While I went to university and studied Eng Lit my brother-in-law became a mechanic. I think I used to look down on him but that all changed when it slowly began to dawn on me that I could do nothing useful while he could repair pretty much anything. He understood how things worked while I didn't. Just by looking at something he could see what its function must be while for me it was a bit of metal. It took me a long time to understand that it takes more thought to work out the best way to fix something than to remember who wrote Don Juan. He is now wealthy yet he still spends much of his time in his shed or garage making stuff or, like today, helping me repair an old oxidized outdoor lamp. I'm still useless at everything useful but at least I am now completely cured of my previous intellectual snobbery.
One underrated advantage for men: Women appreciate handy men. The dryer heating element went out a couple of weeks ago with a sopping wet load of laundry. A few youtube videos, a multimeter, a drill, and an $8 fuse later, it was good as new. I swear my wife was more proud of me for that than when I got promoted
“The happiest people you know are the busiest. The labor of your own two hands is the stuff of your life, for better or worse.” I can see you’re trying to convince me that it *is* possible for me to raise five kids, join the national guard, and buy the 100 year-old fixer-upper.
My next-door neighbor is incredibly meticulous with his lawn, but it takes him five hours to do what a hired crew could get done in half-an-hour with no difference in quality. He's retired with time on his hands and loves it though, and that's what matters. Others who don't have the time find themselves in an arms race against neighbors hiring a service with perfect lawns. Families with young kids and jobs don't have near the bandwidth to keep up.
You can just say "screw it" and do minimal lawn care since the kids are going to be tearing it up anyways, but your house will be the odd one out. Even if no one really cares as long as you mow every week, for those sensitive to status, it's aggravating.
I know this wasn't the focus of the post, but the nuisance of leaf blowers is real. It is impossible to enjoy a weekday suburban day without dealing with the sound. If labor were more expensive, time between lawn visits would be longer, more lawns would be covered in ivy or rocks, more homeowners would do their own lawns, and new lawns would be smaller. Landscaping is a good example of an industry where substitutes for cheap labor would actually raise quality of life. In this particular case, cheap labor sustains societal waste on a large scale.
I do all my own gardening and yard work, because my father and grandfathers did their own gardening and yard work. When I work in the yard, I am at one with my ancestors.
Also, I do not "clean up" leaves. I *harvest* leaves, shred them, and throw them in the composter. We have a bumper crop of leaves this year, which will yield lots of nice compost for mulching and soil enrichment.
Compost is a thing I want down the line when the kids are a little bit bigger and will eat things that aren't mac and cheese and nuggets and can appreciate vegetables and fruits more (and helping out with harvesting planting etc).
A really good piece. Robert M. Pirsig and his hundred-times-repaired motorcycling gloves came to mind. And as you say, what are you going to do with the time you save? Watch another movie? Does anyone really believe that sitting watching movies and all day constitutes a good life?
There was a British sit-com in the 1970's called 'The Good life' about a middle-management office worker who gives up his 9-5 job and, with the help of his wife, turns his suburban home and garden into a mini allotment/farm. The humour comes from the contrast between the tough, earthy self-suffient life of Tom and Barbara Good and that of their posh, keep-up-with-the-Joneses nextdoor neighbours, Margot and Jerry. I don't think there was a single person in Britain who would have preferred to be the latter.
My mother, despite having been a schoolteacher, on retirement cleaned other people's houses and would sometimes come home with stories of how, while she was cleaning, the well-do-to wife of the house would be on the exercise bike. My mother always wondered why such women didn't simply do their own cleaning if it was the exercise they wanted.
I've read it twice, once as a 19-year-old and then again about ten years later to see if I could better understand the main idea. I initially picked the book up because I wanted to dissolve the line between subject and object so as not to feel quite so separate from the world, as most teenagers do. The novel seemed to suggest that 'quality' was the thing that welded both worlds together, though quite how I couldn't really see. Pirsig led me right up to the moment of revelation and I was hanging on his every word until there it was, the answer, and then after closing the book I realised I didn't really get it at all.
Second time around what I liked most about the book was not the philosophical stuff but rather the travelogue, where his thoughts and opinions come out more naturally and not in massive chunks. When read just as a novel rather than the key to all wisdom, I think it's an enjoyable, well-structured and engaging novel.
I have since had 40 years to mull things over and I think what Pirsig might have been saying was that when you are in that frame of mind where you are so engaged that you forget yourself, then the two worlds of subject and object merge into one, inasmuch as you aren't aware of being separate. Later I read about Mihali Thingy's idea of 'flow' and to me it seemed like they were talking about very similar things.
I can't help but feel somewhat depressed about how irrelevant this is for my own life. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing of any kind, and particularly the kind of suburban detached housing this essay describes, is prohibitively expensive. I might get my parents' house once they pass away, if their end-of-life medical expenses don't drain the equity in it first like those of my grandmother did with her house. Barring that, I can't afford to buy built surroundings anywhere near where I grew up and live, that I might choose to care for myself. I pay rent to a landlord and the landlord decides how the physical structure will be managed, and I cannot afford to change this state of affairs.
Unless I leave the region to live somewhere else I have no particular community ties to, that has cheaper houses. Maybe the spiritual benefits of maintaining one's own home and possessions are great enough that it's worth uprooting the rest of my life over.
I think you can still practice this ethos as a renter, it just applies more to things you can take with you. Or, you apply it with the understanding it won't be permanent, that you'll be leaving part of yourself behind when you move. Such sweet sorrow. I always did improvements to my rented housing before we bought, although it's more practical in some places than in others.
I have two fig trees in my yard, and adore them. I definitely do not rake up the leaves, and the fruits never last long enough to splat on the ground. What variety do you have? We have a Chicago Hardy and I send the kids out to harvest figs every weekend. Maybe in a few more years we'll have too many to casually eat on a Saturday afternoon and I'll actually get to make jam or something.
“What are you saving your time for?”
For reading your essays and tweets, of course.
A life well spent
While I went to university and studied Eng Lit my brother-in-law became a mechanic. I think I used to look down on him but that all changed when it slowly began to dawn on me that I could do nothing useful while he could repair pretty much anything. He understood how things worked while I didn't. Just by looking at something he could see what its function must be while for me it was a bit of metal. It took me a long time to understand that it takes more thought to work out the best way to fix something than to remember who wrote Don Juan. He is now wealthy yet he still spends much of his time in his shed or garage making stuff or, like today, helping me repair an old oxidized outdoor lamp. I'm still useless at everything useful but at least I am now completely cured of my previous intellectual snobbery.
One underrated advantage for men: Women appreciate handy men. The dryer heating element went out a couple of weeks ago with a sopping wet load of laundry. A few youtube videos, a multimeter, a drill, and an $8 fuse later, it was good as new. I swear my wife was more proud of me for that than when I got promoted
“The happiest people you know are the busiest. The labor of your own two hands is the stuff of your life, for better or worse.” I can see you’re trying to convince me that it *is* possible for me to raise five kids, join the national guard, and buy the 100 year-old fixer-upper.
I believe in you
My next-door neighbor is incredibly meticulous with his lawn, but it takes him five hours to do what a hired crew could get done in half-an-hour with no difference in quality. He's retired with time on his hands and loves it though, and that's what matters. Others who don't have the time find themselves in an arms race against neighbors hiring a service with perfect lawns. Families with young kids and jobs don't have near the bandwidth to keep up.
You can just say "screw it" and do minimal lawn care since the kids are going to be tearing it up anyways, but your house will be the odd one out. Even if no one really cares as long as you mow every week, for those sensitive to status, it's aggravating.
Arms race is exactly the right way to describe it. The only way to win is to live in the kind of neighborhood that isn't competing in this way.
I'll bet he would do yours, too. I have an uncle who mows for several folks on his block.
Better to help out your neighbor than some employer of illegals.
I know this wasn't the focus of the post, but the nuisance of leaf blowers is real. It is impossible to enjoy a weekday suburban day without dealing with the sound. If labor were more expensive, time between lawn visits would be longer, more lawns would be covered in ivy or rocks, more homeowners would do their own lawns, and new lawns would be smaller. Landscaping is a good example of an industry where substitutes for cheap labor would actually raise quality of life. In this particular case, cheap labor sustains societal waste on a large scale.
I do all my own gardening and yard work, because my father and grandfathers did their own gardening and yard work. When I work in the yard, I am at one with my ancestors.
Also, I do not "clean up" leaves. I *harvest* leaves, shred them, and throw them in the composter. We have a bumper crop of leaves this year, which will yield lots of nice compost for mulching and soil enrichment.
It's good to be grounded.
I just mulch them with the lawnmower, tbqh (which interestingly is also what the local university says you should be doing anyway)
Mulching with a lawnmower is fine if (1) all leaves land on your lawn, and (2) you do not want compost
Compost is a thing I want down the line when the kids are a little bit bigger and will eat things that aren't mac and cheese and nuggets and can appreciate vegetables and fruits more (and helping out with harvesting planting etc).
beautiful essay, thanks for sharing.
A really good piece. Robert M. Pirsig and his hundred-times-repaired motorcycling gloves came to mind. And as you say, what are you going to do with the time you save? Watch another movie? Does anyone really believe that sitting watching movies and all day constitutes a good life?
There was a British sit-com in the 1970's called 'The Good life' about a middle-management office worker who gives up his 9-5 job and, with the help of his wife, turns his suburban home and garden into a mini allotment/farm. The humour comes from the contrast between the tough, earthy self-suffient life of Tom and Barbara Good and that of their posh, keep-up-with-the-Joneses nextdoor neighbours, Margot and Jerry. I don't think there was a single person in Britain who would have preferred to be the latter.
My mother, despite having been a schoolteacher, on retirement cleaned other people's houses and would sometimes come home with stories of how, while she was cleaning, the well-do-to wife of the house would be on the exercise bike. My mother always wondered why such women didn't simply do their own cleaning if it was the exercise they wanted.
I tried to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in college and bounced off, hard. I wonder if it would resonate now as an older man.
I've read it twice, once as a 19-year-old and then again about ten years later to see if I could better understand the main idea. I initially picked the book up because I wanted to dissolve the line between subject and object so as not to feel quite so separate from the world, as most teenagers do. The novel seemed to suggest that 'quality' was the thing that welded both worlds together, though quite how I couldn't really see. Pirsig led me right up to the moment of revelation and I was hanging on his every word until there it was, the answer, and then after closing the book I realised I didn't really get it at all.
Second time around what I liked most about the book was not the philosophical stuff but rather the travelogue, where his thoughts and opinions come out more naturally and not in massive chunks. When read just as a novel rather than the key to all wisdom, I think it's an enjoyable, well-structured and engaging novel.
I have since had 40 years to mull things over and I think what Pirsig might have been saying was that when you are in that frame of mind where you are so engaged that you forget yourself, then the two worlds of subject and object merge into one, inasmuch as you aren't aware of being separate. Later I read about Mihali Thingy's idea of 'flow' and to me it seemed like they were talking about very similar things.
I can't help but feel somewhat depressed about how irrelevant this is for my own life. I was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, where housing of any kind, and particularly the kind of suburban detached housing this essay describes, is prohibitively expensive. I might get my parents' house once they pass away, if their end-of-life medical expenses don't drain the equity in it first like those of my grandmother did with her house. Barring that, I can't afford to buy built surroundings anywhere near where I grew up and live, that I might choose to care for myself. I pay rent to a landlord and the landlord decides how the physical structure will be managed, and I cannot afford to change this state of affairs.
Unless I leave the region to live somewhere else I have no particular community ties to, that has cheaper houses. Maybe the spiritual benefits of maintaining one's own home and possessions are great enough that it's worth uprooting the rest of my life over.
I think you can still practice this ethos as a renter, it just applies more to things you can take with you. Or, you apply it with the understanding it won't be permanent, that you'll be leaving part of yourself behind when you move. Such sweet sorrow. I always did improvements to my rented housing before we bought, although it's more practical in some places than in others.
I have two fig trees in my yard, and adore them. I definitely do not rake up the leaves, and the fruits never last long enough to splat on the ground. What variety do you have? We have a Chicago Hardy and I send the kids out to harvest figs every weekend. Maybe in a few more years we'll have too many to casually eat on a Saturday afternoon and I'll actually get to make jam or something.