Choosing Difficulty: The Radical Act of Making Things Harder Than They Need To Be

"People thought I'd lost my mind," he says, leaning against a van that has seen better days, its back doors open to a tidy arrangement of copper pipe and fittings. "My dad especially. He'd spent his whole life trying to get out of that kind of work."

Colin hasn't lost his mind. If anything, he's the most philosophically deliberate person in the conversation -the one who has thought hardest about why he made the choice he did, and what it means in a world where the trajectory is supposed to go the other way.

"At some point," he says, "I realised that the problem was solved before I arrived. Someone in Bangalore had already figured it out, the template existed, the AI could generate the first draft. My job was to manage the process of a thing that had already been decided. And I just thought... what is that?"

What that is, it turns out, is a question a lot of people are starting to ask. And some of them are answering it the same way Colin did -by choosing, deliberately and without obvious financial incentive, to do the hard thing.

The Man Who Quit Think-Tank Work to Fix Motorcycles

Colin is in good company, philosophically speaking -though his intellectual companion probably wouldn't describe himself that way in a van.

Matthew Crawford has a PhD in political philosophy from the University of Chicago. In the early 2000s he took a job at a Washington think tank writing policy summaries, discovered within five months that the work had no discernible connection to reality, and quit to open a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. He then wrote a book about why, which became an unexpected bestseller.

Shop Class as Soulcraft (Penguin Press, 2009) is not, Crawford insists, a book about how plumbers earn more than lawyers, though that is sometimes true. It is a book about what happens to a person's mind and sense of self when their work involves real, resistant, physical things that push back. (Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work, Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press, 2009) A motorcycle that won't start doesn't care about your credentials. The pipe either runs true or it doesn't. The joint either holds or it weeps.

Crawford's central argument is that the "knowledge economy" made a category error when it separated thinking from doing. Manual work, done well, is cognitively demanding -it requires diagnosis, judgment, improvisation, and a constant negotiation between what you intended and what the material in front of you will actually allow. The difference is that the feedback is immediate, physical, and impossible to spin. You know whether you fixed it. You know whether it works.

Knowledge work, by contrast, increasingly operates in an environment where the feedback loop is long, abstract, and mediated by a dozen layers of process. Did the report matter? Did the strategy work? Was the meeting useful? Often you genuinely cannot tell. And when AI starts generating the first drafts and the frameworks and the templates -as it now does, reliably and for free- the knowledge worker can find themselves managing the appearance of contribution rather than contribution itself.

Colin recognised that feeling. He just happened to do something about it.

Downshifting Isn't What It Used to Be

There's a trend researchers and sociologists have been tracking in France, the UK, and increasingly across the English-speaking world, where highly educated professionals are leaving credentialed careers for manual trades. The French have a word for it -reconversion- and in January 2022 alone, 21% of French working people were in the process of a career change, with executives and the highly educated disproportionately drawn toward craft work. (Downshifting: Why People Are Quitting Their Corporate Careers for Craft Jobs, The Conversation, 2023)

The researchers studying this pattern found something that surprises people expecting a back-to-basics story. The career changers aren't fleeing complexity -they're seeking a different kind of it. What they describe valuing most about craft work is its "concrete character"-the fact that effort and result are visibly connected. You make a thing. The thing exists. It either does what it's supposed to or it doesn't.

This sounds simple. It isn't. Most of professional life in the 2020s is deliberately designed to obscure the connection between effort and outcome. Metrics are chosen to make things look good. Processes exist to distribute responsibility so thinly that nobody is truly accountable. Language is used to make inaction sound like strategy. Manual work has none of these escape routes. The pipe is installed correctly or the wall gets wet.

Colin describes this as the thing he missed most without knowing he was missing it. "In my old job I could have a bad week and nobody would know, including me. Now if I make a mistake, someone's boiler doesn't work. It's more pressure, genuinely. But at least I know where I stand."

The Neo-Luddites Who Own Smartphones

It would be easy to frame Colin, and the broader trend he represents, as a rejection of technology. The neo-Luddite label gets applied-sometimes approvingly, sometimes not- to anyone who appears to be stepping back from the digital economy. But that framing misses what's actually going on.

Colin uses project management software to schedule his jobs. He has a van tracking system. He watches YouTube tutorials when he encounters an unusual fitting configuration. He isn't against technology. He's against a specific kind of abstraction-the kind where your contribution becomes so mediated by systems, platforms, and AI assistance that you lose the ability to tell what you actually did.

The original Luddites, it's worth remembering, weren't against machines as such. They were against the specific use of machines to eliminate craft skill and reduce skilled workers to interchangeable operators. The grievance wasn't technology-it was the erasure of the human from the work. (Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto, Chellis Glendinning, 1990) That complaint maps surprisingly well onto what people like Colin are describing in 2025, except now it's the AI doing the erasing rather than the power loom.

So the choice to do the hard thing isn't a rejection of the modern world. It's a claim about what the self needs in order to remain intact inside it. A claim that some minimum of resistance, some domain where your judgment and skill are genuinely tested against real consequences, is not optional. It's structural. Remove it entirely and something important goes with it-not just job satisfaction, but the felt sense of being an agent in your own life rather than a manager of other things' outputs.

What a Leaking Joint Teaches You That a Spreadsheet Can't

There's a moment Colin describes that has stayed with him. Early in his apprenticeship, he sweated his first copper joint on a live job-a bathroom refurb in Harrogate, an older house with ancient pipework, his supervisor watching from the doorway. He'd practised the technique sixty times in training. This was the real one.

"I turned the water back on," he says. "And I just stood there watching the joint. Waiting. And it didn't drip. It just... didn't drip."

He pauses.

"I know that sounds like nothing. But I hadn't felt anything like that in years."

What he felt was, in the most literal sense, the IKEA effect-the deep particular satisfaction of having made something that works, with your own hands, under genuine pressure, with real consequences if it failed. No algorithm helped. No template existed. His supervisor was there, but the joint was his.

Matthew Crawford writes that manual work provides what he calls "a direct encounter with the material world"-a feedback loop so immediate and unambiguous that it's genuinely difficult to replicate in abstract knowledge work. You cannot fake a soldered joint. You cannot spin a pipe that runs uphill. The work either meets the standard or it doesn't, and the standard was set by physics, not by a performance review cycle.

This is what makes the choice to do hard things not a retreat from modernity but something closer to its opposite. In a world increasingly optimised to remove friction, resistance, and the possibility of visible failure, choosing work that has all three of those things is a quietly radical act. It's an insistence that the self is most fully present when it is genuinely tested.

The Most Philosophically Serious Person in the Room

Colin's dad came round eventually. He came to see a job Colin did in a semi-detached in Bradford -a full bathroom refit, tight angles, awkward alcove, tiles Colin had never laid before but watched fourteen tutorials about and figured out. His dad walked around it slowly, ran his thumb along the grout lines, turned the tap on and off a few times.

"He said, 'That's proper, that,'" Colin says. "And I thought, yeah. Yeah it is."

There is no AI version of that sentence. There is no algorithm that can produce the feeling behind it, or the feeling in front of it. A father and a son, standing in a bathroom in Bradford, looking at something that works because a person made it work. Real, resistant, testable, true.

Crawford's thesis, and Colin's life, and the growing number of people making similar choices, all point to the same quiet conclusion: the value of doing hard things is not incidental to human flourishing. It isn't a lifestyle choice or a preference or a quirky counter-cultural pose.

It might just be the point.

His dad ran his thumb along the grout line and said "that's proper, that." There is no algorithm that produces the feeling behind those four words, or the feeling in front of them.

Maurice Joseph writes about work, meaning, and what humans are actually for at inthacity.com/blog. Article 5 in this series looks at what the research actually shows about the jobs that survived automation -and why the answer surprised almost everyone who predicted it.

Sources & Further Reading

- Crawford, M.B. (2009). Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. Penguin Press. About the book →

- Downshifting: Why People Are Quitting Their Corporate Careers for Craft Jobs. The Conversation, 2023. Read the article →

- Glendinning, C. (1990). Notes toward a Neo-Luddite Manifesto. Read the essay →

Your Questions, Answered Plainly

Is this realistic for most people? Not everyone can retrain as a plumber at 44.

Fair point, and Colin would be the first to say so-he had savings, no dependents at that point, and a partner with stable income. The practical argument here isn't "quit your job and pick up a pipe wrench." It's the narrower claim that some domain of genuinely challenging, concrete, feedback-rich work-paid or unpaid- matters to human wellbeing in ways that abstract, AI-assisted, process-managed work often doesn't provide.

Does the work have to be manual? What about challenging intellectual work?

Crawford's argument is specifically about the manual because of the unambiguous physical feedback. But the deeper principle-that work requiring real skill, with real consequences for failure, and visible connection between effort and outcome-applies more broadly. A surgeon, a musician, a teacher in a difficult classroom, a programmer debugging a genuinely hard problem... all of these can have the same quality. What seems to matter is the resistance, not the material.

Isn't there something romantic about this view? Manual work can be brutal and exhausting.

Yes, and Crawford addresses this directly. There's a difference between skilled craft work-where the worker has genuine agency, judgment, and pride in quality-and repetitive manual labour on a line, which can be just as alienating as a bad knowledge job. He isn't romanticising all manual work. He's making a specific claim about skilled, craft-based work where the human brings something irreplaceable.

What's the actual connection to AI? Isn't this just a general career-change story?

The connection is this: as AI takes over more of the cognitive tasks that used to require human judgment, the domain of knowledge work where a person can feel genuinely indispensable-genuinely tested- is shrinking. That makes the question of where you find that feeling more urgent, not less. Colin's story is a preview of a conversation a lot more people are about to have.