I'm going canoeing......

"The habituation of workers to the assembly line was thus perhaps made easier by another innovation of the early twentieth century: consumer debt. As Jackson Lears has argued, through the installment plan previously unthinkable acquisitions became thinkable, and more than thinkable: it became normal to carry debt. 11 The display of a new car bought on installment became a sign that one was trustworthy. In a wholesale transformation of the old Puritan moral ism, expressed by Benjamin Franklin (admittedly no Puritan) with the motto "Be frugal and free," the early twentieth century saw the moral legitimation of spending. One symptom Lears points to is a 1907 book with the immodest title The New Basis of Civilization, by Simon Nelson Patten, in which the moral valence of debt and spending is reversed, and the multiplication of wants becomes not a sign of dangerous corruption but part of the civilizing process. That is, part of the disciplinary process. As Lear writes, "Indebtedness could discipline workers, keeping them at routinized jobs in factories and offices, graying but in the harness, meeting payments regularly.' " So writes Matthew B. Crawford in SHOP CLASS AS SOULCRAFT: AN INQUIRY INTO THE VALUE OF WORK.
With economic doldrums we suffer today we see the chickens of this philosophy come home to roost. Here's my confession. Lars graduated from Oberlin College and went to work for the ELCA Board of Pensions processing health claims. I don't think he ever enjoyed it. He'd been doing this for seven months when he told me he was going to quit so he could canoe down the Missouri river through Montana. What was my reaction? "Go for it, you may never have another chance"? "Good for you, that's a great way to spend your summer"? No! Sorry! I did the old, "but you've got benefits blab blab blab". Lars looked down at me and said, "Dad, what are you trying to tell me? that I should gain the whole world and lose my soul?" That brought me to my senses and I said, "Have a great trip."
Lisa gave me the book for Father's Day. As the blurb on the book jacket says, "A philosopher/mechanic destroys the pretensions of the high-prestige workplace and makes an irresistible case for working with one's hands." I've enjoyed the book and had never thought about the narrow constraints under which white color workers labor today and many of the other points he makes.