1. Why Do We Still Need Craftsmanship in an Age of Full Automation?
During the Third Wave—the Information Revolution—the value created by physical labor and manufacturing steadily declined. Instead, high value shifted toward cognitive labor and service industries. The reason was simple.
Intangible assets—things built from symbols, numbers, and code—have nearly zero marginal cost.
Once a design exists, producing one more unit costs almost nothing. Capital efficiency skyrockets.
In a world with little physical friction, systems don’t depreciate the way factories do.
Investment becomes an entry barrier and an asset, not a cost.
At the moment when machines replaced high-value physical labor, human intelligence became the scarce resource.
That was the logic of the last few decades. But AI changes everything. Once machines begin replacing cognitive labor too, humans are left with fewer ways to generate economic value. That’s why people like Elon Musk now talk about a future where most people live on basic income instead of labor. But human agency is not built on consumption alone.
Human agency = (a life that contributes to others’ survival and meaning) + (one’s own economic survival).
Meaning does not come only from dopamine-driven consumption. Internally, it comes from enduring the pain of creation. Externally, it comes from contributing to the survival of others. For too long, we have trained only our brains—sitting at desks, manipulating symbols and formulas. We became people who know Ohm’s Law (I = V/R) but can’t replace a wall outlet. General knowledge became abstract and disembodied. Now AI is replacing exactly that kind of generalized symbolic knowledge.
👉 If we want to preserve human agency, we must refocus on meaning created through embodied action—through the human body interacting with the world. To start with the conclusion, craftsmanship in the AI era must create objects that allow us to perceive the meaning of life anew through artistic sensibility.
Let’s get more concrete. Philosophers of craftsmanship like Matthew Crawford, Richard Sennett, and Michael Polanyi argued that abstract desk labor is not true participation in the world. Instead, mechanics, instrument repairers, and experimental scientists interpret reality through rich, embodied contexts. They engage directly with physical causality. Their insight is largely correct. But it raises three serious problems.
First: How Do You Survive While Being Deeply Absorbed in Craft?
It sounds great to say “listen to the object and immerse yourself in the work.” But real life includes rent, materials, taxes, labor costs, and family obligations. You cannot live only in dialogue with objects. You must deal with survival. When Home Depot and IKEA decompose complex work into standardized modules, and global supply chains integrate manual labor markets, it becomes hard to romanticize woodworking as pure immersion in the world.
Survival is not a philosophical footnote. It is the central constraint.
Second: Traditional Craft Philosophy Is Trapped in Hand-Skill Romanticism
Most people today work in offices. They cannot simply quit and become mechanics or carpenters. “Just do it as a hobby,” people say. But when you are exhausted from wage labor, even hobbies feel heavy. And if you start enjoying physical work too much, your desk job begins to feel meaningless. That psychological split is hard to endure. If I had never fallen in love with hand-crafted work, I probably would have stayed in corporate jobs or gone to a PhD program. Instead, I opened a pub, and somehow ended up in Georgia.😭
So in the short term, we need alternatives for office workers—not just romantic calls to quit everything and work with wood.
Third: Modern Civilization Makes Pure Skill Asceticism Unrealistic
Today, AI translation is almost perfect. If I sit alone in my room studying Russian for two hours a day— “спрашивать means to ask, imperfective; просить means to request…”— from a purely functional perspective, this is extremely inefficient.
Of course, philosophers like Merleau-Ponty and Iris Murdoch understood language as embodied gesture—learning a language expands one’s lived world. That ideal is still valid. Direct experience without technological mediation matters. But when easier functional paths exist, deliberately choosing hardship becomes psychologically painful.
So the real question becomes: How do we integrate discipline and convenience into daily life without destroying either?
Craftsmanship must be reinterpreted for the age of AI. This Endorphin Craftsmanship series will address these questions more fully. This article is only the introduction. First, we need to examine how craftsmanship is currently misunderstood.
2. Why Classic Craft Ideals of Matthew Crawford No Longer Inspire People (A Critical Examination)
(1) Listening to Objects While Starving
Imagine a broken motorcycle. One mechanic replaces module A with module B. Another dismantles everything, listens to the engine, feels vibrations, and diagnoses the root cause. From the customer’s perspective, both outcomes are identical: the bike runs. But Crawford argues that the second mechanic lives a richer life because he listens to “the voice of the object.” He does not impose abstract categories onto the world—he engages in direct dialogue with it. Through this, he experiences agency: to govern the object is to govern one’s relation to the world. This insight remains powerful. But classical craft philosophy narrowed craftsmanship into functional expertise.
In earlier industrial stages, when machines were unreliable and quality varied wildly, simply making things work already granted technicians ‘near-shamanic‘ status. People who could produce unique physical properties or restore broken systems became revered specialists. In that framework, meaning becomes identical to competence. Craft becomes a quest for mastery and recognition from customers and peers. Ironically, this is exactly why craftsmanship now feels boring to many people.
Remember the framework from the Phenomenology of Boredom? When you:
- lack trust from the world (customers, mentors, systems),
- follow manuals without controlling the narrative of why you are doing things,
- and lack bodily skill to diagnose problems intuitively,
then the sounds you hear mean nothing. You cannot interpret them. In the past, slow time allowed people to endure long training processes(World, Narrative, Body skill). Everyone moved slowly together. Today, everything accelerates. Focusing on one narrow functional expertise becomes unbearable.
Capitalism’s greatest power lies in modularization. Modern systems are designed as independent subsystems. Engines become replaceable units. Electronics become sealed modules. Production speeds increase. Quality becomes controllable. Craftsmen disappear. Operators remain. But craftsmanship assumes interdependent systems—patterns understood through intuition and experience. That world is gone. Architecture itself has changed. Now corporations provide diagnostic tools and replacement kits. YouTube and AI democratize technical knowledge. Reaching “good enough” functionality is easy.
👉 So if you train only to “listen to objects,” you will starve.
Mechanical labor now splits into two classes:
- Those who repair Harley-Davidsons while selling upper-class lifestyle identity.
- And those who replace Honda parts as standardized operators.
The same applies to interior carpentry. IKEA plus basic installation already solves most storage needs.
You can chase ultra-high-end craftsmanship, but skill acquisition takes too long. Most people starve before mastering it. The debate is no longer mind vs. body. The real question is: How do you survive?
(2) How a Hybrid of Merleau-Ponty and Hegel Ended Up Suffocating Craftsmanship
Let me start with the conclusion. Matthew Crawford turned craftsmanship into a kind of impossible moral ideal by combining two very different philosophies at once: Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of process, and Hegel’s logic of excellence and results. As a result, craftsmanship became something people admire, but do not practice. It feels noble—but abstract and unrealistic.
Crawford builds the philosophical genealogy of craftsmanship roughly like this:
First, Enlightenment philosophy liberates individuals from tradition and oppression (Locke, Descartes).
➡️ Then intellectualism develops, emphasizing symbols and representations as reality, and the autonomy of consciousness (Kant, early Husserl).
➡️ Modern people come to believe attention exists independently of the world.
➡️ Corporations invade this separated mental space, filling it with products and capturing attention.
➡️ The self becomes scattered, disconnected from the world, and boredom deepens.
➡️ To recover agency, individuals must confront the world directly.
➡️ Immersion in direct dialogue with objects becomes the solution (Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Iris Murdoch).
➡️ But the ultimate goal of life is excellence and absolute knowledge (Hegel). Therefore, the true craftsman is one who works like Merleau-Ponty, but achieves like Hegel.
This genealogy has serious problems. Let’s examine them one by one.
First: You Cannot Work Like Merleau-Ponty and Aim for Hegelian Excellence at the Same Time
The logic itself is contradictory. It says: Work by listening to objects and immersing yourself in the process—but aim for dialectical excellence in the final result. Hegel emphasized historical progress toward truth, toward a final synthesis. His philosophy is fundamentally teleological and idealist.
Merleau-Ponty, by contrast, rejected fixed meanings in perception. He criticized scientific abstraction for stripping life of its uniqueness and playfulness. If later thinkers used his name to justify competitive excellence and recognition battles, he likely would have been deeply uncomfortable with that. The same goes for Iris Murdoch. She studied Russian not to gain social recognition, but because she loved Russian literature. It was not a struggle for status—it was devotion to a world. So what is really happening here?
Perhaps this hybrid logic allows people to justify present incompetence by saying, “I’m enjoying the process,” while secretly projecting their desire to be recognized as professionals in the future.
But real craftsmen do not obsess over sound, wood grain, or knife technique in order to gain approval.
They do it because they enjoy exploration itself. One of my friends plays guitar well. He passionately explains the tonal differences between classical and acoustic guitars. Honestly, I can barely hear the difference. He is not trying to impress anyone. He simply enjoys the investigation. I, on the other hand, once tried to learn guitar for recognition. Then I saw a seven-year-old play better than me, and I lost all interest. Recognition struggles do not last when mixed with inferiority.
At some point, pure functional excellence becomes meaningless. Once an object works and fulfills its purpose, the rest is artistic exploration. If we fail to separate these two domains, craftsmanship becomes nothing more than moral preaching.
Modern people naturally ask: “It already works. Why should I struggle more? For what?”
Craftsmanship was originally about fullness, immersion, and freedom. But it became dull because it turned into a doctrine of excellence and recognition.
Second: The Genealogy Is Built Backward
Another problem is that this philosophical lineage is constructed retrospectively. Connecting ideas simply because they look similar in hindsight ignores historical context. No philosophy is created to predict future problems. It emerges to address the concrete crises of its own time.
Locke was a political philosopher. He had nothing to do with capitalism or modern epistemology as later interpreted. Social contract theory and Enlightenment rationalism were responses to divine monarchy, not attempts to trap humans inside representations. Descartes’ methodological doubt was about establishing certainty, not about creating alienated subjects. To claim that these thinkers prepared the ground for corporate attention capture is a stretch.
The same applies to Kant. Kant emphasized autonomy not to fragment attention, but to establish individuals as moral agents in a post-Christian world. He wanted to give responsibility back to individuals, not dissolve them into distraction. Crawford likely wanted to position craftsmanship as an anti-thesis to Enlightenment rationalism, as a way to restore agency. But the historical logic does not hold. As a result, craftsmanship appears irrelevant to modern life.
People think: “Isn’t that medieval stuff? Why should I care?”
Let’s Be Clear About What Really Happened
What turns the world into symbols and abstractions is not reason itself. It is:
- instrumental rationality (science, mathematics, law),
- combined with capitalism, which converts everything into money.
If we misunderstand this, we imagine a fantasy history where medieval people lived in direct harmony with objects, and modern people only stare at symbols behind desks. That is not true. Craftsmanship is not a medieval relic. It is a modern concept.
👉 We need it to explain why non-scientific, non-capitalist forms of labor still matter—and how people can survive while practicing them. Without that explanation, craftsmanship becomes nothing more than nostalgia.
(3) Romanticizing the Past: Was Life Once Full of Meaning While Modern Life Is Empty?
Most scholars have never made a living through physical labor. That is why they often fall into romantic nostalgia about manual work. They criticize Fordism and Taylorism as if efficiency itself were evil. Instead, they admire images of tough men shouting, swinging hammers, and solving problems through sweat and grit. To be fair, that kind of work does involve immersion. There is a sense of agency in dealing directly with the world. But when people mix this nostalgia with phenomenology and describe medieval-style craft communities as spiritually rich worlds of bodily engagement, something feels off.
Here is my core claim: There was never a historical period when people found deep meaning in physical labor itself.
Philosophies that place the body at the center of meaning— that try to overcome alienation from abstract consciousness— are products of the 20th century. Now, in the age of AI, their relevance is finally becoming obvious to the general public. That means craftsmanship is not an ancient worldview.
It is a thoroughly modern response to modern conditions. If we keep romanticizing it as something from the past, people will conclude it has nothing to do with their current lives.
Why Physical Labor Was Never Romantic in the Past
Let me offer a hypothesis. Yuval Harari argues in Sapiens that agriculture emerged when wheat domesticated humans, forcing settlement. But archaeology shows many examples of settled societies that existed before agriculture. For example:
- the Natufian culture in the Levant,
- and Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey, dating back over 12,000 years.
Here is my interpretation. Hunter-gatherers lived by moving. But population growth eventually outpaced the land’s natural recovery. When tribes returned to former territories, the food was gone—eaten by others. Now they had to defend land. Settlement began. War and raids became frequent. To defend territory, crops like wheat—plants that thrive under stable conditions—became strategically useful. In Asia, this meant rice. That is how agriculture emerged.
In hunter-gatherer societies, when resources declined or environments became harsh, people moved.
Work was limited, and labor often had festive or communal aspects. But once settlement began, survival required winning wars and accumulating food. Nature and rival groups posed constant threats. People worked relentlessly just to defend their position.
So no—there was never a golden age of romantic manual labor. Physical labor was always a form of survival combat. Praising the past does nothing to help modern people. Most people already sense that academic nostalgia does not match reality.
👉 So the real question is not: “How can we go back?”. It is: “Can we build lives where bodily agency and deep engagement with the world coexist with economic survival?” Craftsmanship must answer this question.
(4) The Myth of the Craft Community
Is it really noble education to make sushi apprentices wash dishes for three years without teaching them how to shape rice? One major reason modern people mock craftsmanship is because craft communities have been overly mythologized. In the idealized image, craft communities have: shared standards, mutual learning, authority based on technical mastery and understanding of objects. But in reality, many so-called craft communities— including academic research labs—look more like this:
- You are denied funding if you lack skills, but no one teaches you those skills.
- Seniors and professors curse at you if your work is poor.
- Professors are absent due to personal issues, so you are told to water plants instead.
- You offer co-author and get job recommendations.
- Everyone calls each other “mentor” in public, but gossips behind closed doors.
- Seniors avoid training juniors because they fear competition.
- Thesis committees appear democratic, but decisions follow the main advisor’s preferences.
In such communities: skill becomes loyalty, excellence becomes obedience, objectivity becomes private power.
One reason Max Weber proposed bureaucratic systems based on procedures and documentation—
instead of personal authority— was the extreme corruption and inefficiency of medieval craft guilds. To Weber, medieval guilds were not communities of virtue, but interest groups enforcing monopolies, hierarchy, and exclusion.Ironically, later sociologists like Matthew Crawford, Richard Sennett became nostalgic about those very guilds. 🧐🧐 (Weber already wrote his book 120 years ago !)
So here is the real challenge: Is it possible to build a craft-based life without craft communities?
3. Where Do We Go From Here?
I want to propose a third path. Not a life of recognition battles. Not a life of passive resignation. But a way of living that awakens survival instincts in harsh reality and forges the self through pain. I call this Endorphin Craftsmanship. Endorphin craftsmanship is not limited to manual skills or technical excellence. It is a philosophy of organizing immersive bodily labor into a rhythm of life that also supports economic survival. This path means:
- securing cash flow instead of chasing romantic ideals,
- standing alone instead of relying on toxic hierarchies,
- taming AI as a tool instead of rejecting it.
It is a brutally modern and fiercely wild form of craftsmanship. In Parts 2 through 7, I will break down its concrete structure and practical methods step by step. What we need is not museum craftsmen. We need wild craftsmen who can survive now.
So.. Why Listen to the Sound of Engine if You Can’t Pay Rent?
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