Skill nostalgia

Listen to this essay 26 minute listen In the 18th century, the streets of East London were filled with flowers. Fuchsias, auriculas and star-of-Bethlehem grew from the window boxes of tall terraced houses. And tulips and dahlias sprouted from the narrow allotments kept by local silk weavers, who often tended to their gardens on Mondays. But as mechanical looms took over, and the weavers were forced to work long hours in factories to earn a living, there was little time left for growing flowers. In 1795, John Thelwall, the son of a silk mercer, wrote about his memories of the weavers’ gardens: I remember the time, myself, when a man who was a tolerable workman in the fields, had generally, beside the apartment in which he carried on his vocation, a small summer house and a narrow slip of a garden, at the outskirts of the town, where he spent his Monday, either in flying his pidgeons, or raising his tulips. But those gardens are now fallen into decay. The little summer-house and the Monday’s recreation are no more; and you will find the poor weavers and their families crowded together in vile, filthy and unwholesome chambers, destitute of the most common comforts, and even of the common necessaries of life. Like many others, Thelwall was nostalgic for a lost way of life. The historian E P Thompson notes that almost all writing about cloth workers in the 19th century is ‘haunted by the legend of better days’. And, like many others, Thelwall used the flowers that artisans had grown (and then woven into their patterns) as a symbol of that loss. ‘Weavers,’ the historian Robin Veder writes, ‘mourned the flowers as stand-ins for lost artisanal work culture.’ We might say that Thelwall was in the grip of skill nostalgia. Today, we seem to be caught by the same emotion. Streaming sites are full of reality television shows in which people compete to learn new skills: baking, pottery, sewing, glassblowing, blacksmithing. Etsy, an online marketplace built around handmade and vintage goods, now has more than 5 million sellers. A version of the 19th-century whaling song ‘The Wellerman’ has been viewed by hundreds of millions of people on TikTok and YouTube – a work song for people with neither ship nor crew. The French worker’s jacket, bleu de travail, is now sold by luxury fashion houses to people who will never set foot on a factory floor. We dream of running away to work on a farm or living the life of a Mediterranean peasant (ie, ‘Nonnamaxxing’). The American philosopher Matthew Crawford – who left his job at a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop – wrote a bestselling book about this kind of transition, called Shop Class as Soulcraft (2009), in which he argues that skilled manual work gives access to a form of thinking that office work denies us. These desires are growing ever more acute as AI promises, or threatens, to automate yet another layer of what humans can do. We crave the handmade, the from-scratch, the traditional, the folk. We dream of old forms of skilled work. When we fetishise the skills of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? But nostalgia can be a complicated and problematic emotion. For one thing, it is characteristically detached from reality. Fond memories of London’s weavers and their flowers make it easier to overlook the problems with artisanal silk production, and the fact that there were still gardens in Spitalfields until the mid-19th century. An equally serious concern is that nostalgia channels discontent about the present into the project of recreating an imagined past. As the cultural theorist Svetlana Boym argues in The Future of Nostalgia (2001), unreflective nostalgia ‘breeds monsters’: nationalism, racial supremacy, fascism. Will our desire for a lost age of skilled work curdle into technophobia, a distrust of social change, and a desire to return to the ‘way things were’? When we fetishise the skills and objects of the past, are we falling into a reactionary form of Luddism that resists all change? What are the politics hidden within our desire for artisanal sourdough bread and hand-thrown pottery? We are not the first to confront these questions. More than a century ago, sickened by the factories and slums that mechanical looms had built, John Ruskin and William Morris looked back, reaching past the Spitalfields weaver to something older: the medieval artisan. There, they found a dream of skilled labour, which they used as a tool to indict the present and imagine a fairer future. Their skill nostalgia became radical. Could ours do the same? Anxieties about the way we work are much older than the factories that worried Morris and Ruskin. For more than two millennia, philosophers have argued that skills are worth defending, and that we lose something of ourselves when we let them go. In Plato’s Phaedrus dialogue, written around 370 BCE, Socrates relates an Egyptian story about the invention of writing by the God Thoth. In the tale, Thoth makes his case for this new technology to the Egyptian king Thamus. After the divine sales pitch, Thamus responds: [T]his discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. In Plato’s telling, Socrates sides with Thamus on the basis that writing produces only a simulation of intelligence. Written texts are fixed, whereas conversation requires speakers to exercise flexibility, responding to questions and adapting to listeners. Plato views this responsiveness as characteristic of wisdom. There is a suggestion here that genuine understanding is produced through flexible give-and-take, and that reliance on writing threatens this by fostering forgetfulness and the mere appearance of knowledge. In some ways, this story suggests that flexible conversation could be understood as a skill – one that might be threatened if the technology of writing were to become widespread. The shift to industrial manufacturing destroys the tacit knowledge tied up in the creation of handmade goods Roughly 21 centuries later, in Émile (1762), Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues that apprenticeship in a métier – a job or skill – ought to be a central part of a child’s education. His rhetoric explicitly connects crafts with heritage: ‘Cultivate the heritage of your fathers! But if you have lost that heritage, or if you never had it, what should you do? Learn a skill [métier]!’ For Rousseau, the point of this apprenticeship is to gain insight into social relations, and crucially to learn the distinction between jobs that are held in high esteem and those that are actually useful. A century later, Karl Marx spends three chapters of his Capital (1867) detailing the shift from hand-crafted objects to industrially manufactured products. These chapters are presented as economic analysis but they have a nostalgic bent. For example: Manufacture begets, in every handicraft that it seizes upon, a class of so-called unskilled labourers, a class which handicraft industry strictly excluded. If it develops a one-sided speciality into a perfection, at the expense of the whole of a man’s working capacity, it also begins to make a speciality of the absence of all development. In these chapters, Marx presents something like a political economy of skill. His basic thought – following Adam Smith – is that the division of labour in production leads to substantial benefits of efficiency and profitability for the owner of capital, at the cost of a vicious specialisation among workers that narrows their practical and mental lives. The shift to industrial manufacturing destroys (or ‘uninvents’, to borrow a phrase from Donald MacKenzie and Graham Spinardi) the practical, tacit knowledge that was tied up in the creation of handmade goods. Eventually, people simply forget the exact way to make things because not all forms of practical knowledge can be written down. These examples of skill nostalgia have some common themes. Each argues that there is a moral imperative to cultivate skills, and that we can’t be free or truly understand the world without learning them. Each takes a declinist view of history, in which practical skills are always diminishing due to technological change. But each argument also highlights some of the problems with skill nostalgia. Rousseau ranks trades by how independent they are, anticipating the aspiration to heroic practical independence that we later find in Henry David Thoreau’s writing (and in every man who starts a DIY project). Socrates plays the technophobic trick of dismissing a technology by listing only its costs. Marx romanticises the artisan, treating the workshop as a site of integrated human development while underplaying the social inequalities that often structured the production of crafts. There’s a pattern here. When earlier periods of skilled practice are treated as more fully human, the social order that produced them can easily appear better than what replaced it. The past, then, seems superior to the present. This is why such arguments risk becoming reactionary. When we mourn the uninvention of skills, we may also – unless we are very careful – end up mourning the loss of the social structures that surround them. That slippage is the core mechanism by which skill nostalgia feeds into a longing for a bygone world. The wellspring of modern reactionary skill nostalgia is Martin Heidegger’s essay The Question Concerning Technology, first presented as a lecture in 1953. Heidegger argues that modern technology enframes the natural world, transforming it and us into the ‘standing reserve’ for industrial production. In so doing, modern technology alienates us from the revelatory potential of skill, and from our human essence. Heidegger’s alternative is dichterisch wohnen (‘poetic dwelling’), which amounts to romanticising one’s life: inhabiting the world in a way that remains open to the meaning of things rather than treating them as resources to be ordered and used. Heidegger’s examples of poetical living are steeped in Volkish symbolism and nostalgia: the woodsman, the windmill, the peasant farmer, the rushing river Rhine (now emasculated by a hydroelectric power station). We can find elements of Heidegger’s perspective running through popular writing on skill nostalgia in recent decades. In Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford focuses on male-coded skills like motorcycle repair. In Craftland (2025), the historian James Fox ties craft to British national identity; the book is structured around the regional trades that once defined local communities. And in Against the Machine (2025), Paul Kingsnorth describes skill and tradition as defences against modernity, which he equates with spiritual collapse – a position that places him within a longer tradition of reactionary European thought. An example to tie these ideas together: in September 2025, the United States Labor Department posted a picture of a white man in a denim shirt with a cleft chin against a blue sky marked by towering cranes. The slogan: Make America Skilled Again! At best, the image promotes the Fordist compromise of hard work for a family wage. At worst, it echoes National Socialist posters that promote a white supremacist politics, using the white worker as a synecdoche for the power of the state. What exactly do I mean by skill nostalgia? For me, the term describes both the desire for skilled activity that can be fulfilled by acquiring a skill, and more indirect forms of nostalgia for things – objects, practices, fashions – merely associated with skills. The skill-oriented hobbyist and the impractical hipster dressed in workwear are both expressing forms of skill nostalgia. But are they both expressing a Heideggerian desire to return to some imagined golden period? Is the hobbyist a technophobe? Is the hipster guilty of stolen valour? A more sympathetic view is that skill nostalgia – and nostalgia in general – is often motivated by a sense of pained loss rather than a desire to return to the past. We can find this sense of loss in the very origins of the word. ‘Nostalgia’ was introduced in the late 17th century as a medical diagnosis for the homesickness of Swiss mercenaries, which was so severe that superior officers banned the singing of the Alpine herding song ‘Ranz des Vaches’, supposedly on pain of death. The word has obviously undergone semantic drift since then, but the association between it and loss appears to be important. What kind of loss might give rise to skill nostalgia? The loss that animates skill nostalgia relates to the hollowing out of skilled labour and our frustrated desire for skilled work. In The Doctrine of Virtue (1797), Immanuel Kant describes the failure to develop our capacities (such as physical skills) as a failure of self-directed duty that leaves us idle and ‘rusting away [our] natural dispositions and powers’. Many contemporary jobs are simply not complicated enough to keep the rust off. For example, consider two of my own: there is no such thing as a master supermarket cashier or an expert warehouse worker. You can be good at these jobs but, because of the way they are organised, you can’t devote your life to mastering the art of scanning or unpacking cages in the same way as a craftsman devotes themselves to blade-making or weaving. We face a dearth of complex and meaningful jobs. You can be nostalgic for your lost childhood. You can also be nostalgic for losses that were never yours Some of us have found complexity and meaning in hobbies that reproduce obsolete forms of skilled labour: woodworking, knitting, fishing, fixing radios, home brewing, hand-weaving, fixing typewriters, calligraphy. The ever-pessimistic Theodor Adorno argues in the essay ‘Free Time’ (1977) that hobbies are a trick played by the management class to keep people busy and to habituate us into the work ethic. This view can claim some historical support: many hobbies were designed to keep the working class busy. However, there’s a more optimistic diagnosis available. Hobbies that reproduce obsolete jobs have, or can be imagined to have, features that many contemporary jobs lack: clear and sustained attention to a single task; the kind of complexity that enables lifelong self-development; stability; a specialised community organised around the possession of knowledge; and social recognition based on expertise and performance. Our hobbies seem to have become one way that we imagine our jobs should be. As automation, AI and lay-offs threaten to deskill labour further, it’s likely that our desire for skilled hobbies will only increase. As I see it, nostalgia is a peculiar combination of a desire for something associated with the past and a belief that it is impossible for that desire to be satisfied. Nostalgia is heterogeneous because there are many past things that we can desire. Perhaps we look to the community solidarity of the German Democratic Republic or the chivalric code of the medieval knight. Nostalgia can be associated both with individual and collective loss. You can be nostalgic for your lost childhood. You can also be nostalgic for losses that were never yours: the murmurations of starlings that once filled the evening sky and have since thinned away. There are two obvious routes out of the pain – and irrationality – of desiring something from the past that you believe you cannot have. You can either give up the desire for the past thing, or you can give up the belief that the past is lost. If you lose the desire, you end up lighter, but you accept the world the way it is. This is supposed to be the grown-up way to process nostalgia: stop dreaming about being a child and be an adult. On the other hand, if you give up the belief that the past thing is lost, your desire can create a belief that the present can be made more like the past. This is the reactionary form of skill nostalgia that we find in Heidegger and the current US government. Are these the only two options for skill nostalgia? Must it always resolve into accepting the present or into the project of recreating an imagined past? In the 1800s, following the start of the industrial revolution in Britain, there was a wave of nostalgia in art, literature, architecture and design that looked back to the medieval period. The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood produced art inspired by Arthurian folk stories. Authors of Gothic literature used medieval symbols as emotional engines to generate fear and awe. Architects drafted a slew of pseudomedieval Gothic buildings (most notably the Houses of Parliament). And interior designers and decorative artists popularised a style that evoked the medieval workshop and its handmade aesthetic. This wave of medieval nostalgia was in large part a Romantic reaction to industrialisation. One of its central ideas was that one ought to value the products made by hand over factory-produced goods – a kind of skill nostalgia. Consider the furnishing and interior design firm Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co (later known as Morris & Co). When it was founded in 1861, the firm started with a renovation project. One of the founders, William Morris, wanted to build a family home that rejected what he saw as dominant Victorian social values. With his friend Philip Webb, Morris designed a modern Gothic house made from red brick, in southeast London. It would be furnished with stained glass, tableware, furniture and tapestries designed by Morris and his friends. One evening – apparently as a joke – they started Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co as an attempt to reform the decorative arts against the overwhelming tide of shoddy factory-made objects. In a later talk, Morris sets out a dual function for the decorative arts: To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it. The making of cloth, books and tapestries by hand were rapidly declining skills by the mid-1800s, and Morris personally dove into reinventing several crafts, with the assistance of period manuals. But he wanted to do more than just reproduce art from bygone eras. Morris wanted people to have the opportunity to perform skilled labour in the manner of medieval craftspeople by working slowly, with their hands, gradually improving their skills through experiments and mistakes. Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co was an early part of the wider Arts and Crafts movement that emerged from medievalism and the rejection of industrial production. Eventually, it led to a resurgence of craft practices across the world, from the Mingei movement in Japan to the Prairie School in Chicago. Pugin thinks beautiful architecture reveals a flourishing society, and ugly buildings are a sign of breakdown The Victorians were clearly nostalgic for medieval craft production, but was their form of skill nostalgia reactionary or radical? There certainly were reactionary takes on this wave of nostalgia. Consider the work of the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and the English architect Augustus Pugin (co-designer of the Houses of Parliament). In Past and Present (1843), Carlyle compares the troubles of the English working class with the harmony of the medieval monastery, and makes the case for reestablishing a feudal monarchy. Pugin anticipates this message in his illustrated tract Contrasts: Or, A Parallel between the Noble Edifices of the Middle Ages and Corresponding Buildings of the Present Day (1836). Pugin contrasts the beauty of medieval buildings with the ugliness of Victorian buildings, and thinks that beautiful architecture reveals a flourishing society, and ugly buildings are a sign of breakdown. He writes: It is only by communing with the spirit of past ages, as it is developed in the lives of the holy men of old, and in their wonderful monuments and works, that we can arrive at a just appreciation of the glories we have lost, or adopt the necessary means for their recovery. Faced with the industrial revolution, both Pugin and Carlyle seek a counter-revolution that re-establishes the medieval social order: king, church and country. In contrast with this reactionary version of skill nostalgia, consider the form articulated by the art critic Ruskin. From 1851 to 1853, he published a three-volume history of Venetian architecture titled The Stones of Venice. Like Pugin, Ruskin views architectural styles as indicative of the social and political health of society. His central argument is that the Venetian Republic reached its peak during the Gothic period and declined thereafter. Ruskin gives a detailed conceptual analysis of the Gothic style of architecture. He proposes that Gothic buildings have six characteristics: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity and redundancy. This all sounds pretty dry, until we get into the details. Each architectural feature really describes a virtue of the medieval stonemasons who built it, rather than a physical property of the building. Savageness is a sign of improving skill; changefulness, of independence; naturalism, of love of nature; grotesqueness, of imaginative freedom; rigidity, of dedication to hard work; and redundancy, of generosity of spirit. Ruskin is doing virtue theory via aesthetics. Ruskin treats the past not as an ideal, but as a way to calibrate our hopes and dreams Ruskin goes on to use the Gothic stonemason to critique the factory labour system. He contrasts the independent and always-improving stonemason with the factory labourer who works under the division of labour: We want one man to be always thinking, and another to be always working, and we call one a gentleman, and the other an operative; whereas the workman ought often to be thinking, and the thinker often to be working, and both should be gentlemen, in the best sense. As it is, we make both ungentle, the one envying, the other despising, his brother; and the mass of society is made up of morbid thinkers, and miserable workers. Now it is only by labour that thought can be made healthy, and only by thought that labour can be made happy, and the two cannot be separated with impunity. Ruskin doesn’t want to return to the way of life of the medieval stonemason and he doesn’t see the medieval period as a golden era. Instead, he wants to build our hopes for the future around the ideals and virtues that animated the stonemason’s life and work. Ruskin treats the past not as an ideal, but as a way to calibrate our hopes and dreams. He points towards a way to develop nostalgia that is an alternative to accepting the present or trying to recreate the past. Instead, his nostalgia orientates us towards the future. On 4 December 1877, Morris expressed something similar to a gathered crowd at the Trades Guild of Learning in London. During the talk, he conjured the days when the ‘the mystery and wonder of handicrafts were well acknowledged by the world.’ Those were days when ‘all handicraftsmen were artists’. But then that art changed: it grew into something heavy and complex, and crafts like weaving or blacksmithing were broken down into parts and turned into serious, industrial activities, rending the lives of artists into ‘one long tragedy of hope and fear, joy and trouble.’ This process, Morris says, defines ‘the growth of art: like all growth, it was good and fruitful for awhile; like all fruitful growth, it grew into decay; like all decay of what was once fruitful, it will grow into something new.’ The problems of skilled, meaningful work are just as urgent today as they were in the time of Morris and Ruskin. In the Papal Encyclical Magnifica Humanitas (2026), Pope Leo XIV worries that artificial intelligence will ‘paradoxically de-skill workers, subject them to automated surveillance and relegate them to rigid and repetitive tasks.’ But we must push back against this, he insists, because ‘work is not simply an instrument; it expresses and enhances the dignity of our lives. It is a requirement of the human condition, a normal path toward maturity, development and personal fulfilment.’ Defending that dignity often involves looking back. Some of the richest thinking about what good work looks like has come from people mourning its disappearance. Skill nostalgia is worth cultivating, provided we redirect it. The longing to live as some imagined stonemason, peasant farmer or carpenter can be turned into a demand for work that is complex and worthwhile. In his essay Useful Work versus Useless Toil (1885), Morris offers a framework for doing this. He dismisses a swathe of contemporary work as useless and harmful to the mental life of the worker – something that many of us can likely relate to – but he maintains that there is a category of hopeful work. For him, such work is animated by four goals: the hope of rest, the hope of producing useful things, the hope of intrinsic pleasure in skilled activity, and the hope of abundance for all. Yes, the gardens have fallen into decay and the flowers are gone. We can mourn that loss. Or we can ask: what kind of work will let us grow them again?