If you keep the right attitude and avoid modernity’s prescriptions, you might find people still doing meaningful things.

In the big scheme of things, artisans of yesteryear are now mere “parts replacers,” as planned obsolescence and convenience turned well-paid artisan jobs into low-wage claim managers. And, amid this subtle transformation over the decades, we got ourselves into a problem affecting every aspect of our lives.

Of course, this process has been ongoing for over a century, and many times, automation and economies of scale have brought abundance and affordability. Other times, the processes and lifestyles lost forever haven’t been compensated by convenience.

It’s not only that we can’t fix things neatly anymore; the rich interactions of two generations ago have morphed into economic transactions that avoid the human aspect as much as possible. We humans are the part that seems to bother this new system, and alienation isn’t the issue to be fixed anymore but the byproduct of the new digital social contract.

In the process, many people miss the importance of community and in-person interactions and decide to stay at home, accessing the placebo: the digital experiences manufactured by others appearing on their feeds.

If the goal was amusing ourselves to death, we’re doing more than fine, and those who worry they can’t even pay for ordered meals, don’t worry: Klarna and Doordash agreed on allowing people to “eat now, pay later.” The memes explain the situation quite well.

Online ASMR is not a substitute for the real thing

We are hardwired for in-person interactions and can’t substitute them with a diet of digital content and remote communication. Personal encounters tell so much more than online interaction. We all have sensed it in person, and studies do nothing but confirm our impression.

Most times, the context (location, gestures, sensorial perception, gut feeling based on experience interacting with others) can explain so much more than what a person-to-person meeting over the Internet might reveal, especially now, when chatbots can escape our intuition and the Turing test for a much longer way, especially in a chat interaction.

Humans are still much better than machines at capturing subtleties that make the world beautiful —despite the digital realm’s attempts to eliminate them: if it can’t be easily converted into value, ditch it, says the utility motto. In a world that loses nuance to the crushing advance of memes about manual work, cute pets, decontextualized commentary, food recipes, and workouts making people numb on TikTok, people like Italian writer Italo Calvino may seem anachronistic: nobody seems to have time to the nuance of sensory details—smells, gestures, tones—carrying meaning beyond words.

To Calvino, our words are a precarious way to build meaning in a world that doesn’t yet exist:

“The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.”

The machines will win if we lose the urge to communicate with others and build our own narrative as we go, delegating it passively to our digital feeds.

Fixing a bumper in a world of “replacers”

In other words, if we leave the task to AI and become mere conceptual “prompters,” we risk erasing what words and stories have of the human experience, turning digital entertainment—and, by extension, life itself—into a curated platitude. Instead of building “frail emergency bridges” over the abyss so we can give meaning to our short stay in this world, we seem ready to delegate this last effort to large language models trained by churning content on platforms like this one.

Fortunately, even when I get closer to being one of the particles amalgamated in an LLM (as I ease any potential friction between these lines and AI’s ultimate intentions by writing in English and publishing here), I can’t help but get myself into the good trouble of finding life affirmation and nuance everywhere I go.

Case in mind: I recently enjoyed one encounter a mere few miles from where we live, a very mundane and unspectacular encounter if the goal is merely looking at the utility of such interaction. Fortunately, to some of us, the world is much more than a zero-sum utility game leading to cynicism, erosion of trust, and alienation. Some may say we’re approaching AGI or the Singularity; we may be entering the realm of cosmic selfishness instead, which impoverishes how we see the world, turning beauty into transactional consumption (of things, experiences, people).

My tiny quotidian odyssey of re-enchantment of the world began in the least plausible way (which may mean that it might have happened anyway, had the interaction been different): the driver’s leather seat on our 2017 car was deteriorating so much on one side that I decided to look out of curiosity for the existence of one old-school upholstery shop near me.

Those are things one may never do, and I happened to look into it as I had to deal with our rear bumper; a hit on the left side moved this modern piece of plastic that ceased to be a real “bumper” in modern cars a long time ago, to the point of messing up the internal part, which now almost touches the rear left wheel. I went to a shop, and when I asked for an estimate to “repair” it, the young lady attending me almost laughed at my rationale: “repairing” something artisanally instead of replacing the whole part? No way, José, it’s been a long time since things worked that way; now—she proceeded to lecture me—insurance takes care of the replacement, so there’s an incentive for people to agree on the expensive work (in my case, well over $2,000) since they’ll only have to pay their deductible, which is $500 in my case.

The hidden value of knowledgeable manual labor

I find this rationale utterly ridiculous. I’m sure that any skilled person on this trade could fix my car’s particular issue (no external visible damage to the bumper but a mere misalignment due to a small impact, which requires using new plastic clips and fasteners since most of them have fallen or are damaged). It’s easier, cleaner, and more profitable for the local shop where I asked to order a new bumper and install it instead of artisanally putting it back in place.

After leaving the place, a car body repair local chain where everything seemed optimized for this type of transaction (devoid of nuance and the value of human interaction or expertise in one’s trade) I thought that this might be the way things work nowadays, and it’s been like this for a long time, no matter if its furniture, electronics, cars, or even “human body repair” (read orthodontics, etc.): why fixing what’s damaged if it takes less time and the outcome is guaranteed when one replaces the damaged part, or even the whole product or service?

Until recently, only complex electronics seemed to fall into the worthless-to-repair category. Planned obsolescence has taken over reality like a virus, invisible to the careless “consumer” but infiltrating every system, changing the world from the inside out. It’s a world of convenience where things fail fast and get tossed out right away, for getting the replacement is cheaper than holding to the promise of nostalgia and patina.

Fortunately, my other interaction that day went much, much differently. Concerned about the bumper black hole I was risking getting into, I decided to address the other nothing-burger issue in the car: the driver’s seat was indeed deteriorating fast.

The quest for an artisan

Growing up near a big city in the European Mediterranean, I’ve always admired artisans surviving in our world of automation, planned obsolescence, and don’t-fix-it-if-you-can-order-the-whole-damn-part. An impulse motivated by nostalgia and belief in a Romantic world that probably never quite existed prompted me to dedicate one Saturday morning to the Quixotic enterprise of finding an expert in leather upholstery in the San Francisco East Bay, one crazy enough to be willing to fix the sit instead of advising of replacing the entire bottom part of the seat, and of doing so for a reasonable price.

So, instead of abandoning the idea, I opened the smartphone’s map application and looked inside a ten-mile radius. It didn’t take long to spot a place not far from the water with a legit name for such type of enterprise: American Auto Upholstery & Glass; it seemed to be open, but nobody was getting my call, so I decided to take a chance and drive to the place to see if it really existed or I was just about to discover an oddity, like the half-floor in Being John Malkovich‘s office building.

Driving towards the Bay, I crossed the usually busy San Pablo Avenue and ventured into the hip and much-berated industrial area of Berkeley, where legendary salvage shops and bistros share the urban fabric with little factories, medical facilities, auto shops, low office buildings, and parked vans or cars in poor shape with people living on them. I saw a few precarious homes-on-wheels parked along the street I’m driving down towards the train tracks, neatly parked (contrary to some of the reports I’ve read about the areas homeless issue).

At first, I couldn’t see the place I was driving to, but I realized I had just assumed (wrongly) that there was nothing else after an electric bike shop of some sort. The upholstery business I was driving to looked humble and messy from the outside, more like your typical small auto shop keeping totaled cars near the entry than anything else.

Little local odyssey

I was still outside since a car blocked the place’s entry. Ahead of me, somebody on a Toyota Rav4 was talking to an old, lean man who had approached him from the shop’s interior. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, though the scene conveyed so much information to me: I could see his hair was grey, he had glasses, and—especially—he talked while moving his hands at once in a very particular way.

If you’ve lived in the Mediterranean basin, and especially if you’re from there, you’ll never realize how similar people from different countries move their hands when they speak in the Med until you go live somewhere else where such theatrics don’t exist. We just talk effusively, even when there’s no need to make a point, and we aren’t angry at all; we’ll just move your hands and arms back and forth to make a point, to accompany some interesting comment, or just for the sake of the je-ne-se-quois of life: we just do move our hands a big deal when as talk.

So, I decided to make a bet with myself. I could see the old man moving his hands as he talked, much like many people do in many parts of the Med. I guessed that he was originally from somewhere near my region of the world. The Rav4 driver finally backed his car, which prompted me to do the same thing and let him go, and we were getting effusive, gesticulative aid from the shop’s old person.

As I greeted him and started talking, I guessed I was right, for “Joe” had an accent I couldn’t quite locate, though I decided it wasn’t from the Americas (I’m from Spain, so I guess it’s easier for me to tell). Joe was blue-eyed and olive-skinned, much like Californians or people from the Med spending time outdoors, looking great and healthy. Given the accent, I decided he wasn’t Italian but could be Greek or perhaps from somewhere else in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, or Turkey.

Joe and George, he told me, had had their car-upholstery-and-glass shop on Oakland’s Broadway for over two decades but had to close it. He explained it in such a way that I felt he would have liked to show me the old shop instead of talking to me in the backwater place he was in now. I didn’t ask why they had decided or been prompted to move their business, which was now indeed tucked away.

Entering the world of artists and artisans

Joe happened not to be the person I needed to talk to since he specializes in fixing broken solar roofs that apparently get smashed all the time, prompting people to pay the $500 deductible for the job that ends up being more expensive, and insurances take care of the rest. “You’re interested in talking to George, my partner; he can fix anything.” He nonetheless asked me to show him the issue; he looked at the seat, the type of tear and leather, and said: “George will fix it for you for $250 in a morning, like new.”

I asked him if he was worried about the job. He smiled at me almost paternalistically. “Come, I’ll show you something,” he said. Since we were still talking by the car, I told him I’d need to turn the car back on to roll up the driver’s car window before getting inside the shop, but Joe did what my father would have done, dismissing my idea with a gesture and letting me know that nobody there would touch the car of one of Joe’s potential customers. They just wouldn’t. I trusted him, and in we went.

I could have entered an old man’s shop somewhere in the Mediterranean Levant: on the sides, there were beat-up tables and surfaces of all sorts collecting all the clutter of the world, though you could tell it was the sort of curated chaos some of us have seen in places inhabited by singular artists and artisans: misplace one single thing amid the apparent entropy, and you may trigger the destruction of the universe because such people KNOW where they place stuff amid “clusters” of things.

In front of us, facing the building’s back wall, there were hundreds of leather and upholstery rolls of all the colors imaginable, including the crazy yellows, greens, blues, and browns of some of the funkiest car interiors ever produced by car companies (especially American ones) in the sixties and seventies. From what Joe told me, there seems to be quite a market in the Bay Area around restoring the American cars one would expect to see in a Steve McQueen movie or in the TV series Columbo; I’ve seen some of them going back and forth, blasting some bass-saturated music.

He showed me the colorful leather seats of a Cadillac, which the absent George had just finished fixing. After studying George’s work on those seats and in many others, I told Joe the truth: I couldn’t tell with the naked eye which parts were original and which parts were restored. These people are artisans the same way people making leather gloves in Newark, New Jersey, in the forties—as explained by Philip Roth in American Pastoral—were artisans. The one-of-a-kind type of people that hold an entire school of knowledge with them, which perhaps will die off once they retire (I didn’t see anyone else besides the two old business partners in the three times I went there).

Mediterranean reminiscences

I told Joe I was coming the next morning, and they were open to meeting George and leaving the car for the job. I gave Joe my first name. Joe might have been playing my same game, hinting at my accent, for when we were saying goodbye, he said, after repeating my name, “Aren’t you, perchance, Greek?”

“It’s funny; I was thinking the same about you,” I told him, not before asking him why he thought so. He figured that my accent and being called “Nikos” (I said Nicholas or Nico, but it was close enough, I guess) was enough for him to make a guess. I imagined how many people my age called Nikos he might have met in Greece when he lived there. He probably didn’t consciously “see” my gestures as I talked to him, but I’m sure that the hand-gesturing invisible brotherhood played a part; only something familiar clicked on him.

Then came Joe’s life story after a warm smile. Joe is from Lebanon; he left his country 35 years ago during the war, just after a snipper’s lost bullet almost killed him: “Do you remember what happened to Donald Trump in his rally? I was also pierced in the ear and did the same thing he did: I felt something, touched the place I had sensed with my hand, and I felt some warm liquid. Then I saw it was blood.” I wasn’t expecting such a story in such a place. Interestingly enough, there he was, an immigrant talking about something I wasn’t expecting.

Joe went on: he wanted to live and felt fortunate to have another chance; he decided he had to leave Lebanon before it was too late. As a Christian Orthodox, Joe left for Greece and lived in the country for many years (not enough, however, to tell whether I was from Greece or Barcelona, given my accent in English). But we both really sensed that we belonged to the same loose culture of talking-while-effusively-moving-our-hands, though not in any random way, just in a way that somehow made us relatable.

“Are you a Christian?” —I finally asked. “Yes,” Joe said. I asked if he knew who Nicholas Nassim Taleb was, another Greek Orthodox Lebanese living in the US. He didn’t. I told him that, actually, I had family friends who came from his place.

Joe left Greece not long after and flew to the US, setting up the shop on Broadway he was telling me about with his buddy George, whom I had yet to meet.

Being from Spain, I’d say that hand gesturing while talking is more common or prevalent in the Mediterranean (Catalonia, Valencia, Balearic Islands, Murcia, Andalusia) than in other parts of Spain like inland, small-town Castilla y León, Galicia, or the Basque Country. And I don’t have any plausible theory about this, other than, perhaps, a relation between ancient Mediterranean cultures (like the substratum of the Roman Empire before the Arab and Ottoman invasions): the closer a place to the Empire’s cultural core (Rome and Greece, places where expressiveness, oral storytelling, and rhetoric were socially favored), the more prevalent the phenomenon of hand-gesturing while talking.

Meeting an old-school automotive upholsterer

I finally met George when I brought the car in the morning. Shorter than Joe, he was about the same age, with a deep experience in his trade spanning decades that had started a long time ago in his hometown. By having a quick interaction with him, I sensed that he was a Spanish speaker, so we naturally switched and did a bit of small talk. It was past noon, but after seeing the seat, he told me to return at around 4 PM, so I picked my bike from the back, and we shook hands. This simple gesture told me a lot more about George’s (Jorge’s) life and trade: his skin felt thick and coarse, and his fingers were short and curved, having calluses in odd places, which told me that he performs many intricate manual tasks to put the leather and seams in place.

If Joe had the gesticulation and flamboyance of the Mediterranean, Jorge had the reserved, humble, and taciturn character of native Central Americans, descendants of the noble natives that Nobel Prize winner Miguel Ángel Asturias describes in the 1949 masterpiece Men of Maize.

Joe wasn’t there this time around, and we talked about him. I explained to Jorge about our interaction and how I knew he was from my region of the world (if only at the other extreme of the Mediterranean, but still old Fenician, Biblical, Greek, and Roman Empire land) by just looking at him shaking his hands as he talked from afar.

“He lived in Greece, didn’t he?” I asked.
“He did,” Jorge answered mischievously. “However, we have a customer who is Greek, and the day Joe found out, they talked a bit. I could see that Joe understood most of the stuff, but he had more trouble talking back in the man’s language.”
“I can totally see that,” I answered. “It has happened to me many times in Europe. I perfectly understand, and I’m familiar with what I’m told but can reply easily.” It happened to me in Portugal, Italy, and France until recently (though, now, after living there, I’m more fluent in French).

The way the world works

I was awed at the quality of the job when I returned to get the car. The seat is basically back to new, for $250 and a couple of hours of labor (perhaps less) of one skilled worker: a win for him and for me (an estimate at the local official Subaru technical service in Albany, which—surprise, surprise—consisted of replacing the whole bottom cover of the seat, went again for over $2,000). However, I haven’t found the equivalent of Joe and Jorge for bumpers. Maybe there’s no such thing now that cars forgot how bumpers used to be external and made of metal and rubber instead of the seamless and very fragile plastic fiber they are today.

Our conversation ended its full circle as it referenced the beginning of my time with Joe and Jorge, for the Toyota Rav4 I had seen ahead of me on my first visit there was sitting outside the shop with its roof already replaced. Joe wasn’t there at 4 PM to explain it to me, but Jorge talked about it:

“We just fixed the roof for this one,” he said.
“I remember this car, I saw it when I first came,” I replied.
“It also has a dent on the side,” Jorge explained.

I asked if it was easy to fix, expecting the answer I sadly got. Smiling, Jorge told me that the insurance had told the owner of the Rav4 that the dent had messed up with some GPUs (sensors, I assumed) and with the B-pillar (the structural column between the car doors). This didn’t prevent the doors from normally opening and closing, and I had assumed (again, wrongly) that the trouble was worth it in a car that was probably newer than mine.

It meant that the car needed some serious shop with skilled workers to take care of the repair, so they had fought the owner to declare the car “totaled.”

A modern car, probably still worth around $20,000 when sold second-hand, probably with a small mileage and a perfectly smooth engine, had risked being totaled because, to the insurance company, it didn’t make economic sense to help the owner fix a superficial car crash.

When I sold a broken engine to Mercedes in Germany

I left American Auto Upholstery & Glass with the feeling that the two old chaps doing an excellent artisan job at a decent hourly wage were among the last of a lost family of trades that brought back beauty to the world. Once they’re gone and not replaced, people who, like me, could have benefited from their expertise will need to abide to the way we “fix” things now, which is to say we don’t anymore. We ditch the old part or entire product, replacing it with a new one.

I told Jorge that, back in my place in Spain, I drive a 1989 G-Wagon. When my engine broke a few years ago, my insurance company valued the car at under €2,000, which I found interesting because it had cost me much more, and nobody will find a G-Wagon, no matter how old and in which state of disrepair, for under €10,000 across Europe.

So, I embarked on the enterprise of repairing that engine near the place where the car had broken—Dijon, France, a place known for its mustard, which happens to have great mechanic shops. The local Mercedes dealer looked at my old engine and told me they wanted to send a message to Mercedes in Germany via their internal system.

That’s how I found out that the company wanted to buy my broken engine to repair it and use it in another car similar to mine. They gave me more money for the broken engine than the insurance company had estimated the entire car was worth. That’s how detached from reality an estimate from insurers will be.

Nobody wants to fix anything anymore, but if you take the pain to do so, you’ll discover that underneath the layer of mediocrity and convenience we’ve built (which looks so plasticky and shiny and will last like that less time than the one you need to pay for it) there are a few manual workers still doing the real high-skilled job that used to be widespread decades ago.

I’m not sure they’ll last much longer without being noticed, which means that anybody looking for the ones left will be required to pay a huge amount of money for their service.

The end of fixing

Talking with my neighbor, who works for AAA from home, he said it made sense what I was explaining about the Toyota Rav4 being pushed to be considered a totaled vehicle for insurance purposes.

“If that’s what’s happening,” I told him, then some of the cars being artificially totaled to avoid lengthy repairs are more than worth buying.

“Here’s the thing,” he said: they’ll tell you your car is worth nothing, but then, on their auction page, the totaled car will go for $15,000 or $20,000.

Things don’t seem to add up in the system of abundance we’ve built, which will work as long as you don’t add entropy as a factor.

If we are to resist the slow erosion of meaning, then there’s a hill to hold: that of actual human interaction and empathy in a world rushing past convenience and into total abstraction.

The artisans, the repairers, and those willing to work with their hands are preserving old trades but also something of ourselves.