The separation of thinking from doing

I had never really thought about the downside to the assembly line until reading this chapter. The assembly line allowed us to mass produce things, but also took away thought from action. As Americans, we are incredible consumers. We can have pretty much anything we want if we have the money. We never have to wait until crops are in season, or even only get what is available locally. Our goal as a country is to get more stuff to the point that we don't even care if it's coming from sweatshops in Asia. Our need for everything right now has driven us to replacing knowledgeable craftsmen with machine-like humans in assembly lines, to just replacing humans with machines. Thought has been taken out of so many things, which also makes us more likely to throw something away and buy a new one than try and get the old thing fixed. The knowledge that once was required to make something is gone, and one big contributor to why blue-collar jobs are often so looked down upon.

I've always thought it would be great to live in a time where cities were self-sustainable. There were people who were farmers, tailors, blacksmiths, carpenters, etc. and each was an expert in his or her field, gaining them more respect. When you put thinking back into doing, jobs automatically become more important. Crawford even talks about the degradation of white-collar jobs now. I worked in an office at North Park for my first three years here and most days I felt a little bit of myself dying inside because everything I did required very little to no thinking. While I now have a lot of respect for people who do that for a living and their soul remains alive, I hope to never work in an office setting again. As Crawford points out in his closing paragraph, not everyone needs to be working in an office, or even go to college. And even though it was really directed toward people looking to go into college, it made me feel so much more encouraged in my crisis of grad school vs. no grad school next year.