long-term prosperity. Why? When a thing is disposable, it a) loses value and therefore the activity of acquisition loses satisfaction, b) extracts a greater effective cost for society because resources are unnecessarily consumed and thrown away, becoming useless. More below.

We don’t get even one second of time back. (Physicists and philosophers, I appreciate that this statement lacks nuance necessary for more theoretical discussions. Another time.;-)) Each second has a cost. By ‘cost’, I don’t mean just money. Money is just one metric of cost. I consider the true cost of a thing to be the entire set of factors required for its existence together with the set of all its consequences for existence. The cost of a second of life has a truly vast cost. So vast it’s boggling even to consider how one could adequately measure it. When I think about my own life, I want to create something that I feel is worth its cost. This applies at all scales: the scale of my entire life, the scale of this year, the scale of this breath. Foremost, I am the craftsman of my life.

This is an intense way of being in the world. Simultaneously, I find it profoundly calming instead of stressful. I think one reason why this is is that it takes power back from the vicissitudes of external circumstances over my own assessment of self-worth and well being. What’s happening does matter to me, but my relationship to what’s happening matters much more. This way of being also demands all of my attention and ability, so there’s no room for worry. It’s one thing to say that it’s not worth stressing about stuff, which is often hard to follow through on. I feel that I can’t afford to stress about stuff. That works. One important domain where everything has a huge cost that I used to under-appreciate is the domain of material stuff.

My living depends on being a part of a small team that makes best-in-class space objects. I have a lot of skin in the game when it comes to the quality (i.e. conformance with requirements) and costs of these objects. Handling and working with components of these objects makes me feel the reality that we don’t get anything back in life much more keenly than I had doing math or primarily writing software. I still enjoy those more abstract activities enormously, but I now approach them with a sort of reverence; even if I can rub an error invisible on paper or press ctrl+z, nothing really is ever erased. Doing math and writing software are physical processes as much as anything, even if we can’t observe the vast majority of what goes on during those processes; their costs are easier to ignore.

As I imagine anyone who produces hardware for a living knows, this truth of getting nothing back guides so much of the practice of one’s craft and the process of making an object from start to finish. In my company’s case, I think we give flight software the same treatment, since it’s integral to the hardware’s operation. If you scratch something, drop something, burn something, let a bad line of code slip through to flight, there is no going back. Failures happen because things are hard and complicated, but let them not be wasted failures! Hopefully you feel the cost of failure in the lab before you’ve released something to the world. But even then, you exert the cost of “starting over” (if only you truly could!) and scrapping a physical object that so much has already gone into: natural resources, global supply chains, skilled workmanship, etc.

I spend a lot of my time in an environment where this mindset is always at the forefront. I sometimes do feel a degree of pressure that is uncomfortable. I also feel this when I’m working on an art piece or a technical project outside the lab. But I’m not stressed out by it. I instead find that I live a very relaxed life, because working at the edge forces me into it. I simply can’t do what I need to do if I’m too tense or if I’m focused more on the outcome of what I’m doing than what I’m actually doing as I do it. I also derive deep satisfaction from work that’s challenging enough to force me to this edge because I feel some of the weight of what is on the line.

You don’t have to make physical objects for a living to approach your work or life as a craftsman. You can start exercising a craftsman-like way of thinking by, say, auditing the food in your fridge or the objects in your home. Try considering the questions of where they came from, who grew/made them and how, what will happen to them once you get rid of them. Even if you don’t see them, they might transform, but they won’t disappear. And they will always have a cost beyond what you paid for them.

Doing this exercise might make your stuff more valuable to you because the cost of them to you will have increased by you thinking about them. My bet is that you’ll either feel more satisfied by your decision to acquire them in the first place or feel more satisfied by acquisition in the future because you’ll make better choices. If this means acquiring less stuff in general, then the cost to our natural resources will be less. Then you get to take satisfaction from that, too.