“I loved your singing mechanic vignette and the ensuing debate. Do you know the story of the gynecologist who retrained as an auto mechanic?

“For his final exam, he was required to completely dismantle a… hmmmm …Volvo, yeah a volvo engine and reassemble it. His final mark was 120 out of a possible 100.

“He received bonus marks for doing the whole job through the tail pipe.”

- T

To connect dots among Ranger Tim’s points to suit my own ends, the fact that the average 20something gets into a major existential funk because he or she can’t break into an upper-middle income housing market with a half a million dollar threshold says a lot about how unrealistic people’s aspirations have become. I’m 30 so it’s ok for me. One can build one’s equity somewhere else and stay in Santa Clara while renting the property out.

I’m not sure it’s any more meaningful to repair a muffler than it is to sit in a cubicle and peer at lines of accountancy software code. While I understand how one might feel the sacrifice of meaning and an heroic view of one’s self to be ill rewarded if life in the cubicle was failing to produce enough green to acquire a surfiet of consumer durables, it’s a category error to reach for a pair of plumber’s dungarees.

Self-employment a la the muffler man is the ideal. Not only is it the only way to get rich, but you can avoid the horribly bonhomous alpha-aspirant male bonders of merchant banking and the hospitalising practical jokes of your friendly neighbourhood bricklayer. It’s a question of what sort of skills it would give you most satisfaction to employ in your working life I suppose.

The key to not stressing about all this stuff is education because education helps you to keep things in perspective. So I haven’t got granite surfaces in my kitchen, but I have Dickens on my shelves and a second-hand upright piano in my bedroom. That perspective is also what allows one to reject the idea that one should bring one’s work home every night or grow an ulcer because of a looming deadline. And you don’t get that by doing an apprenticeship at 16.

I reject claims about these “happiest” men because I’m quite sure working class men suffer disproportionately from heart disease, depression, alcoholism etc.

Employers, advertisers et al conspire to terrify like the Wizard behind his furious, firebreathing mask, but as you approach the boss’s door it pays to remember you’re not a schoolboy any more and it’s not as if you’re about to be beaten with a rubber hose. Perhaps the discord is between the difficulty of attaining the lifestyle to which the mags and tv contend one should aspire and the utter banality of failure, if failure is the opposite of being a movie star.

It’s a complicated matter. The only thing I advise is to buy a house above the potential global warming flooding threshold and away from any extreme weather events and make sure your kids can support you when you retire by brainwashing them to be overachieving lawyer or doctor. As Ogden Nash so succinctly put it:

Professional men, they have no cares; whatever happens, they get theirs.

I’m surely tainted by the epidemic of white-collar backlash I’m seeing in the post-boom Valley. A bit of it’s due to shifting skill demand, as you note: as we’ve transitioned from stock bubble to housing bubble, drywallers DO earn more than software engineers. But particularly among young people, there is active rejection of the life choices that saw their parents sacrificing friends, family, and pastimes for 70 hour workweeks at companies that laid them off anyway when the tech economy went south.

Reinforcing this is the dawning realization that even a decent professional income will not buy you new admission into the Bay Area’s overheated home equity market. The average house in Santa Clara County (where I live) sold for $535,000 last year. So twenty-somethings evaluating career choices perceive very little marginal return on work ambition. What’s the point, if you’re shut out of the asset accumulation game your Boomer parents coasted through by dint of generational timing?

There ought to be a good magazine piece in analyzing this little-heralded millennial California value shift, but somebody else will have to write it. It’s 7:20pm, and I still haven’t started this damn sales report.

- T

In fact, I saw on 60 mins or something a report on all these white collar guys who are retraining to take advantage of the blue collar skills shortage in the States. Same is happening in the UK. I admit it’s tempting when one imagines a life of handicraft, but glamorous as the blue collar life is from afar, its realities involve coping with the tabloid sensibilities of macho, horribly sentimental dickheads. If you liked secondary school, you’ll love the shop floor.

And while a lawyer is paid by the hour to talk to you, the muffler guy seems to have increased the hours for which is paid by doing the same thing. Not saying that was deliberate in this case despite his hefty take home wedge. Happily in this instance, he was a charming individual and made fine subject matter for a well-written penseé. But what if he’d been, as is vastly more likely, of the Dublin taxi driver mentality and decided to regale you with his balanced, considered opinions on asylum seekers and their Government sponsored conveyances? Would we have a similar ballad of the working man – see At-Swim-Two-Birds for details?

So, I’m not criticising the instinct to write the piece, I just think it’s facile to infer from it – as it’s all too easy to do – the nobility of the blue over the white collar. Obviously, it behooves someone making my argument to do something more constructive with middle-class privileges than push dead paper around, which I don’t necessarily do. I’ve been meaning to try though.

I can’t imagine how annoying this post must appear.

Seems very rewarding to make things and fix things while you chat to people, not to mention supporting yourself independently. I’d rather do that than push dead words around for money, but unfortunately, like most liberal arts graduates and lawywers, I don’t have the skills.