An Urgent Message: Learn How to Do Something

Five years ago, it hit me. Despite attaining a PhD, despite earning tenure, despite winning all kinds of research and teaching awards…

I didn’t know how to do anything.

Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

Zero.

Several years ago, our air conditioner shut off. I called an HVAC service. They sent someone out. They charged us about a hundred bucks.

All they had to do was… flip a circuit breaker.

That’s all.

It was just a little embarrassing. What else? I didn’t know how to fix a toilet. I didn’t know how to wire an appliance. I didn’t know how to grow a tomato. I didn’t know how to build a computer. I didn’t know how to do, well, anything. I had two skills: I could write a viral article, and I could write a long, boring one for an academic journal. Honestly, I barely knew how to change a tire.

It was a little ironic that the book I enjoyed teaching most wasn’t a novel. It was The Mind at Work, by Mike Rose, a book that uncovered the overlooked intellectual demands of blue-collar jobs. My developmental students loved it. (Well, most of them.) While my colleagues went around bragging about their degrees and demanding everyone address them as “Doctor,” my students called me by my first name. I lived in quiet awe of the plumbers who came out to our house to install a sink or a water heater. Part of me wanted to be more like them.

I’m not sure when exactly it occurred to me that my decades of book learning were about to become useless. Living through pandemics, wars, spiraling inflation, a boom in artificial intelligence, and other disasters certainly helped my awareness along. More and more, with every service call, with every visit from a plumber or electrician, my helplessness felt more and more like a death sentence.

I was going to have to confront it.

More than any prediction of deadly disease or famine, more than any fear of starving or going without water, what I really feared was the helplessness. That’s what kept me up at night, my lack of real-world, practical skills.

I didn’t know how to do anything.

If the apocalypse erupted, if civilization collapsed, or we just had a week without power, I wouldn’t know what to do. I would feel like an idiot. I would contribute nothing to my community. I would have zero leverage with bandits.

But that was five years ago.

What changed?

Everything.

Two years ago, I quit my job as a professor. Deep down, beneath all the other reasons, there’s the core reason. I didn’t want to waste another minute of my life writing academic articles that nobody, not even the peer reviewers, really wanted to read. I didn’t want to spend another minute writing reports for deans who would rather go to wine tastings in the middle of the afternoon. I didn’t want to spend another Friday stuck in an endless department meeting, talking about problems nobody was ever going to do anything about. I didn’t want to spend another weekend grading papers that students didn’t want to write, and I didn’t want to read. Not because they were bad papers. Because there were other things we needed to be doing. There were other things my students needed to be learning.

How to do things.

Today, I passed the final exam for an electrical wiring course that was designed to take a year, with a 99 percent. I finished the course in a few months. I also finished a 200-page graphic novel that I made with Blender, one of the hardest programs out there. Oh, and I made a 200-page survival guide.

My head feels like it’s going to melt. I gave myself a case of “mouse shoulder” that’s going to take a few weeks to heal.

(I’m going to pace myself a little going forward…)

But I did it.

I’m not done by any means. I’ve got a lot more to learn. But: Now, I know how to build a computer. I know how to grow a tomato. I know how to rig up a drip irrigation system. I know how to change a tire. I know how to fix a toilet. I know how to wire appliances. I know how to fit pipes. I know how to install a receptacle. A few weeks ago, I installed a Level 2 charger for our EV, saving us about a thousand bucks. When we met with plumbers to talk about a permanent composting toilet, I could offer to design parts for them with 3D software. I could actually have conversations with them. One of them kept asking:

“What do you do for a living again?”

“I’m a… writer.”

“Ah.”

My experience might feel familiar to others out there, those of us who grew up in the suburbs in the 90s, with busy parents. It’s strange how fast generational knowledge can evaporate. My dad grew up in farm country, getting chased by bulls, using out houses, hunting ducks on rickety little boats. He knew how to fix just about anything in our house. When he didn’t, he had friends who could show him what to do. My grandpa was a car mechanic. He even knew how to fix a tank. My other grandparents knew how to grow vegetables and skin fish. For various reasons I won’t bore you with, these skills never made it to me.

I’ll just bore you with this reason:

Millennials like me were sold hard on book learning and fancy degrees. Everyone around us, including the television, assured us that we would do just fine as long as we studied hard and made good grades.

Everything would turn out okay.

My high school didn’t even have a vocational program. There was no shop class. There was no home economics.

Not even a chemistry lab.

Instead of learning how to replace a car battery, I learned how to play the piano and the cello. I learned how to run a mile in five minutes.

I learned how to operate a cash register.

I learned how to take tests.

Now, everything has changed. The skills that were going to guarantee us long, lucrative careers have turned out to be complete liabilities.

Now it’s the ones who didn’t go to college that look smart. The ones who went to trade school, the ones who learned a vocation, they’re the ones least likely to be automated out of a job. They’ll be the last ones replaced.

My brother wasn’t like me. Although we both hated school, he hated it even more. He refused to cooperate. He barely graduated high school. He never went to college. He studied electrical wiring at a tech school. Then he sort of drifted for a while, and now he works on cars for a living. Out of all my friends, with all of our fancy degrees and awards, he’s the one with the best career prospects.

My dad often said he wished my brother were more like me. Now I wish I were more like my bother. If I had it all to do over again, I’m not sure I would’ve gone into teaching. I’m not sure I would’ve subjected myself to the endless hours of studying for exams and writing a dissertation.

After all, I was always going to wind up here.

If you’re someone who pays attention to the climate news, if you’ve been following the trajectory of AI, then you don’t need me to predict the future for you. It’s pretty clear where things are headed. While this or that viral article will tell you all the reasons why you should fill your house with canned food, there’s something even more important, and it’s a lot harder.

Learn how to do something.

It’s the most important thing you can do. Learn how to do something that will serve you in the future. Learn something that will make you harder to replace with a robot. Learn how to do something that will help your friends and family. Learn something that you can use to trade goods and services.

You don’t have to learn it in one day. You don’t have to learn it in a month. You don’t even have to learn how to do it well. Not at first. Learn how to do it badly. Learn how to make mistakes. Learn how to get frustrated. Learn how to give up and then come back to it a few days later.

There’s another good reason you should learn how to do something: The technofeudalist overlords don’t want you to learn how to do anything. Not anymore. They want you to rely on their robots. They want you to keep delegating your life to them. They want you to be helpless. When you’re helpless, when you don’t know how to do anything, you’re easier to control.

There’s one more reason:

When you learn how to do something, you gain more than a skill. You gain confidence. You gain a sense of self-worth. You gain a little peace of mind. You’re not worthless. You’re not helpless. When disaster hits you, you’ll be able to figure things out. You’ll be able to keep learning how to do things.

You don’t have to learn how to do everything.

Just learn how to do one thing.

Go from there.

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