An Antidote is Awe

January 7, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m about to fly out to a place that filled me with awe before, both as a teenager and as a parent. So I’ve been thinking a lot about that mix of wonder and apprehension that you only feel when you face something that’s exponentially vaster and less comprehensible than the realities you struggle to manage every day.

As much as I’ve poked fun at friends this year that “Your sky is not falling Chicken Little,” it seems undeniable that we’re in the most unsettled time since the early Seventies when I first took this trip. So once again I’ve been thinking about antidotes like awe (and its sidekicks beauty and timelessness). As the following observations attest, you don’t necessarily need a plane to get there.

Awe Can Come From the Sounds of the Words

As part of his project “to re-wild” our language, one of Robert MacFarlane’s recent “words of the day” on Twitter was “roke,” for the thick morning mist that rises like smoke from the ground and water. This picture of it was taken by John & Rosamund MacFarlane

Robert MacFarlane is a naturalist and the author of a new children’s book called The Lost Words.

The book is his and illustrator Jackie Morris’ response to a controversy that, at first, sounds peculiarly British. In 2007, the kid’s version of the Oxford English Dictionary announced that it was adding words like “broadband” to its new edition while removing a host of other words that it found to be “less in use.” Many of those words—including acorn, blackberry and bluebell—put names to things that are experienced in the natural world. Did their removal from the dictionary signal a deeper loss about what we know and don’t know?

Philosopher A.J. Ayres has argued that without a word for something, you are unable to conceive of it. Your imagination, your ability to conceptualize, and your vocabulary are closely intertwined. As a word like “acorn” departs the lexicon, it becomes harder for you to imagine that nut which falls out of oak trees to the delight of squirrels and other managers of their winter stores. Surely, the dictionary’s culling would contribute to these words’ disuse and eventual oblivion.

In the controversy that followed, MacFarlane, Morris and others wrote an open letter to the dictionary’s editors that stated in part:

“There is a shocking, proven connection between the decline in natural play and the decline in children’s wellbeing.”

The editorial changes marked a alarming shift from the natural playground outside to the screen-centered world inside. To repair some of the broken connections, MacFarlane and Morris decided to collaborate on The Lost Words, each one of which had been removed from the dictionary.

With gorgeous illustrations and poems that are meant to be read by children or to them out loud, The Lost Words is intended to operate like a “spell”—as in leaving you spellbound or in awe of a word and where your imagination takes it.

These are some of MacFarlane’s poetic conjurings around the lost word “otter”:

Otter enters river without falter—what a supple slider out of holt and into water.

This shape-shifter’s a sheer breath-taker, a sure heart-stopper—but you’ll only ever spot a shadow-flutter, bubble-skein and never (almost never) actual otter….

In one interview, MacFarlane said:

We wanted to make a spell-book in two senses—in that children spelt these words but that there was also this great sense of enchantment; that old magic of speaking things aloud.

MacFarlane is often asked whether he is hopeful about the future. “The bigger picture is dismal,” he says, mentioning plastic pollution, climate change and extreme weather events. But he’s also concerned about feeling paralyzed in the face of it.

Small acts of care are crucial—grass-roots charities, individuals, books, words, [all] are doing magic work—so to say there’s no point is an abandonment of everything. Hope is a greater agent for change than despair.

You can follow his hopeful words on Twitter too @RobGMacFarlane

Great Teachers Share Their Awe

The shortest path to continuous learning comes from cultivating the desire to be surprised and amazed. The best teachers have this desire, and their life’s work is sharing their intoxication with others who want to have it too. For them, it’s an essential part of completing who you are.

A teacher can stimulate a compulsive kind of curiosity by recounting how a book, an experiment, a theory or an equation is still exciting to him or continues to affect her. “Thrilling.” “Gorgeous.” “Amazing.” “It can still send shivers down my spine.” Students can always follow scents of engagement like this because they can feel how they bring their teacher to life.

Why math, history, chemistry or English actually matter requires witnesses who have already been convinced and can share their belief. For teachers like this, the goal is not to transfer content into rows of empty boxes but to foster “a quality of mind” that inspires students to pursue their own questions while showing them how to satisfy their thirst for knowledge. It’s releasing the intrinsic sense of wonder in every learner instead diverting it into the extrinsic search for grades or the approval of others.

On the most basic level, infectious curiosity becomes a part of every learner’s agency. You complete yourself by your continuing willingness to be surprised and amazed.

To be awestruck.

Awe Follows Invitations to Get Lost in Something Bigger Than Yourself

I recommend Casper Henderson’s A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels. It’s a rambling, lively and insightful discourse on the wonders that are all around us.

Like MacFarlane (another Brit), Henderson is careful with his words. “I prefer the term ‘wonder’ to ‘awe,’ he writes in a short essay about his new book in The Guardian:

For me, awe, even in its everyday clothes, is redolent of something that almost overwhelms us. Wonder, by contrast, is a state in which we remain in possession of our intellectual faculties as well as feel emotionally elevated. It has much in common with awe, but it also overlaps with curiosity. ‘When experiencing wonder,’ writes the scholar Matthew Bevis, ‘it feels as if we know something without quite being sure of what we know.’

Wonder is a state of deep attention in which we feel good and think clearly, and connect to phenomena beyond ourselves.

For me, whether you’re mindful or just about to lose it, what’s interesting about these phenomena is not just the mental focus they invite but also the unconstrained emotions they unleash.

For example, when considering rainbows, full-moons and meteor showers, Henderson notes how little the scientific explanations for these occurrences interrupt our experience of their majesty. Whatever our minds tell us, we are still delighted, amazed and almost lost to reverie when we see them.

There is also tremendous emotional gravity around our knowledge that world leaders in America, Russia and even North Korea have the power to launch a nuclear attack. Musing about a president’s access to the nuclear codes, Henderson manages to co-mingle our consideration of this awesome destructive power in his hands with its tragic and very human consequences by citing a jaw-dropping proposal that was made early in the Cold War:

[I]nstead of having launch codes in an attaché case carried by a young officer constantly at the President’s side, the codes [could] be surgically implanted in a capsule beneath the officer’s heart. Then if the President decided that the murder of tens of millions of people was necessary, he would himself have to access the codes by using a butcher’s knife to gouge out the young man’s heart.

For me, anyway, the wonders (like this) that Henderson describes are always on the cusp of lapsing into deep and uncontrollable awe. While becoming more mindful of the wonders around you may be exactly what you need to counter your screens’ addictive attractions, what makes his book so fascinating is its many invitations to get lost in contemplations that are so much bigger than yourself.

The Awesome Edge

Some really interesting things can happen when you leave the familiar behind and inhabit—if only in your mind for a limited time—what lies beyond it.

Victor Turner called this a liminal space, where the reality between the familiar and the unfamiliar tend to blur. From looking at rites of passage or transition rituals in many cultures—such as transforming a boy into man—Turner believed that when you are at the tipping point between one state and another, the dividing line between your individuality and a wider sense of shared meaning gets blurred. You are not only a boy, but also a vital part of a tribe. Not one organism, but united with the entire natural world.

It’s very trippy stuff, but Turner also argues that liminal spaces provide access to thoughts and emotions that can’t be accessed in any other way.

I had one of those experiences several years ago, when I left my freshman year in college for bootcamp in the Coast Guard. One of the short stories in my book describes the edge of my known world this way:

The Coast Guard’s training center juts into the Atlantic churn at the tip of New Jersey, and its southwest watch station sits on a ghostly beachhead whose brow meets the whitecaps when the moon is out. The watcher’s charge is to look out for anyone who is trying to infiltrate our clambake (or escape from it) when a gate of sorts opens between the fence that extends to the high water mark and the retreating tide.

During my duties at this station during “the mid-watch” from 2-6 a.m. one February morning, I could see:

the stern markers of passing trawlers, somebody on watch there too. There were buoys in the straits, candles that I’d learn to keep to my right when following a channel. Under the torn up dark there were even planes on their way to Newark or Philly, their taillights dipping beneath the clouds and their pilots looking down to see where the water turned to land.

I was sick, sleep deprived, feeling sorry for myself, 19 and wondering what I had to hold onto. I knew where I was coming from, but not what I wanted to go back to.

You have to go out—sometimes very far out—and experience something like awe before you can come back in to reassemble the pieces. It may be the only way to refresh what’s really important.

Place Settings for Awe

Shortly after this post, I am flying out for a week in Rome.

I’ve experienced place-induced awe more than once when travelling.

Looking out over the rooftops in East Jerusalem, descending the slick rocks behind a waterfall in Venezuela, drowning in the flower clogged prairie of western Colorado in late June. I’ve also experienced it in Rome. Like Jerusalem, it’s a place where one layer of history is piled on top of another while at the same time it is intensely lived in—through daily use—by everyone who’s there now.

Because they are living so hard and so well, no one in Rome is interested in turning the city into a theme park, so the immensity of time and lived experience is almost everywhere.

I can’t believe how much I’m looking forward to the pageant of it, the food, and the vistas that keep opening up and down its seven famous hills. When the jet lag has been slept away, or maybe while I’m still in its hazy focus, I might even feel its special kind of awe again.

Note to readers: in a slightly different form, this content was included in my December 10, 2017 Newsletter, the first of what turned into three posts about awe.

A Class Apart

September 17, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

What we want in America is a fair chance to succeed. On the other hand, imposing economic equality through the redistribution of wealth has always seemed un-American. But there is a place where the needs for greater equality and a fairer playing field converge, and we are in that place today.

A good life and good work are not possible without the opportunity to make enough to meet our basic economic needs. In other words, every American needs a fair shot at the American pie, as opposed to an increasingly small piece of it. As the nation’s wealth concentrates in the hands of a few, fair opportunity disappears and makes the need for a national conversation about greater economic equality more pressing.

“Fairness” (in terms of opportunity) and “equality” (as a way to distribute wealth) are not the same thing.

Surveys regularly find that Americans accept a certain amount of inequality when it comes to wealth because of factors like individual merit. When one study asked about their ideal distribution of wealth, most responded with an allocation that was far from equal. People in the top 20% could have three times as much wealth as those in the bottom 20%, they said. In the article that reported these findings, this study’s author described the majority’s comfort level as “not too equal, but not too unequal.” By contrast, 84% of the nation’s wealth is in the hands of the top 20% today compared to only 0.3% in the hands of the bottom 20% (or more than 250 times as much)—an almost textbook case for “too unequal.”

In order to focus debate on this vast disparity of wealth in America, it will be necessary to bear in mind the differences between fairness and equality, because the distinction:

allows us to zoom in on certain critical questions that have long been of interest to political scientists and moral philosophers. When is it unjust to treat people the same—that is, which factors (hard work, skill, need, morality) are fair grounds for inequality and which are not? Which resources should be distributed on the basis of merit?

We can accept inequality under certain circumstances, but extreme disparities in wealth offend our basic sense of justice and fairness.

The richest 20% seem to know that there is something offensive about the gulf that exists between them and the other 80% of Americans. There was a piece in the New York Times last week that had a great deal to say about their (or our) discomfort with what the author called “the moral stigma of privilege.” Interviews with wealthy New Yorkers revealed that they routinely:

-take price tags and labels off expensive purchases so housekeepers and nannies can’t see the “obscenely high” amounts that they pay for items like “six dollar bread;”

-describe themselves as “comfortable,” “fortunate” or even “middle class” instead of rich or upper class;

-point out how “hard-working,” “charitable” and sensitive they are about “not showing off” what they have.

Their consideration, lack of ostentation, and other personal qualities seemed to be offered so that the interviewees can be seen as “worthy” of their privilege. “If they can see themselves [and the rest of us can see them] as hard workers and reasonable consumers,” the author notes, “they can belong symbolically to the broad and legitimate American ‘middle,’ while remaining materially at the top.”

Whether rich people are also “good people” simply obscures the important issue however.

[W]hat’s crucial to see is that such judgments distract us from any possibility of thinking about redistribution. When we evaluate people’s moral worth on the basis of where and how they live and work, we reinforce the idea that what matters is what people do, not what they have. With every such judgment, we reproduce a system in which being astronomically wealthy is acceptable as long as wealthy people are morally good.

So the issue isn’t whether rich people are also nice and hardworking. Instead, it is whether we should tolerate a small percentage of our citizens having so much more than everyone else. Is this state of affairs “good” for us as citizens and as a country?

With more wealth concentrating at the top of society, it is hardly surprising that the populism behind movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party became even more pronounced in the last election. Wealthy, often urban professionals on the right and left coasts may be puzzled by it and disgusted with some of the key players, but somewhere within this political upheaval is the desire for a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work. To realize that desire will mean reducing the economic divide after an honest discussion with these same wealthy, often urban professionals about the inequality that benefits them most.

“A shot at the American Dream” was the chance that every returning soldier wanted to take in 1945. The G.I. Bill after World War II reduced economic inequality by providing a fairer opportunity (with the possibility of college and home ownership) to the mostly white men of every economic class who were coming home. After their own struggle for greater equality, women and minorities secured a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and work after the Great Society programs of the Sixties and the women’s movement of the Seventies. Indeed, many of the men and women who benefitted from that 30-year push for greater equality made it into today’s wealthiest class, or lived to see their highly educated children enter it.

Today, there is once again an urgent need to confront the economic disparities that have become entrenched since our last conversation as Americans about greater equality in terms of wealth and class. For the vast majority, a fairer opportunity to pursue a good life and good work will not be possible until we do.

Our Mediating Devices

September 10, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I started this post with two different impressions about the phone and computer screens that stand between us and what we want to realize or accomplish—that is, the devices that increasingly mediate our everyday experiences. I still don’t know where to take these impressions.

Two articles about technology gave rise to them. One was about how “smartphone-savy millennials and Gen Zers” answer the doorbell by sending text messages instead of opening the door and facing the person who is ringing it. The other came after reading an interview about Microsoft teams that are building products which try to respond to human needs instead of asking the end user to do all of the adapting. The first story illustrates how smart phones diminish human interaction, while the second suggests a role for technology that actually might enhance the human experience. One seems a warning and the other welcome news.

Who knew that young people don’t answer their doorbells, and may even be “terrified” when they ring. I would have put this article in the armchair anthropology pile, but its observations and conclusions came from Christopher Mims, who studied neuroscience and behavioral biology before he became a technology reporter around 15 years ago. He also posts regularly about the intersection of these disciplines, and I invariably find myself nodding to his conclusions. So maybe something more is happening in these awkward exchanges that young people are trying to have with cell phones in between them.

Instead of answering the doorbell that announces an expected delivery of, say, a pizza, this teen through 30 cohort apparently would prefer that the delivery person text them when arriving so they can text back with payment, a tip, and a request to leave the pizza by the door. Both would prefer never to encounter the other. The talking heads who commented on this behavior included:

– a so-called “teen-whisperer” who said that text means “friend” while a door-bell says “outsider;”

– the founder of Ring, a WiFi connected doorbell that enables those inside to communicate with those outside without making eye contact; and

– a psychology professor who says this behavior suggests a further decline in face-to-face interaction by teenagers and young adults, with implications for their emotional closeness and mental health.

While young people may be on the leading edge of this kind of social change, I think what Mims is observing effects everyone who uses mediating technologies and not just young people. Do I bank on-line because I don’t want to deal with tellers? Do I click on a website’s customer service bot because I prefer it to conversation with an actual customer service representative? By doing so, am I slowly losing my ability to interact in an effective manner with other people?

And there are other questions too. What should parents do when their child rarely seems to interact with anybody live? What should I conclude from a table of college students at Shake Shack this week, all on their phones but never talking or making eye contact with one another? What do you make of people who email you at work when they could walk a few steps and either ask you or tell you something in person?

I don’t know what’s happening here, but it may be affecting our wiring at a very basic level. From a values perspective, it’s difficult to see how the “distancing” that our devices permit could be improving how we relate to ourselves or to one another.

Besides Mims, another voice in the space between human behavior and technology is Sherry Turkel at MIT. A TED talk that she gave a few years back catalogs similar concerns about the anti-social uses of mediating technologies.

On the other hand, when a mediating device tries to respond to human needs and create new possibilities it leaves a better impression.

Dave Nelson is Microsoft’s lead designer, and he makes many interesting statements in an interview he gave recently, including how early exposure to Flash technology allowed him “to make things come alive and get rich feedback from screens, which were traditionally hard to interact with.”

By the time he got to Microsoft, the desire for even greater responsiveness led him and his designers to focus more on meeting customer needs than on how to get people to adapt to a device’s limitations. As he put it: we began to look at “how we can get the computer to be more human-literate rather than making people more computer literate.”

The break-through came during exchanges between Microsoft engineers and customers while developing a new platform called Compass.

The engineers saw firsthand the range of emotions that real people had while working with their product. They saw the setup, the trepidation of trying to get in, the pain points, and the joy…This became the central turning point for our culture today. Now every single person in the [design] team has gone on site and spent time with our early customers. This has never happened before at Microsoft. The change in perspective for engineers and other personnel has been huge…It has put people at the forefront of our processes.

It should also be said that Microsoft’s designers had never been this integral to a product’s development before. They were suddenly interacting with people who don’t sit in front of screens all day—baristas in coffee shops, construction workers, health care professionals—who needed interfaces that streamline everyday work functions like scheduling. In a way, Nelson’s designers were learning how people speak so they could teach new Microsoft programs how to understand what was needed and be more responsive to those needs.

This story made me ask some additional questions.

– If new devices can sense our needs for better scheduling and work flows, can they also support and even encourage qualities that make us more human and less like machines?

– Can they enable richer human connections instead of making us increasingly isolated from one another?

– Will devices allow us to expand our capabilities at work or will they marginalize us until they eventually replace us in the workforce?

– Will our technologies enable greater human freedom and autonomy or herd us like sheep to buy certain things and behave in particular ways?

When I read this week about doorbells and Microsoft’s design team, I realized how little I’ve thought about these questions and that the future of technology for me extends no further than the features I’m likely to find in my next iPhone. Maybe it’s because this future comes so fast that all of our energy is spent trying to absorb what’s here instead of anticipating what might be coming next or thinking about its implications.

Still, concerns are being raised about the impact of recent technologies on human behavior. Frank Wilczek (from the “Learning By Doing” post two weeks ago), Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and others recently signed an open letter about the urgent need for a debate about advances in artificial intelligence. But beyond this plea, few have been bold enough to propose how the human future should unfold in the face of these innovations, or to publically debate the proposals that have been made. It should also be said that almost none of the rest of us seem to be clamoring for such a debate.

Oscar Wilde famously said: “A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always headed.” Wilde said that a century ago, but instead of visions of more humane futures all we seem interested in today is the entertainment value of post-apocalyptic worlds. Articles about avoiding doorbells and technology that begins with human needs provide grounds for concern as well as hope when it comes to what’s next. Maybe they are as good a place as any to start the process of dreaming ahead.

The Work That’s Behind Labor Day

September 3, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Most Americans mark Labor Day as the unofficial end of summer. But since 1894, it has also been a national day of rest to celebrate the American worker. Earlier this week, I got ready to honor the day by visiting an exhibit at Drexel University called “Badges: a Memorial Tribute to Asbestos Workers.”

I was interested in the exhibit for several reasons.

Before, during and after World War II, the giant Philadelphia Naval Yard built and serviced many the country’s battleships and other vessels. Asbestos was used extensively for insulation at the Naval Yard, and tens of thousands of workers in my home town were exposed to it.

I was also in the Coast Guard, and ever since I have felt a connection to those who work in America’s ports. But there was another reason too. As a newly minted attorney, my first job was a clerkship for the judge who was presiding over a flood of asbestos cases brought by Naval Yard workers 40 to 50 years after they had been exposed to this hazardous material.

Almost every day for a year, I heard these men’s stories. All suffered from mesothelioma, lung cancer or asbestosis. None could breathe easily and all were seeking recovery from asbestos companies that had failed to warn them about the dangers they were exposed to. It was difficult to listen to their stories and impossible to forget them. My solidarity with these fallen workers also comes from sharing a courtroom with them.

Over the years, millions were affected nationwide in a range of asbestos related businesses. As illness becomes apparent—asbestos lodges in the lungs and takes decades to manifest its injuries—the flood of lawsuits led to a 30 billion dollar trust fund established by the asbestos industry to provide compensation for worker claims. But asbestos itself has never been banned as a hazardous product, and according to one watchdog group, has resulted in approximately 200,000 additional deaths between 1999 and 2013, and another 12,000-15,000 every year since.

What intrigued me about the Badges Exhibit, was how its curators attempted to humanize the stories of the workers who were most affected. They show us the badges that the men and women who worked with asbestos actually wore on the job. Like time capsules, these badges bear not only their pictures but also the names of their employers and employee numbers in what are often beautifully crafted metal frames. As Earl Dotter, one of the Exhibit’s curators noted in an interview:

These badges personalized this large group of harmed ship builders, construction insulation workers, and more recently the 9/11 emergency responders I photographed on Ground Zero.

At the time, he also spoke about the impact that these badges had on him:

If in my subject’s employment or work experience they have been diminished, I need to show the causes of that diminishment, wherever that takes me.

Earl Dotter tells worker stories. To do so, he takes pictures, collects photographs, and tracks down memorabilia. It has been his job for most of his adult life. As he said elsewhere: “It was after the tragedies of 1968 [the Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations] that I decided to fully devote my creative energy to socially useful photography.” The social use that he had in mind was improving working conditions in hazardous industries. Because he became convinced that working with asbestos could never be safe, he has also been telling everyone who will listen that it should be banned forever.

It is always interesting to learn how someone like Earl Dotter settles on the work of his life. When I conduct interviews about work, this is always my first question because the answer tends to illuminate everything that follows.

Dotter mentioned the Sixties as a catalyst for his social conscience, but I found this remark of his (from the same interview) to be telling as well:

Not too many photographers carve out this subject [hazardous work] as their own today and I still can’t figure out why. Sometimes, when entering a factory, I feel like I am on a movie set with colorful actors of all descriptions populating the moving stage. But what is even better, is it is real and a visually engaging opportunity for me to do useful work too.

For Dotter, being around men and women who were making things was exciting—a real life theater—and as he got to know these workers better, he wanted to help them as only he could.

You can see Earl Dotter’s photography at his website. When he’s not storytelling, he is also a Visiting Scholar at Harvard’s School of Public Health and an advocate for worker safety.

The Badges Exhibit was originally scheduled to close on September 1, but has just been extended through mid-November. Additional information about it can be found here.

This Labor Day, when it is harder to find a factory where workers make things, this story about workplace hazards may seem passé. In the dangerous industries that remain, there are occupational safety laws and far greater accountability than the workforce enjoyed in the heyday of the Philadelphia Naval Yard. But there are still asbestos-related injuries and deaths, and workplace safety concerns continue to stalk many industries such as fishing and coal mining.

Moreover, unless you make your own work (like Dotter has done), work generally strikes a balance between the needs of those who “own the means of production” and the workers “who produce.” Sadly, those needs are not always the same.

Labor Day is a day to celebrate the fairness (and successes) of that balance when it is struck, but it is also for considering how to maintain that fairness in an era of rapid change. Our jobs today will be transformed by increasing automation from both robotics and artificial intelligence. Will we be helped by these developments or harmed by them?

Given the future of our work today, this cautionary tale about America’s asbestos workers could not be more timely.

Why Craft Masters Love Their Jobs

August 13, 2017 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Every job is about two things: what it brings to you and what it brings to others.

Today, new iterations of old-time, blue-collar jobs are providing a new breed of craft masters with the personal validation that comes from using their specialized knowledge to serve grateful customers. These butchers, haircutters, distillers, bartenders and a host of others celebrate proud skills / that enable them to produce something tangible / for people they know.

Each part of their work definition speaks to the quality (or lack of quality) in our work too.

For example, many of our jobs seem inconclusive. I spent all these hours, was aggravated along the way, tried to stay motivated, but at the end of the day, week, month or year, what have I accomplished?

Having something (anything) beyond a paycheck to show for your effort is what’s missing in many, if not most, service economy jobs today. As those in manufacturing, farming and fishing—big jobs a century ago—have left to take on “office work,” what the modern workforce actually produces has gotten harder to either describe or personalize.

Customer satisfaction – Quality control – Teamwork – Greater efficiencies – More sales.

What is your contribution to any of them? Whatever you’re adding may earn you a raise, but probably does little to improve your work engagement because there was almost nothing tangible that you either produced or could “own.” When the fruits of your labor feel this remote from your effort, the level of job satisfaction always tends to be low.

On the other hand, think of the difference if you were giving someone a great haircut, mixing an unforgettable cocktail, or aging a steak to perfection. There is nothing remote about these benefits because someone “thanks you” for your expertise right away. You can take their gratitude home with you that night and recall, with pride, your accomplishments before returning to work tomorrow. It’s sustaining, makes you feel that you’re doing something worthwhile, even when the financial rewards are less than an office job might bring.

What is the calculus that motivates today’s craft masters, and how could their trade-offs change your thinking about the jobs you have or the jobs you want?

Among many other things, Instagram is a forum for craft masters, and I’m following several, including haircutter @crimsonjenny, woodworker @gingerwoodturner, and meat maestro @butcherfarrell. Everyday they show me their work, celebrate their tools, and introduce me to their clients. Talk about job satisfaction—it doesn’t get any more tangible than it seems to be for them:

What exactly do jobs like these bring to the person doing them? For one thing, they provide something that is clear and measureable to them.

In The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton describes the experience like this:

“How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object—whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug—and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see.”

Concreteness can also come from “living the experience.” It’s akin to what many professionals are looking for when they pursue endurance sports, effectively making their exploits in extreme situations into second jobs. As noted last week in Outside magazine, what these men and women may want the most is to be able to explain to themselves and to others at least one thing that they’re accomplishing with their skills:

“Ask a white-collar professional what it means to do a good job at the office, and odds are they’ll need at least a few minutes to explain their answer, accounting for [office] politics, the opinion of their boss, the mood of their client, the role of their team, and a variety of other external factors. Ask someone what it means to do a good job at their next race, however, and the answer becomes much simpler [for the one who’s giving the answer as well as for the one who’s hearing it].”

In the same article, Michael Crawford says that using your skills this way relieves you of the need to offer “chattering interpretations” to explain your worth. You can simply point to the race you ran, the mountain that you climbed, or the house that you built. Results like these provide demonstrations of your value that are readily apparent to everyone.

By contrast, how much “knowing appreciation” did you receive for your work last week? How proud are you of your output, how convinced of your worth given what you accomplished with your skills and experience?

Craft masters know about the pride and sense of empowerment that come from demonstrating their skills. But they also know something about work that no commitment to endurance sports can provide: the gratitude of serving someone beside yourself.

Craft masters are connected to their customers in at least 3 ways. For one thing, those receiving their services are often their peers. As such, their work is a way for both servers and served to recover some of the place-based kinship that was disrupted when national manufacturers, big box stores, on-line merchants and assembly-line service providers drove their predecessors out of business.

Both craft master and customer also respect the specialized knowledge and skill that is being demonstrated. Both may even see themselves as connoisseurs. Customers like to have their steaks, cocktails or haircuts lavished with attention, and the masters revel in their customers’ knowing appreciation of what they do.

Finally, there is transparency about what craft masters add and deliver. Customers generally know where their raw materials come from and how they transform them. It’s the opposite of products appearing on most store shelves whose point of origin, manufacture and supply chain are cloaked in mystery. Transparency establishes loyalty to the work itself and tends to deepen the bonds of trust between master and customer.

Pride and confidence in your skill and experience.

Mutual bonds of gratitude with the beneficiaries of your work.

These rewards don’t belong to craft masters alone. Instead they represent choices (and sometimes trade-offs) at the heart of every job. When these rewards are important enough, you either find them in your current jobs or demand them in future ones. They are essential benefits in every work bargain, and far too often, we’ve forgotten to expect them.

(If you are interested in reading more, a sociologist’s take on jobs in the new urban economy is provided in Richard Ocejo’s recent book and Michael Crawford’s classic essay, “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” can be found here.)