DJ Strouse

The following post was inspired by a NY Times article shared with me by Lena Enck, a recent USC graduate spending at least the next year doing good on the Indian subcontinent. It is adapted from an email response. I highly encourage you to read the above article first, one, because the following is written directly in response to it (and will therefore make more sense with the article as background) and two, and more importantly, it is the most passionate and poignant essay I have read on the dismal state of affairs that is the common Western office job.

A beautiful article… it echoes many of the conversations I’ve had over the past year on the necessity of feeding passion, regardless of whether those passions fall along “well-respected” career paths. The article also hints at a growing illness in western society that I’ve grown sensitive to – the overwhelming lack of knowledge about how stuff works. Everyday people use cars, computers, and can openers and yet if the slightest thing goes wrong, oil needs changed, a fan burns out, or a screw comes loose, they’re completely and utterly lost. These devices are black boxes to them; magical machines whose output is the desired effect of the tool. They don’t realize that deep down, regardless of the device, there is always some kind of mechanical chain of events that is going on. How does this happen? How do people become so disconnected from the things they use everyday? Because, as Crawford points out, they don’t use their hands. They don’t play. Taking things apart, reshuffling them, and putting them back together is the heart of understanding how something works. Even in something seemingly abstract like theoretical physics, this is how we have to work. We take our equations apart, subject them to the most extreme of inputs, and study what comes out. We deconstruct and play.

And yet, the answer is not the wholesale abandonment of all “knowledge workers” to the physical labor market. That’s entirely unsustainable and would be throwing away all the wonderful advantages of the global economy that the digital labor market has enabled (there would be no such unbounded exuberance and optimism in India right now if the digital economy were not so). What we need is feedback – tangible evidence of results for those whose jobs require typing instead of tinkering. Not stock quotes, not steadily increasing bar graphs, and not met quotas. We need feedback that is in sync with our biology – the kind of feedback that our brains can value and appreciate. The above three metrics might or might not be good indications of worker output but they are most definitely not suitably satisfying rewards for a hard day’s work. What do humans want to see? I’d love to see some hard research on this topic (and surely some exists) but I will offer some speculation based on experience.

Humans are satisfied by the physical products of their labor in which they understand the necessity and function of each component. Humans are also satisfied by the smiles of others whom they have helped. That is, they appreciate gratitude – not the formal gratitude expressed at the end of an email but the genuine gratitude evident on the face of someone who has just been helped. Both of these types of biologically satisfying feedback are possible to offer in many workplaces. Simply displaying continually updated prototypes or finished models of a company’s product can provide the satisfying jolt of reality that “knowledge workers” yearn for. Companies might also invite clients to the office after a job well done for a few beers or an informal lunch; barring that, they could set up an easy-to-use video conferencing service that lets clients upload videos of gratitude and play them quietly in the lounge.

Beyond the problem of feedback, there are certainly other maladies that plague the corporate world and one of those is the overabundance of rules. Barry Schwartz recently gave a TED talk illustrating the dangers this entails. First, an overabundance of rules undermines individual responsibility. No longer is a worker’s first responsiblity to the satisfaction of the client, or to put it more humanely, from one human being to the another. Rigid rules erect a barrier of metrics smack in the middle of that chain. The worker is now responsible to an abstract set of conditions, often arbitrarily determined by his or manager’s penchant for even, rounded numbers, rather than any specific desires of the client. Conditions might be easily defined and met, but they don’t express gratitude. Neither do they require much thinking, leading me to the second problem with an overabundance of rules – the discouragement of independent thinking. A set of rigid company procedures might come close to guaranteeing a consistent output, but it will inevitably be a bland, tasteless output. Worse, such conditions systematically turn workers into docile beasts of burden. Never given the chance to exercise their own agency or creativity, their minds will slowly atrophy until they retire early to cower in the corner of a old folks’ home, muttering to themselves about remembering to place the label on the left of from 85A. Backing out of this increasingly esoteric rant for a moment, the essential need is thus: we as a society need to recognize that technologicla change in the workplace has once again outpaced our cultural reaction. More than a century ago, this occurred with the development of factories. Workers wallowed in unfathomable conditions until enough became fed up to the point of demanding minimums safety conditions and the age of laborers and maximums on the number of hours worked. Now it is time to recognize that humans need minimal levels of independence on the job. Without a sense of agency or creativity, humans become docile, stupid workers and, even worse, depressed, unhappy human beings.

If you enjoyed this article, I highly encourage you to read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Many of Crawford’s ideas are very obviously influenced by this work. It is a deep and powerful yet somewhat difficult book also highlighting the lessons of working with your hands… and much more. Check out the review I wrote just after reading it for more details and impressions beyond the spontaneous ones generated as I write this now.