There’s something distinctly human about timekeeping. From an existential perspective, the concerns of seconds and minutes, the cataloguing of days and years, appears entirely meaningless. The rest of nature doesn’t burden itself with such minute worries.
Humans do. And it represents an essential aspect of the human condition. Blessed, and cursed, with sentience, we are always on the search for meaning. And how do we construct meaning? Through stories.
Our inclination for keeping time makes perfect sense when considered from this perspective. It is a coping mechanism. A framework for cataloguing the goings on in the world. A way to quantify and understand an existence we’ve been created to question, cursed to never truly understand.
A mechanical wristwatch consists of hundreds of interacting pieces. Springs and gears and rotors. All of them perfectly attuned to each other in a way so that they can move a couple of hands over the dial with amazing accuracy and consistency. Within seconds every single day. All of this contained within a, sometimes nicely designed, metal casing that fits neatly on my wrist.
Quartz watches can do the same thing, but far more accurately. I can’t tell you exactly how it works. But rest assured it’s something to do with quartz crystals powered by tiny batteries. Extraordinary.
An Apple Watch can keep time even more accurately. Far more so, because it can communicate with and continually make sure it’s running accurately according to the official world time standard. And it can do a thousand things besides. Utterly amazing.
Now, imagine that all technology for timekeeping disappeared overnight. You’re the only remaining person with the knowledge of what we have at our disposal today.
Could you explain the basics for how a mechanical watch functions, so that it could be reconstructed? I’d like to think that I could.
A quartz watch?
“Yeah, sure, just shoot electricity into a special stone and have it move the watch hands, and you should be good.”
So that’s a no.
What about the Apple Watch?
“Absolutely, no problem. You see, some really smart people came up with this thing called a computer, and — yeah, yeah, we can talk to and see people on the other side of the world, but don’t worry about that we’re talking about timekeeping here.“
Hard pass on that one.
Arthur C. Clarke wrote the now famous adage that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. And make no mistake about it, to most people — myself included — an Apple Watch is a magical device. And that’s why I can never truly appreciate an Apple Watch in the same way I can a mechanical watch.
While the latter is an astonishing piece of craftsmanship, the former is magic. And in a world where magic is so pervasive it became mundane a long time ago, craftsmanship we can understand in what’s in short supply.
This website, at the time of writing, is powered by an engine called WordPress. It’s a technological wonder that underpins something like half of all websites in existence. A Swiss Army knife of themes and plugins and blocks that you can wrestle with to wrangle the site into something like what you might have imagined. I’ve used this software for nearly twenty years now.
I remember discovering it, and marvelling at how now I could get away without having to think too much about what’s going on under the hood. As long as the web browser rendered it more or less as I had imagined, I was happy.
Then, the other day, I happened to peek under the hood of Jeremy Keith aka. Adactio’s website. I was looking to figure out how he had solved something related to IndieWeb features, to try to untangle how I could do the same with this site. What I felt while peeking into Jeremy’s source code (no innuendo!) must be similar to the experience of standing naked next to the human incarnation of a Greek god, representing the ideal of human appearance.
I felt shame for letting myself slide so far from this ideal.
In my own exploration of the human condition, my own attempt to create meaning out of nothing, I’ve found that pursuit of a craft is the ultimate point. It is the way we construct stories that make sense. Not in an elitist “only those who reach the pinnacle find meaning” sense. Quite to the contrary, I’m convinced all meaning comes from the journey.
Pick something, dedicate yourself to it, and your unique story will be written with purpose. Your story will have all the emotional ups and downs of a classic drama, as you falter and overcome on your path towards craftsmanship. It will feature victories for the ages, and devastating defeats that leave you wondering whether it’s possible to go on.
All of this comes from immersing yourself into something. It comes from chasing an ideal, and from pursuing the true beauty of craftsmanship.
When I saw Jeremy’s source code, I immediately thought that I need to throw WordPress out the door and write code that I can be proud of. Bad take. Being in the presence of greatness, of true craftsmanship, and recognising it is a gift. But the compulsion I feel to try and emulate it is a double-edged blade.
A gift, because it can be the seed of a years-long pursuit towards achieving that sort of mastery yourself. Something that sparks your own journey on the path to perhaps one day become a craftsman, or craftswoman, in that field.
But if you’ve already picked a path, it represents a potential detour. Worse, it can be something that compels you to abandon one pursuit before you get to experience everything good that comes from dedicating yourself to the mastery of something.
And yet, we should not discard them out of hand. In a world where craftsmanship we can understand is in short supply, these moments present us with potential foundational points. They represent an opportunity to take a stand. To hold ourselves accountable to an ideal we can recognise.
In a world that’s becoming increasingly abstract, that’s valuable. Because to find meaning in the stories we create, we need some level of understanding. Axioms that help us make sense of this existence we’ll never truly understand in this life.
So, while I should no more dedicate myself to the craft of front end development than watchmaking, the fact that I can recognise craftsmanship from something else, which — on the surface — has the same function, is not to be ignored. In the same way a swordsman can enhance his own existence; his own craft, with a sword from a master smith. It signifies an opportunity to enrich my own life by adding a combination of function and beauty I truly “get”.
All the while I carry on with my own pursuit of craftsmanship.
That’s to say, this website may look a little different tomorrow than it does today. When it does, feel free to sneak a peek below the hood.