Do Nothing: Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing and Underliving

by Celeste Headlee

As the industrial era chugged ahead, craftsmen were pulled into the factories. A glassblower couldn’t compete with a glass factory. So he sold his tools and took up a position on a factory floor, where the instruments and machinery were owned not by workers but by the employer. When a worker left a job, he no longer took with him the means to find new work. He relied entirely on a new employer to supply the tools and the resources. Again, this was a significant transfer of power. Because of this shift, the world lost many of its specialized artists and woodworkers and sculptors and metalsmiths. (Here’s an interesting exercise: Take a look at some pictures of England’s Houses of Parliament, built between 1839 and 1842. Imagine how much it would cost to have all that work done today and you’ll understand one aspect of what was abandoned when we lost our craftsman class.) In factories, workers usually didn’t develop the same pride in their work as they churned out dozens of items every day.