‘Skill Nostalgia’ and the Appeal of Craftsmanship

From woodworking to ceramics to baking, people are increasingly stepping away from their devices and embracing manual arts. This desire to work with our hands may speak to an anxiety with modern technology, but professor Joshua Habgood-Coote argues that the preoccupation with ancient crafts dates back thousands of years. Habgood-Coote calls this trend “skill nostalgia,” and he joins us to discuss what happens when we long for the past.

Guests:

• Joshua Habgood-Coote, lecturer in philosophy of language, School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science at the University of Leeds
• Gavin Grant, Oakland designer, artist and craftsman

This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.

Lesley McClurg: Welcome to Forum. I’m Lesley McClurg. Most of the time, most of my day, I am at a desk. I’m staring at a screen. And then during the pandemic, I tried sewing to slow my mind down. It feels good occasionally to garden. But honestly, my favorite non-digitized task is washing my car. There’s something about getting my hands dirty, kind of spraying soap all over myself, that feels really good after sitting all day.

And it turns out I am not alone. Hobbies like leatherwork, beekeeping — apparently are all the rage as more of our lives move online. People want to make things, do things with their hands.

Philosopher Joshua Habgood-Coote calls it “skill nostalgia.” Joshua, welcome.

Joshua Habgood-Coote: And keep on relaxing.

Lesley McClurg: So what qualifies as a skill? I’m not actually sure that washing my car would make the cut. How do you define skill?

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Great. This is a super difficult question. Skill is one of these complicated words that marks a property that comes in degrees. You can be more or less skilled. So, in lots of different contexts, different things can count as skilled.

The thing that I think really matters for thinking about whether something is a skill or not is not how much you know. It’s not what you’re able to do. It’s the ability to answer questions about how to do something complicated while you’re doing it, on the fly, kind of creating knowledge as you’re going along.

So, in a way, there’s a bit of that kind of capacity involved in washing your car, but really we want the kind of complexity where we’re always increasing our knowledge when we’re engaged in skillful activities.

Lesley McClurg: And you coined this term, “skill nostalgia.” What do you mean by it? And why did we need to name this phenomenon, this sort of longing for the skills of the past?

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think skill nostalgia is just the combination of general nostalgia. Exactly what nostalgia is is a little bit complicated. The core phenomenon, I think, is desiring something which is associated with the past, but also believing that that thing associated with the past is kind of lost or impossible to have.

I think we need this term for two reasons. One is just that there are lots of activities which are animated, motivated, by this nostalgia for skills and for crafts and for doing things with your hands. If you think about the kinds of videos that you might see on your short-form vertical video apps, the hobbies that people engage in, like shanty singing all over the place, how people work, rest, quit — this emotion is all over the place, and it kind of always has been for hundreds of years.

But the second reason we need it is because there is really an ideal, right, that we want our work to be skilled. So this emotion isn’t just a kind of longing for the past. It’s also connecting with a real and vibrant ideal for what we want work to be like.

Lesley McClurg: And it’s clear, I mean, our desire to work with our hands, it makes sense. That’s sort of a modern reaction to technology because we are faced with the screen so much. You want to kind of dig your hands in the earth.

But you argue that this is actually an ancient impulse that came way before the digital world engulfed us. Why do you think that humans tend to romanticize the good old days, and we’ve been doing that for so long?

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think there’s a general phenomenon that can happen when any kind of technology is introduced. And it might be a technology as seemingly basic as writing, where the technology comes out and we’re able to do some new things, but at the same time certain capacities that were really important suddenly have less value or are less important for us.

So, in Plato’s dialogue, the Phaedrus, which was written in, I think, the 300s or 400s BCE, Plato tells a story about worrying about the invention of writing being a bad thing. Because what writing is going to do is it’s going to lead to the atrophying of people’s capacities to think through speech and to work through arguments with other people.

He thinks there’s something really bad about replacing this kind of living word that happens in conversations with this kind of frozen word that happens when it’s written down and kind of stuck in place.

So I think that kind of impulse is very general and has been going on for a long time. I mean, there’s more specific and more pained kinds of skill nostalgia probably since the Industrial Revolution. But yeah, there is this really long history.

Lesley McClurg: What was your research process? You pull out lots of examples, like you just gave there with Plato. What was your research process to better understand the origins of skill nostalgia?

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think two directions.

One is to think about my hobbies and what kind of motivates me, and this choice that turns up in lots of different hobbies that I’ve had. I tend to pick up a hobby, have it for six months, and then drop it again. In every hobby there’s a choice between doing things the old way and doing things a new way, and for some reason I kept on feeling pulled toward doing things the old way.

So that’s one part of the research process: to reflect on just what’s going on with me. And partly then that got me into thinking about a body of research in leisure studies where people think about the serious leisure perspective — the idea that hobbies are picking up aspects of our jobs, like career development and capacity development.

And then, on the other hand, I wanted to look through the history of philosophy, trying to find examples of people engaging with skill nostalgia. So yeah, we get it in Plato. You can find it in Rousseau, in Kant. Marx is, I think, also really animated by skill nostalgia. So understanding how those two things connect together was what I was really trying to do.

Lesley McClurg: And we’ll kind of get into that history later in the show. But these hobbies — baking, ceramics, gardening — what do they offer people that our current jobs do not? And why are we kind of drawn to them?

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so I think there’s two ways to think about hobbies.

One is to think that hobbies are just kinds of leisure, and they’re things that we do just for the purposes of pleasure. They’re like reading a book or looking at a beautiful painting, right? They’re not motivated by means-end reasoning. We’re not trying to get something. And maybe some hobbies are kind of like that.

But I think lots of hobbies do look a lot like work. So it’s kind of striking if you think through the list of hobbies that you just described. Those are all activities which, 50 or 100 years ago, would have been employment. It’s a trade that someone might have had.

And so I think the thought here is that there’s something which is like work involved in these hobbies. And plausibly, the thing that we’re trying to get, that we’re not getting in the rest of our jobs and the rest of our lives, is skill development, right? It’s complex practical domains where we’re developing our capacities, generating knowledge, and dealing with difficult practical problems.

That’s the thing that I think, if you think about hobbies as work, is really motivating people to go out and get lots of different hobbies.

Lesley McClurg: And then is that at all connected to why we dream of running away to work on a farm, or to live off the grid, or even the rise of, you know, tradwives — a sort of romanticized reach toward the past? I mean, I know I created kind of fantastical versions of living on a commune in my 20s. We have this idea that life was better back then.

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, good. So this is the moment where we want to be critical about our emotions and critical about skill nostalgia.

It’s animated by what I think is a real ideal for work — that we want skilled work where we’re doing useful things and developing our capacities. But because it’s tied up with nostalgia, and nostalgia is a really tricky emotion, you can get pulled into, “Yeah, there was something good in the past. People had skills,” to, “Oh, maybe the whole way of life was good. Maybe it’s better to live in an agrarian society than it is to live in a modern service-oriented economy.”

And maybe that’s true, but that’s a big claim, right? That’s the thing that we want to be really critical of. And this kind of reactionary slide that can happen with skill nostalgia, I think, is something to be worried about.

Lesley McClurg: I mean, what realities of the past are we leaving out when we romanticize? I mean, you give some really specific examples. Kind of walk us through why this is so dangerous.

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, so just thinking about the impulse to this kind of Georgic nostalgia — nostalgia toward an agrarian form of life — you feel the nostalgia for summer days where there’s plenty of food around and you’re outside and you’re doing something kind of worthwhile that’s going to feed you through the rest of the year.

And you don’t think about the years of famine, the high rates of malnutrition, and just how difficult it is to work on a farm. How much of that work is not meaningful and self-developing, but is just doing the same thing again and again, getting up really early and doing the same thing just to keep the processes going.

So you kind of lose the reality of work if you just get pulled along by this kind of rose tint of nostalgia.

Lesley McClurg: Do you think, though, that as we kind of reach toward these crafts that are more hands-on, that we are reaching a little bit more toward the earth and kind of our connection to nature? I mean, I know I often feel so wrapped in plastic and screens, and there’s just something very human about getting your fingernails dirty.

Joshua Habgood-Coote: Yeah, definitely. I think that’s right.

There’s something I’ve felt a lot in gardening. I’ve got a small garden back at my house, and I grow vegetables there and flowers. One thing I’ve really noticed is I think totally differently about the year now that I’m gardening. It’s all about what’s going to be coming out and flowering, what’s going to be growing at different times. What’s the time to plant the courgettes?

That’s a really rich connection that I wouldn’t have had if I wasn’t spending weekends and evenings outside with my hands in the dirt.

Lesley McClurg: Yeah, like the cycles. We’re kind of more connected to a grittier version than our digitized, sterilized lives allow us to be.

Stuart in Oakland writes, “Art dates back to cave drawings. It’s ancient, and it has never left us. We just had our national craft exhibition last month. We have museums, galleries, studios, and schools that have continually supported and encouraged the use of and making of usable objects, as well as objects of beauty. The connection between humans and creativity has never left us.”

We’d love to hear from you, listeners. Have you taken up a hands-on hobby? What is it? Tell us about it. Is it a distraction, a relief? Do you feel nostalgic for crafts and hobbies of the past? Maybe are you worried about how AI or technology is going to disrupt your work?

Email your comments and questions to [email protected], or find us on any of the social platforms — Discord, Bluesky, Facebook — or jump on the phone and give us a call at 866-733-6786. Again, that’s 866-733-6786.

Stay with us. We’ll be right back.