I’m fighting a war in my head, and the war is about AI and its perils versus a slow, measured approach to progress that balances technology, science, and some of the basics that our society needs to address so that those who aren’t wanting to deal with tech in the workplace are held in high esteem. This is more on what I wrote earlier in June.
Just before I yell at my garden dude, he finally gets around to scheduling a crew for my sorry garden. I’ve been waiting since April. Now, he’s out on a holiday break while Europe is once again in the frying pan. The truth is, there is a shortage of men and women working in the trades, and while I’ve focused on AI for the last two weeks, I need to muse on how AI and soft skills are affecting the reality of finding tradespersons.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the trades were still alive and doing well. A journeyman could earn a good living. If you had good skills, you could shelter, feed, and clothe yourself and a family. A plumber was paid well for fixing the crazy in your sink because you needed a functioning drain, and the plumber could keep it functional. When I was growing up, our plumber was a guy who was an anesthesiologist, and on the days he was not doing that, he worked with his hands fixing household sinks. He said he liked to “tinker.” He was good at it.
There were skilled workers who could weld, pound nails, and understand the mechanics of repair. Going into the trades was a good thing to do. Back then, high schools had a track system. The problem with that is that an A-track student who got stellar grades might have been better off working with their hands versus heading off to a university to work in a “profession.” The person in the C-track who is thought to be fit to do trade might be the genius who discovers new ways of envisioning space; an engineer may be happiest with plants instead of a computer. I think we got it wrong then. And maybe we’re still getting it wrong today.
When I put my garden in, I was able to find a gardener and have an ease-in scheduling service to maintain it. A year later when I wanted to run water outside, it became clear that finding someone would take some time. I was told there was a shortage of people to do what I needed. Now, the garden folk are busy as they can be with more work than they can handle. I’m told it’s like that in all the trades. It is the trades that keep society functioning!
When your sink needs to be fixed or you need to tune a piano, a geek can’t do that work. A tradesperson can. It’s a different skill, and it requires a different type of knowledge, and I’m concerned that it’s fading away. The people that would have considered a trade are being seduced by tech. You don’t start asking the question of who is out there doing skilled labor until you need skilled labor. It is only then that you find out the reality of the trades.
Why?
This is my own opinion: Society has shifted to a belief that skilled labor is for the less capable. I don’t believe this to be true at all. Someone who works with wood and uses a machine to create the right cut needs algebra and geometry in order to understand angles. This person visualizes things in a way that others may not. The craftsperson turns out works of practicality and beauty. I want that person boiling things! I don’t want them sitting at a desk or stuck indoors. The skilled builder sees a piece of wood differently than you might see its potential. They are intelligent in ways others are not. There was a time when it was valued in a different way.
Make a jump in time travel back with me to the days of the US frontier. It was the restless soul who left the cities to explore the wild. Somehow, civility was too much for someone who didn’t fit the mold or have the ability to have a skill set that allowed them to blend into proper society. Heading west was an option. The person heading west wasn’t the professional or the highly educated soul. Misfits laid the groundwork for new settlements. And with this movement came arrogance, intolerance, and a justification for genocide of the Native American.
What does any of this have to do with mental health? Everything.
Who we are as a person is a sum of those who came before us, raised us, and may have forced us to flee our past environments, embrace them, or challenge them. If we challenge and question things, we must turn inside. I believe that this is what is happening now, in our time. In the past, we acted and didn’t stop to think if what we were doing in moving things forward was good for ourselves, society, and our planet—we just made the move.
We’re on the cusp of a new leap into how we think, behave, and work. Are we thinking it through? Are we reworking society without fully understanding the why of it all?
As humans, we have a need to grow, survive, belong, and thrive. We can’t thrive in fullness without understanding the why and how of it all. And so, I look back several paragraphs to ask myself this: Are we pushing out the tradesperson because the few are dictating what this brave new world is or will look like? Will there be respect for the person who desires to not sit at a desk? Is there belonging for them? If so, where will it be, and will it be respected?
The issues for the worker who is a tradesperson/craftsperson at heart have changed. The person who needs to leave the mainstream work life for parts unknown to find something that works for them is looking different today than it looked fifty years ago. Where is our new frontier? Maybe the new is found in the old ways and recognizing that a person who wants to plant seeds is doing a good thing. Maybe a woman who can fix a bike or a washing machine and keep it going so that it is functional and doesn’t add to the massive landfill is healthy for our society. We need to be questioning our consumerism.
What if we slowed progress down just enough to ask questions, and to listen to our personal responses? This is what mental health is about. We need to expand awareness within and set personal boundaries that allow us to not be pushed too fast into changes we aren’t fully understanding. It’s about being prepared for the future before we allow the future to impact our lives.
While the engineer might design the pipeline, the builders have to overcome what is on paper. They need to design new tools and new ways of working with the science, and it is skilled tradespersons that will develop the new tools for a new job.
Here’s hoping that when the garden crew comes later this week, there will be a new kid on the crew: a young person who likes making gardens grow, and who wants to understand soil and what makes a garden attract the butterflies and the bees.