I worked in joinery and carpentry for around 6 years (apart from a few years as a teen as well). While I love building and think they’re incredible crafts, you

I worked in joinery and carpentry for around 6 years (apart from a few years as a teen as well). While I love building and think they’re incredible crafts, you might find that very few people agree. If you want to work for the sake of moving, building, some kind of rudimentary connection to a physical process, maybe that would be alright. I found it fairly soul draining. I want to be great at what I do so I can make the best things possible for people (within reason, of course). Every time I build something, I’m focused on improving myself and my work. The end result should be the creation, improvement, or restoration of something that really should exist, and makes someone’s day or months or years better. A form of leaving things better than you found them. What I did for most of my years was seek out people like me (and mostly failing) while unethically corner-cutting for foremen, radically simplifying joinery processes to save money (not improve products), doing mass amounts of body-breaking menial labour to get big jobs moving, covering up avoidable mistakes because very few people cared not to make them, and generally grinding my love for my work into a pulp. Drunk people on forklifts. Heaps of overt sexism and racism. People working hard to avoid doing their jobs rather than working hard at their jobs. Heaps of resentment if you care and want to do better. Terrible compensation. I love building things. I still do it, and frankly I value my physical labour and trade skills more highly than software. I suppose it seems to me that society, or at least the economy, strongly disagrees and so it’s both financially and perhaps spiritually intractable to return to that kind of work as a career. If these things don’t sound like they’d matter to you, that’s great. I know my incompatibility was partially my own temperament and stubborn inability to simply adapt and let these things be. I am glad I left it behind, though. Despite being young and healthy, it was doing bad things to my body and not doing much for my mind either.