I’ve come to realize I’m not particularly good at anything other than trying hard at everything. Working hard has roots in my own heredity, and deeper ones that tap into my immigrant ancestry. “I’ll outwork anyone” has been an underlying attitude of mine for most of my life. This has gotten me into trouble at times, especially when my achiever mindset takes over. I can slip into a kind of workaholism masquerading as “providing for my family,” or perfectionism as excellence. But when in check, my appreciation for work leads me down good and interesting paths. I mean, industriousness is a virtue, after all.

I’m weird. I like the feeling of work. I prefer manual to automatic. In fact, I kind of hate automation. I guess I’m okay with inefficiency, to a degree anyhow. And I don’t like impersonal, highly-technologized workflows that eliminate the challenge of human interaction and working-it-out (like sending me your Calendly so I can make an appointment with you via your app instead of talking with you like a human being and working out a time that works for both of us. Calendly is cold.).

I do strange things that require more work than is necessary these days, and I do them intentionally. When I smoke meat, I use a charcoal smoker that requires almost constant attention and finesse to keep the fire burning at just the right temperature. I rarely smoke a pipe, but when I do, I appreciate the effort involved to keep the thing going. I french press coffee every morning. It takes work and I have ritualized it. I stopped using my mechanical toothbrush because I don’t need a machine between me and my teeth. I keep chickens. I love mowing my own yard. I enjoy picking weeds with my bare hands and mulching with my bare hands, too, even if it means showcasing stained hands for a few days. I chop wood with an axe. I appreciate the whole experience of painting — cutting, trimming, rolling. I love making a good meal from scratch (which is our usual practice). Writing is a pain, and running is also a pain, yet I love both. Playing the guitar hurts my fingertips (because I don’t play often enough), yet there’s something satisfying about banging out a song and pushing my thumbnail into my callouses the next day. I refuse to use AI for my research, because I like seeing where my curiosity takes me, what unforeseen questions arise, and what new insights I stumble upon. I don’t want some laser-focused LLM responding to my engineered prompts. I like the winding road of research, the tension of unresolved questions, the dead ends, the painful demands for patience, going to bed ignorant and waking up enlightened.

There’s something about smelling like the thing you’re working on — gasoline, grass clippings, car grease, chicken shit, mulch, wood, dirt, and smoke. I’ll never forget the smell of the dry, August earth mixed with the sweat from my football helmet. That’s the smell of two-a-days in Tiffin, Ohio. The feeling of these things, these remind us that work connects us to real things. Even my aching muscles after a long day of working on and around the house reminds me of my interconnectedness with the world beyond my head. I know I’m painting a somewhat sensual image of work, but, last time I checked, I’m not an optic nerve tethered to the Internet.

Getting my hands on the thing, getting deep into it, it’s challenging, thrilling, and so forth. Work and working deeply makes you confront your own limitations. Sometimes, you can transcend them. Other times you can’t. You are simply constrained by your own human limitations, and you must accept and work within them. Artificial and automated processes present the constant illusion of self-transcendence, but, in the end, the self hasn’t transcended anything, a machine has.

To further these points, I have in mind a passage from St. Pope John Paul II:

Technology is undoubtedly man’s ally. It facilitates his work, perfects, accelerates and augments it. It leads to an increase in the quantity of things produced by work, and in many cases improves their quality. However, it is also a fact that, in some instances, technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave. (Laborem Exercens, §5)

Our technology reduces us to the status of a slaves. Once I had a buddy go on-and-on about how busy he was. He then told me he was using AI to summarize all the material he needed to read so he could read more and faster, to get more done. More. More. More. I’m already busy. AI will make my life easier by allowing me to do more. Ah, the promise of modernity. Progress upon progress. Sounds great. Sounds like slavery.

I am listening to Paul Kingsnorth’s Against the Machine right now. In that book, he brings up the rise of email. Email was supposed to save us time, he says. It was supposed to save us from the pain of faxing someone or getting paper cuts while opening snail mail. Instead of saving us time, we are now slaves to email. When you add all the email hours, the average person spends 30 days a year on email. I highly doubt we were dealing with facsimile or USPS for that long.

The further we get away from the feeling of work, the further we get away from experiencing it our bones — slamming into our limitations and our interconnectedness with the world — the greater the risk of living an illusion, the greater the risk of bondage.