Last year, a new neighbor bought the house across the street.
The previous owner had a…colorful personality that led to some interesting stories to tell. So, we were wondering what the new owner would bring. They’ve done a lot of renovation to the house, which has been interesting to watch. This guy is always building, sawing, hammering, putting something together, or, alternatively, bringing in a lot of supplies and re-doing the landscaping of the property.
When I think of that kind of work, I think of a couple of things. First is my father…it’s perhaps apropos that I’m writing this on Father’s Day. He kept a workshop in a detached building and was always outside in the evenings after dinner. The saws could always be heard, and he was always building. My dad made his living in electronics, but he loved woodworking, and the shop was his man cave. He sculpted with wood, as much an artist as a craftsman.
The other thing that I think of is my college career, because I spent most of it as a theatre major. My focus was largely on the technical side of theatre, and as such I spent a good amount of time in the scene shop. Even though I grew up observing my father’s use of power tools, I didn’t really learn to use them until college. While I’m far from being a pro, I do know my way around a drill, a rip saw, and various other tools, but to use them today would surface just how incredibly out of practice I am, because I don’t use them every day.
Or every month.
Or most of the year.
In recent years, for various reasons, I think about my dad often. Part of this is harboring some guilt for not calling him nearly as often as I should. Part of it is that things like seeing this new neighbor working outside all the time reminds me of what my dad did when I was growing up, and I wish sometimes that l was less academic and more hands-on with life.
A few years ago, before we moved to our current house, I was driving home from…somewhere… and I passed a house with a work van parked in the driveway. I forget what sort of work it advertised on its side…electrician, perhaps? Roofing? Given that it was the weekend, the van was not in use, and I remembered my father coming home from work, being with his family, engaging his hobbies, living a simpler life. There wasn’t email then, but if there had been, he wouldn’t have been checking it, because he wouldn’t have had a smartphone in his pocket. He left in the morning, worked his day as a specialist in his field, and returned home to live life, much as I imagine the owner of that van did. Then, after a significant number of years, he retired, which he was able to do because he was rewarded for his longevity with a pension.
While I don’t really want to change who I am in this regard, I often think that life would be simpler if I worked in a field…or in a time…that brought with it a similar lifestyle. Leave for work, do your trade, come home to the family. Work outside on the weekends, watch the game in the evening. There’s an enviable simplicity to that rhythm. That simplicity pre-supposes a security that doesn’t exist in our world any longer (who among my generation can realistically ever expect to retire?). Even without this, though, I feel that there must be ways to re-introduce a simplicity into our lives. Some are obvious…refuse to let work have a foothold in our after-hours lives (I deleted work communications from my phone some time ago), pare back on social media’s poisonous influence. Some are less obvious, or at least they are to me as I haven’t figured them out as of yet.
My techno-optimism has died in its old age, and I’ve started looking for ways to bring back this sort of simplicity. I want work to have its appropriate place, to mean something, and for life to be free from tech billionaires making decisions for me.
As foreign as this sounds to a generation that has grown up in this landscape, I can’t feel that this is what it was meant to be. Our lives have fallen out of balance, and we need to get that back. I’m not sure how exactly that happens. I just know instinctively that it involves less complexity than our current state.