A fine wooden desk sits in my room. It’s one of a number that my grandfather refinished. This was his hobby: hunting from one yard sale to the next; eyeing cast-off, beaten-up furniture and evaluating by a checklist only he could see; setting each new acquisition on his workshop operating table; and emerging months later with something reinforced, refinished, and utterly transformed. He was an artist. When I knew I was bound for DC, I drove the desk 400 miles north with me.
Same as I know the desk is something special, I also suspect it’s something I’ll never make. I’m not “handy;” I’ve met only a few people from my generation who are. “Handiness”—the ability look at a problem, rifle through a toolbox, and know immediately how to solve it—seems for a lot of us to be going the way of calligraphy, dedicated photography, or even the humble hometown newspaper. With stuff both cheaper and more complicated, buying another is easier than repairing the one you have.
But before mourning Millennials’ callous abandonment of skills once thought integral to the life of an industrious man or woman (carpentry! canning! sewing!), it’s worth considering what we’ve learned in their stead. This is an interesting exercise: often times, something doesn’t even seem like a “skill” until you meet someone who can’t do it.
I’ve been thinking about this disconnect quite a lot over the last month as I’ve rebuilt my website from the ground up, working through web design challenges I’d never have dreamed of when I first bought my domain a year and a half ago. I’ve learned how to build a test server and migrate content; make graphics responsive and parallax’d and pretty; design a logo; crop, cut, encode, and embed videos as backgrounds; match font families; and actually understand a full analytics report.
At its most sublime, the experience has felt like some sort of virtual sculpting—shaping online contours into a unique space where your content lives and thrives, where visitors can be gently guided from one page to the next. Of course, most of the time it hasn’t been sublime at all. It’s been teeth-gnashingly frustrating, fruitless and seemingly insurmountable, requiring too much effort for too little reward.
I suspect that, gazing at a half-finished piece after hours of sweat and nothing to show for it, my grandfather sometimes felt the same way.
This foray into web design (and weirdly long meditations on the nature of refinished furniture) have helped me realize that Millennials aren’t losing the ability to make and shape things. Rather, the medium in which we work is just different. Today’s fundamental building block isn’t a “block” at all—it’s information. Learning how to cut, paste, aggregate, reshape, present, and distribute this content requires a diverse set of proficiencies; a different kind of toolbox. The result is a new, distinctly twenty-first century sort of carpentry.
And as the value of information continues to grow—as the internet plays a more and more dominant role in our lives—this is a trade of which virtually everyone will need a basic level of understanding.
Hello! I should say thank you for thee read. I like this article.