Shop Class as Soulcraft Audiobook

Matthew B Crawford is a philosopher who also works as an electrician and mechanic. This non-fiction book starts from the daily puzzle of office life: what people there actually do all day. Many who sit in cubicles feel a sense of unreality and powerlessness, and Crawford takes that feeling seriously.

His subject is how to live concretely in a world that grows more abstract. His argument is aimed at the push to turn everyone into a "knowledge worker". He holds that this rests on a false split between thinking and doing, the hand on one side and the mind on the other.

By his account the split began a century ago with the assembly line. He shows in detail how it degrades work for people on both sides of it. He questions the idea on economic grounds and on psychological ones.

The second half of the case draws on his own years in the trades. Manual work, he says, is unlike factory labour: it demands a lot of thinking and can bring real pleasure. Builders and mechanics cannot be outsourced, they tie people to their local communities, and they take pride in work that is useful.

The book mixes social criticism with personal reflection and a plain argument for self-reliance. It is written for readers who felt steered toward college and then an office against their own inclinations, and for anyone weighing what makes work worth doing. The tone is thoughtful and often funny.