My dad was a carpenter, and I always went out of my way to not distract or surprise him when he was working with power tools.

Besides, a lot of carpentry requires planning and precision, and there is no undo button...

It is nice to be able to put your hands on something you've done though.

I've known people who have constructed working lives for themselves that try and achieve this balance, but it is a difficult thing to do. I expect that it usually has an economic penalty of some sort, but if at least some of the work pays well it's not crazy.

One way to manage it would be to find lucrative work roughly 1/2 time (i.e. "knowledge work" contracts) and then very intentionally spend the rest of your time outside and doing something active. If you've ever tried to negotiate a short week for less pay you'll probably realize this is difficult to arrange.

Presumably you mean "better for the individual", but I don't believe this is an assumption we can make. It seems clear that agriculture was better in a competitive sense than other ways of life at the time, though likely worse for many of the individuals involved.

There’s no evidence it was necessarily better for any particular insividual’s quality of life.

That is a spectacularly impractical idea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward#Consequence...

Compared to modern mass-scale industrial stock-farming killing the planet? Nothing really...

Depends on where you live (and most of current living where one can't make food and wouldn't survive a shortage has been enabled by "industrial farming" and other developments - e.g. enabling deserts cities in Nevada).

In my case, we have had hens, pigs, turkeys, olives, grapes, tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons, oranges, figs, corn, berries, potatoes, and several other fruits and vegetables besides at the house at home. And this wasn't uncommon in my between ~150K strong place of birth (now I live in a much larger city), almost every family had such.

>In the good old days there would be a bad harvest every so many years and a substantial fraction of the population would starve to death in the ensuing famine.

We've had techniques to survive bad harvests, including long term storage, canned goods, saline storage, dried goods (from nuts to figs and salami), and so on, for millennia, and I don't remember any famines in my here parts (much less a "substantial fraction of the population starving to death"). Then there's always trade, which we also have had for quite a while.

The worst famines are not caused by bad harvests, they are either due to political reasons (from the Irish potato famine, to the 80s Ethiopian one, both caused by bad policies) or poor distribution/inequality (while food exists).

That's more about water than food per se, though they go hand in hand.

It indeed does help that nearly all major Nevadan cities (and the vast majority of Nevadans, in turn) happen to be near the border between Nevada and one of the world's primary agricultural powerhouses, though.

i was responding to someone who is very skilled (presumably) wishing they didn't need to be so specialized.

edit: lots of people willfully misconstrue things. the same goes for Marx. if you've read any of the volumes of capital you'd understand that marxist positions aren't as asinine as "everyone needs to be a farmer in order for socialism to be viable".

Today it's just silly. You can't decide to review medical papers today, write them tomorrow, farm the next day, then be a lawyer, then go commercial crab fishing, then be a surveyer, then design an interstate highway bridge, then perhaps a concert pianist performance, and then perhaps start it all over again in a cycle. Or, to the extent you can, you can't generate any value that way.

Of course you can still "recreate" with hunting, fishing, and "criticizing after dinner" (note how, coincidentally, all his cited examples tend to gracefully fail; I can "go hunting" and come back with nothing and I have accomplished "going hunting"). Observing that recreation in the form of unevaluated, low-barrier-of-entry tasks that nobody cares if you produce no value with are available is a pointless statement, so I assume that's not the point of the quote. But there's a whackload of magic in that "society will regulate production" if everybody operates like this. "Society regulating production" is why we end up specialized. You end up specialized because it takes years of training and experience in any field to be worth a darn, which means that's by necessity the cost of switching too. You can certainly get to a hobbyist level in a couple of fields beyond your profession, too, but even then you're unlikely to just switch that to your profession one day in the general case.

you're repeating yourself. here is the quotation in context

"Further, the division of labour implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another. And indeed, this communal interest does not exist merely in the imagination, as the "general interest", but first of all in reality, as the mutual interdependence of the individuals among whom the labour is divided. And finally, the division of labour offers us the first example of how, as long as man remains in natural society, that is, as long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. This fixation of social activity, this consolidation of what we ourselves produce into an objective power above us, growing out of our control, thwarting our expectations, bringing to naught our calculations, is one of the chief factors in historical development up till now."

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/Marx_Th...

In his day (and in the modern world) people pretty freely move between roles within the intelligentsia but for legal constraints (which while notionally justified by consumer/public protection are often in no small part protectionist measures to maximize income of incumbents and restrict competing supply) and often hack around the legal constraints, too, (hanging out shingles in various “wellness” or un-/less-regulated alternative fields to evade regulation of health/medical work, for instance.)

That is, I think experience has shown that Marx’s description was correct at least as to the direction of effect of the politico-economic system, though probably hyperbolic about the degree of practical freedom from path-dependent career constraints attainable in even the ideal situation.

I know many manual laborers who have far better physique, strength, and health than the average sedentary programmer, so there's that...

The key is to be an independent craftsman, and not e.g. lay carpets as an employee (at the businesses pace and mercy), or stand all day, etc...

The ratio of independents to employees suggest a lot of people aren't in the situation you describe

I think most work is -- at the very least -- bearable given enough independence/autonomy. Programming can certainly be pretty joyful given a reasonably open-ended project and a quiet spot to sit. It's getting the autonomy that's the tricky bit.

There are valid reasons for this, anyone who works with software for a while feels that he works so much but never made something you could actually touch and always has to explain to people the real value of his work because it's not obvious for the "common folk" ( even your boss ). So, making a deck is a physical, obvious and long lasting thing you can be proud of and easily pointed out when you seek for approval/praise ( everyone wants/needs that, some more than others )

That's probably the reason I like to make stuff in my spare time, and why I prefer to show that stuff off rather than talk about my work most of the time. I don't have to explain why my work is interesting or important. Even if the stuff I make isn't 'important', people can appreciate a finished physical thing and the work that went into it, and I can dive into details about how I made it and the choices I made.

I like doing things by hand. But I am generally a hard working man, by hand or when using my head.

Two observations:either work can become obsessive. When you start working with your hands for leasure, this can become a burden on it's own. But even more so: I do not need to make living out of carrying for my land. And: the grass looks always greener on the other side of the river!

What sucks is spending 50ish weeks a year doing 40 hours/wk of the same damn thing. I don't hate hard work—I love it—I hate lack of autonomy to choose what to work on, in a very broad sense. Work is nice, jobs are fucking awful.

Theorem 1: If you accomplish half of your plan for the day, you had a very unusual day.

Rule 2: Be ready, at a moment's notice, to drop your plan for the day to pursue an unusual opportunity.

Theorem 2: You might not always be rewarded for your enthusiasm, however. And, at first, you will see many "opportunities" that are actually distractions from the task you are avoiding. Time and seasoning will give you discernment.

Rule 3: Be aware, at a moment's notice, that you will have to drop your plans and focus on an unexpected emergency. Re-build what broke so that it won't break the same again next time.

Rule 4: You can start practicing now by skipping meals, or even skipping a day of eating on occasion. Also, sleep on the floor with a light blanket sometimes. Don't wear a coat to work sometimes. Take cold showers. Practice being uncomfortable. Practicing makes it easier to absorb being uncomfortable when you don't have a choice in the matter.

Rule 5: While you will be met by frequent surprises and challenges, you will also be bored at times. Practice being comfortable with being bored by walking more, with no headphones, no podcasts, no music. Just you and your thoughts.

Rule 6: You will always be building and re-building a plan for the day, but that plan should always be fitting into a context of the season that is coming next. What you do today makes the next season more comfortable, or at least, survivable.

Theorem 3: You can judge how well you are surviving and adapting to the challenges of your environment by how long out into the future your planning reaches.

Theorem 4: To romanticize this as "simplicity" is to grossly underestimate the mental fortitude and resilience required to focus on the matter at hand while continuing to rebuild a plan for the near future, all without losing your shit and giving up. Not to mention, grossly underestimating the creativity with which Nature can surprise you.

(The numbering doesn't really matter, but theorem 1 is related to rule 1, and theorem 2 is related to rule 2. Mostly, it was just a way of separating my thoughts.)

I have no doubt I'm grossly underestimating things, but I do think your ideas fit the definition of "simplicity" as I intended--simple being the opposite of complex, rather than easy or effortless.

I find all of the ancillary functions we're forced to perform as part of modern life to be very complex and highly distracting. On any given day I might have to file a tax return, pay a phone bill, argue with a doctor's office over a bill I paid 18 months ago, have my car break down, deal with credit card fraud, receive a dozen spam calls, research and select a new insurance plan, find a new dentist, etc, etc.

I actively take steps to reduce these distractions, but many are pervasive and effectively required. I long for the opportunity to be bored. As another comment said, this is part of what I love about backpacking: it affords the change to be bored with my own thoughts.

And I'm back to romanticizing the ability to focus on a single, simple goal: survive to the next season, with all the uncertainty that brings and mental fortitude it demands.

Women often complain about their office jobs too, but you rarely see them fantasizing about being able to swing a hammer for a living because they weren’t subject to the same cultural programming.