The World Becomes Frictionless (And Loses Something Human)
There is a particular kind of silence that belongs only to the modern world, a strangely weightless quiet, not the calm of a Sunday morning or the contemplative hush of a library but the soft emptiness of a life that has become too easy. It’s the silence that follows the click of a “next-day delivery” button. The instant gratification of a meal that arrives still steaming in its container. The smug, frictionless slide of an interface that does exactly what it should without asking anything of you in return.
We used to have to earn things. Now we simply summon them and while summoning is efficient, dazzlingly and at times seductively efficient, it carries a peculiar side effect. It starves us of the sense that what we’re doing matters.
For most of human history, value was self-evident. It lived in the weight of the chair you carved, the thickness of the wool you wove, the stubbornness of the soil you coaxed into life. Everything worthwhile required effort and effort, in turn, gave meaning. You knew a man not by what he consumed but by what he could mend, craft, grow, or endure. Humans ruled their dominion but somewhere between the first automated till and the latest AI-driven shopping recommendation, we misplaced that relationship. We optimised the friction out of life with such enthusiasm that we accidentally optimised out the feeling as well. The emptiness is evident.
Today, we live in an economy designed to eliminate inconvenience. You can cross continents without speaking to a single person. You can furnish a home without touching a single object.
You can eat a week’s worth of food without knowing its origin. You can order a new wardrobe without ever seeing the fabric that will cling to your skin. It’s comfy but it’s dull. It is all astonishingly, dazzlingly effortless and yet it leaves us curiously unfulfilled.
The truth is this, a world without friction is a world without texture and a world without texture is one in which we lose our connection to the real. To ourselves and eventually to those we love.
We have replaced the rituals that once gave our days structure with a kind of abstract, digital choreography. A swipe here, a tap there, a little coloured dot telling us a parcel is waiting on the doorstep like a Pavlovian treat. We’ve built a life so smooth it’s begun to slide right past us. Even sex for many young males is purely digital as Only Fans has proven.
A generation ago, buying something worth owning meant a small pilgrimage. You would go to the workshop, the tailor’s back room, the ironmonger, the farm gate. You’d step into a space that smelled of cedar or lanolin or hot oil. You’d shake hands with the person who made the thing you were buying and in doing so, you inherited a little of their pride in it, their certainty that this object, this coat, this saddle, this watch, this loaf, would stand up to life. The life that you gave it however short or long it was yours to be enjoyed
Today, by contrast, you can spend thousands of pounds on an object whose maker you could not name even under threat of cross-examination. You’ll never see the factory, never meet the workers, never understand the compromise between cost and quality that shaped the thing you’re holding. Impersonal is an understatement.
There is no connection, only the transaction. There is no story, only shipping. There is certainly no craft, we do all of this purely for convenience.
The irony, of course, is that this convenience has made us weary. The more efficiently we acquire things, the less we seem to care about any of them. The closet bulges, the garage overflows, the digital subscriptions multiply like damp in winter and yet very little of it feels truly ours.
Why? It’s simple, ownership without involvement is hollow. It’s soulless, to only consume reduces your net worth in real terms.
How did we get here?
This is most obvious in the things we use every day. It’s the chair that begins to wobble after two months. The high street chain store coat whose seams betray you on the third outing. One of my personal pet hates, the knitwear that bobbles after one or to washes. The electrical appliance designed to last exactly as long as its warranty. The software that worked beautifully until the company chased “innovation” and broke the very features people loved. You all know the feeling because you have all experienced it.
Somewhere in the pursuit of frictionless perfection, quality slipped quietly out the back door. We used to build objects that aged with us, now we replace them before they have time to form a personality. We used to take pride in the patina of use, now we hide wear and tear as if it were shameful. We used to value the hand that made it, now we value the speed at which the next one can arrive.
This shift has consequences, the most obvious of which is that we no longer trust the objects around us. We treat them as temporary. Dispensable and disposable and the moment you start treating your possessions that way, you’re only one step away from treating experiences, relationships and memories the same. Once again deep down inside we all know that is what’s happening but we turn that blind eye, to our friends, our partner and increasingly sadly our children. In doing that we lose trust and real trust cannot survive in a world where nothing is permitted to last. Ios that the legacy we want to leave?
Recently the arrival of AI has accelerated this estrangement. Suddenly we inhabit an age where everything can be generated, duplicated, reimagined, scaled and delivered without human intervention. Fast, efficient and lifeless. The beautifully written word, the carefully drawn line, the tirelessly crafted melody and the idea that took months or years to bring to fruition. All of them can be conjured instantly, cleanly and without sweat and more importantly without inspiration.
Yet, as the digital world multiplies its outputs, it also dilutes them. When everything is possible, very little feels precious. That’s why craft, the slow, stubborn, analogue kind has returned to the cultural foreground like a long forgotten aria. The reason is because it offers something the modern world has misplaced, evidence of care.
There is emotional truth in something that carries the marks of its making. A hand-thrown pottery mug feels different because a hand shaped it, consequently the liquid it contains will taste different. A jacket cut by a tailor moves differently because a human shoulder guided it and because of that the individual wearing it will feel different when the wear it. A field tended by a farmer grows different because the land remembers and the food tastes so much better for it.
Machines make things flawless. Humans make things meaningful.
The resurgence of craft is not nostalgia. It is a reaction, a visceral, almost instinctive rebellion against a world that has become so efficient, it no longer feels real. If that sounds naively romantic, it’s not. It’s a plain and simple fact and deep down we all know it.
People want to feel again. They want to touch things with a story, a history a past. They want to buy things that will outlive them, that can can pass on to their children and possible grandchildren. The desire to connect with the hands that worked long before the purchase was ever made is deep but we’re suppressing it.
The frictionless world has made life convenient, yes but it has also made it strangely bloodless, a lifeless corpse. Craft returns the blood, it resuscitates the cadaver.
So here we stand at the threshold of a quiet cultural correction, one in which the speed of the modern world will continue to mesmerise us but the authenticity of the old world will begin to hopefully anchor us once more, because at some point, everyone realises the same thing.
The life that asks nothing of you, gives nothing back.
The Return of the Maker: Why Craft Is Booming Again
If you spend any time wandering the edges of modern life, the markets, the high streets, the workshop districts, the little corners of the internet where people still make things for the pleasure of making them you will begin to notice something quietly subversive. Amid the churn of automation, amid the Amazonification of desire, amid the unceasing, algorithmic roar of choice, human beings are circling back toward the one thing the modern world tried so very hard to forget. The maker. The originator. The creator. Not brands, factories and not “producers.”
Makers. Originators and Creators.
People with hands, tools, apprenticeships, stubbornness, patience and the sort of glint in the eye that tells you they know something the rest of us have lost. It’s happening in ways that feel almost subterranean at first. A young accountant who has decided he will only buy welted boots. A lawyer who commissions knitwear from a fourth-generation Shetlander. A tech founder who realises he trusts a tiny software team of three, who he can talk to, far more than a platform valued at £10 billion. A family that switches from supermarket tomatoes to the farmer’s unbranded produce because it tastes like a tomato should.
Look again, search and the trend is not microscopic at all, it’s tidal. The return of the maker is not nostalgia, it’s universal fatigue. A collective exhale after decades of being fed a diet of the perfectly adequate. A slow, calm rebellion against the world’s cheapest superpower. The ability to produce astonishing quantities of things no one actually loves.
Once people begin to ask the simple question “Who made this?” the revolution will start, the more people ash you that question, the entire geometry of consumption tilts.
There is a particular weariness that follows living too fast for too long. The products wear out, the clothes lose shape, the tools fail at the precise moment you need them, as if conspiring with the universe to remind you that you bought the wrong thing. The modern marketplace has become the culinary equivalent of eating nothing but crisps, satisfying for a moment, hollow shortly thereafter and faintly shame-inducing once the dust settles. Cheapness has a hangover.
Every broken hinge, every pilling garment, every plastic gadget that cracks under minimal pressure is a reminder that the modern world’s obsession with convenience has hollowed out the soul from the objects around us. In that hollow space, a hunger has grown, a hunger not for more things but for better things, things with value, things to cherish and love. Things to pass on and share.
This is the quiet engine behind the revival of craft, a growing impatience with the emptiness of the mass-produced.
The most surprising part of this resurgence is that it isn’t driven by wealth. It’s driven by weariness. People are discovering that the most luxurious thing about a handmade object isn’t the price, it’s the care inside it. Care has become a commodity again.
You can feel it in a hand-stitched saddle where the craftsman has shaped the leather with the same movements thousands of times. You can see it in the way a traditional baker scores a loaf by instinct, not by a machine. You can taste it in cheese made by a family that has milked cows, sheep or goats in the same valley for over a century. You hear it in a mechanical watch whose ticking seems almost embarrassed by the silence of the room. All those experiences are beautiful, they fill the soul with joy.
These objects, these foods, these garments, these tools, every one of them ask you to slow down, if only for a moment and appreciate the time embedded in them. They are the opposite of everything the modern world celebrates. They require patience to make and in return, they encourage patience to use. That is why, in the long run, they are going to win.
In a time obsessed with instant gratification, anything that slows us down enough to feel human again begins to look like treasure.
There is an irony here that would be funny if it weren’t so poetic, the generation raised entirely on AI, touchscreens, on-demand everything and frictionless life is the one leading the charge back to craft. You see it in twenty-something baristas discussing the mouthfeel of natural coffees. The young sommeliers taking time to learn the grapes that have taken centuries to form the current taste. In Gen-Z tailors who can hand-sew a lapel roll that would make a Savile Row cutter nod in quiet respect. In young farmers reviving regenerative practices their grandparents abandoned in the rush to industrialise. In software engineers who throw out bloated frameworks and write their own tools because they “want to feel the architecture.”
Craft is no longer the dusty pastime of the traditionalist. It’s the revolt of the digitally overfed. This generation isn’t looking backwards. They’re looking for anchors. Something build foundations on, something to be proud of. They want products with weight, with story, with fingerprints, literal or metaphorical. Nothing says “human” quite like the presence of a flaw you can’t explain, only appreciate.
The Appetite for Authenticity
One of the most interesting developments in this revival is that craft is not restricted to the physical world. It has returned in the digital realm too, where the most beloved tools are not the ones with the most features but the ones with the most humanity.
Software used to be about scale. Bigger teams, bigger roadmaps, bigger ambitions. However, as the digital world becomes saturated with feature-rich but soul-poor platforms, users are rediscovering the appeal of the small. A six-person team in Norway builds a note-taking app that becomes the darling of writers across the world. A two-person analytics company in Estonia wins trust purely because they refuse to spy on their users. A small group of developers in Chicago can command an audience of millions simply by arguing, convincingly, that “less is more.”
These people are not technologists in the traditional sense. They are craftsmen. They treat code like joinery. It has to be clean, tight, elegant, built with a philosophy rather than a target. The digital craftsman, much like the carpenter or tailor, operates with a sense of proportion the mass-production world has forgotten. A feature should justify its existence. A product should have an opinion. A user should feel better after interacting with it, not drained.
This is craft, translated into bits and logic rather than wood and steel.
If you ask people why they choose a handmade object over a mass-produced one, the answers vary but they always sound poetic.
“It feels as if someone cared.”
“It feels real.”
“It reminds me of my grandfather.”
“The smell is just right.”
“I know it will outlast me.”
“It doesn’t have a equal.”
What they’re describing is authenticity, not the overused marketing term but the visceral recognition that something was made by a human being who stood behind their work. We are biologically attuned to these cues. There’s a sense of presence in objects shaped by hands, a faint echo of the maker’s confidence, their frustration and their patience, their adjustments and their decisions. It is the closest thing we have to telepathy, one human speaking to another through material and form. Craft bends time. It allows the past to shake hands with the present.
This is why craft is booming because the modern world has become too smooth, too fast, too synthetic to leave any imprint on our sense of self. Handmade things restore friction and friction restores meaning.
What’s happening now is more than a trend. It is a rebalancing of cultural power. For decades, we admired the people who could scale things. Now we admire the people who can shape things.
The maker has returned to the centre of culture, not the influencer, not the brand strategist, not the lifestyle guru but the person who can create something with integrity.
In my experience they come in many forms:
the farmer whose tomatoes taste like childhood
the tailor who understands your posture better than you do
the watchmaker who tunes a movement until it purrs
the baker who coaxes an impossible crust from three ingredients
the indie software team who build products with the calm certainty of people who intend to support them forever
These makers are not competing with mass production. They are quietly outgrowing it. The reason? Mass production offers abundance, while craft offers belonging.
The return of the maker is a cultural homecoming, a slow, steady reunion with the idea that the things we live with should be built to last and that the people who make them should be visible, honourable and proud. It is not a rejection of modernity. It’ the pure refinement of it.
In choosing craft, people are not turning their backs on technology, they are insisting that technology serve them, not engulf them. They are choosing quality over quantity, meaning over convenience, connection over anonymity. That choice made, something remarkable is happening, a new generation is rediscovering what previous generations never doubted that the things worth having are rarely the things that arrive instantly. Craft is not back. It never left.
We simply lost the ability to recognise it.
Now, with the fatigue of frictionless life settling into the bones of society, people are learning slowly, beautifully, deliberately to look again.
Trust in the Age of Disposable Everything
Trust, like good bread or good weather, was once something we took for granted. It hovered in the background of daily life, quiet, dependable, unquestioned. You trusted the things you bought because someone had made them, someone visibly, tangibly, responsibly human. You trusted the brands you used because they seemed to value their own reputations. You trusted that the tool in your hand wouldn’t snap under pressure, that the garment on your back wouldn’t disintegrate in the wash, that the spare part you ordered would actually fit the machine it was meant for.
Somewhere along the line and I truly believe that’s it all our own fault, that confidence evaporated. It didn’t disappear dramatically, like a scandal or a crash, it drained away like heat from a winter sky, slowly, silently, leaving us shivering before we noticed the cold.
Today, we inhabit a world of products that promise almost everything and deliver virtually nothing. Things break too soon. Subscriptions quietly degrade. Appliances die the instant the warranty expires as if obeying a secret calendar. Software updates ruin familiar features in the name of “innovation,” and clothes seem to wilt out of sheer embarrassment. The modern economy is built on a strange, bleak assumption, that we won’t trust anything for long, so there’s no point making it trustworthy.
Therefore we live surrounded by objects that feel as fragile as they are forgettable.
There is a moment of realisation that comes to everyone, usually at the wrong time, a hinge snaps on a laptop bag you thought would last years, a jacket loses its shape after three wears, a toddler’s toy collapses in your hand, revealing its thin insides like a secret shame. You’re left holding the remnants, wondering how something that looked so capable turned out to be made of nothing. We have normalised transience, we have institutionalised disappointment and we have hidden it behind the cheerful veneer of “affordable.”
The supermarket sells strawberries in January, socks in six-packs with colours that nobody wants and a dozen variations of the same plastic container, each one destined to crack under the same amount of pressure. The big-box retailer sells cordless tools that wheeze after a season. Online giants deliver whatever you want in a brown box, only to see it returned days later, destined for a landfill in some anonymous valley. It’s all terribly convenient and it’s terribly bleak.
This slow degradation has corroded something deeper than our appetite for shopping. It has eroded our faith in products, in brands and more worryingly, in the idea that anything can be relied upon.
The Vanishing of Accountability
Once upon a time, when you bought a chair or a watch or a pair of boots, you could point to the person responsible for its existence. They had a name, a workshop, a reputation and if you had a complaint, you spoke to a human being who would either set things right or look you in the eye and explain why they couldn’t. Today, if you have a problem with anything, you enter the labyrinth.
A chatbot asks if your issue matches one of nine predetermined categories. Then a customer-service agent on a different continent apologises profusely, repeating everything that you say but can resolve nothing. The faceless brand assures you that your feedback has been “escalated,” which is corporate dialect for filed neatly in the bin.
You cannot talk to the maker because there is no maker, only a system a vast, humming machine of subcontractors, suppliers, warehouses, logistics firms, customer-care departments and algorithms all passing responsibility like a hot plate.
Who, exactly, is accountable for the shirt that began to unravel at the seam? For the drone that died at forty-three minutes? For the kitchen knife that couldn’t survive a tomato? Or for the online service that lost two years of your documents? No one. There’s no accountability. Trust cannot survive where no one is responsible.
In response, quietly, instinctively, people have begun to retreat from the world of the frictionless disposable and edge toward the warm glow of tangible, crafted, accountable things. They don’t always announce this shift. They may not even articulate it nbut you see it in the corners of their lives, the handmade wallet bought from a leatherworker in Dorset, the boots ordered from a one-man workshop in Yorkshire, the kitchen knife forged by a former engineer-turned-bladesmith in a converted barn, the software product built by a small, stable team whose entire business depends on being trustworthy.
These objects aren’t perfect. That’s precisely why they’re trusted. Their small irregularities, a slight variance in the stitching, a gentle lean in the wood grain, broadcast something mass production cannot. Someone cared enough to make this and cared enough to get it as right as possible. Someone took and will take responsibility for it once it’s complete.
Humans, it turns out, trust other humans far more than they trust systems. Not because humans are flawless but because their flaws are honest.
You can always feel the difference between a product made for you and a product made for everyone. The handmade object has a kind of weight that the mass-produced object lacks. It carries time inside it, not metaphorically but literally. Hours of labour, years of apprenticeship, perhaps even generations of accumulated knowledge. It holds intention and humans have an innate ability to sense intention.
It might be the way that hand-thrown mug sits differently in the palm. It might be the soft warmth of a hand-loomed scarf, or the reassuring heft of a forged tool. It might be the way a small software application simply works, doing only the things you need, quietly and elegantly, without the suffocating bloat that characterises its corporate rivals. These objects announce their origins in a language we all understand intuitively, even if we cannot describe it, “This was made by someone who stands behind it.”
That one sentence, or rather, that one feeling, is the essence of trust.
When everything becomes disposable, something else is disposed of too. Dignity. Dignity for the maker, whose work is reduced to a cog in an invisible wheel. Dignity for the buyer, who is treated as a statistic rather than a person. Dignity for the object itself, stripped of any expectation to last, to improve with time, to matter.
The tragedy of cheap goods is not that they break, though they do, easily but that they leave nothing behind. No memory, no story, no patina of use. They arrive, perform briefly and vanish, leaving the buyer slightly poorer in both wallet and spirit. This, slowly and quietly, has made people hungry for the opposite. They want objects that carry a sense of endurance.
Think of a handmade boot you can resole repeatedly for twenty years.
Consider the watch that ticks long after the fashion for smart ones has dulled.
Imagine a piece of furniture that softens with age instead of collapsing under its own weight. Lastly hope for the digital tool that feels as though it was written with caution and conscience instead of urgency. These things, inevitably, come from people who care.
Trust as a Form of Presence
When people talk about wanting “quality,” they are really saying they want presence.
Presence is the invisible ingredient in all crafted things, the maker’s mind lingering in the object long after it leaves their hands. In a world where everything arrives in the same brown cardboard box, presence is rare but when found, people cling to it. I personally return to the same cheesemaker each month. I get my shoes and boots resoled by the same cobbler I’ve used for 10 plus years. I search for software from a team that replies personally to emails. Closest to my heart, where I can, I choose food from a farm where the farmer remembers my name and the name of my wife and children. Trust is not built with marketing. It is built with memory.
And memory comes from interaction with people, not processes.
We rarely speak about it openly but the truth is that society is losing its faith in modern systems. Not entirely and not dramatically, no one is storming the barricades or protesting in the street but they’re doing enough that the cracks are visible. I’ve not spoken to one person that trusts that the phone company will protect their data. I don’t know anyone that believes trust that their energy provider has their interests at heart. Food? I can’t even imagine trusting a food label. Tech? Warranty promises or privacy policies, give me break who reads the small print that says you have no rights. The integrity of the supply chain is broken.
For better or worse trust is migrating. It is drifting downward and inward away from global institutions and toward individuals, workshops, family farms, small teams, single makers, local producers.
Trust is becoming artisanal.
Craft, I mean, real craft has always offered a simple, powerful guarantee. The greatest guarantee.
“If something goes wrong, I will put it right.”
No bureaucracy. No customer service scripts. None of that escalating tickets bullshit.
Just a person whose name you know, standing behind their work. Taking responsibility. Being accountable for the work they produce. This is why crafted things are returning to prominence. It’s not because people want to retreat into pre-industrial romanticism, although I for one would love to mix that into todays technological landscape. It’s because they want to feel secure again.
The real product of craft is not the object. It is the relationship. The feeling you get walking into your tailors, your shoemakers, the local farm shop. The feeling of discovering knitwear that feels like you could wear it every day for the rest of your life and never tire of the emotion it brings. Visiting new countries and experiencing everything that is truly local and letting the people who produced know that loved it.
Craft rebuilds trust by making the maker visible again. Hu-fucking-zzah
The trust economy is not something governments planned or companies strategised for. It emerged from the exhaustion of a public tired of being let down by systems too big to care. People want objects, services and food that show evidence of responsibility. They want to feel the hand behind the outcome. They want to know that the person who made something can be held to account and is proud to be. This is why craft is not competing with mass production.
It is offering an alternative universe. One where quality is non-negotiable, where failure is addressed with humility and where trust is rebuilt one object, one service, one human interaction at a time.
The disposable world taught us convenience. Craft is teaching us confidence.
In that quiet exchange, that unseen moment, something essential, something we didn’t realise we were mourning is finding its way back into our lives. The feeling that the things around us were made to endure and that the people who made them would be proud if they could see how long they lasted.
Generational Skills: The Knowledge Machines Can’t Replace
There is knowledge that can be written down and then there is knowledge that can only be passed down. I love that sentence. After all the former lives on shelves and servers.
The latter lives in hands, in posture, in instinct, in a type of memory that’s closer to inheritance than education. You can’t download it. You can’t short-cut your way into it. You can’t automate your way around it, however insistent the machines become.
It must be, it has to be, it can only be lived.
We tend to speak about “generational skill” as if it were a charming relic, the sort of phrase you might find printed on a tourist brochure for a heritage craft town, somewhere between the blacksmith’s forge and the jam-making ladies of the local women’s institute, if they still exist. In reality, generational skill is one of civilisation’s great invisible backbones. A type of knowledge that accumulates not through learning but through living. It’s a parent’s duty to instil all possible knowledge, all they’ve experienced. We should pass on everything, so it’s not lost forever.
The knowledge contained in the way a farmer walks a field at dusk, listening for a silence that shouldn’t be there. It may be a watchmaker holding their breath when adjusting a balance spring.
Perhaps a tailor running a thumb across cloth and knowing immediately whether it will drape or fight. How about a carpenter knocking their knuckles against timber and hearing a whole story echo back, moisture, age, strength, temperament. It is knowledge that survives only if someone cares enough to inherit it.
And we are only now realising how rare and how irreplaceable that inheritance truly is.
Try asking a master craftsperson how they know when something is ready.
“When do you know the bread has proofed enough?”
“How do you know a ewe is close to lambing?”
“How do you know the joint won’t split when you drive the dowel?”
“How do you know the software will buckle under load before it ever does?”
They’ll often pause, frown slightly and give the most honest answer possible, “I just know.”
Let’s be clear this isn’t arrogance, it’s an extremely high form of literacy. Generational literacy.
What they mean is, “I’ve seen the wrong way so many times that the right way announces itself before I consciously recognise it.”
It’s beautiful. These are people who have trained their senses until the world whispers clues to them. What we call intuition is simply their memory working faster than their speech.
It is not magic. It is not genius. It is not mysticism. It is the relentless, cumulative experience of people who have spent a lifetime paying attention. They should be rewarded. Machines can analyse patterns. Only humans can feel them.
Apprenticeship: The Lost University
There was a time, not long ago in the history of things, when apprenticeship was not a romantic concept but the ordinary route to adulthood. You didn’t earn certificates; you earned calluses, respect and the capacity to do something properly. It was tough. Your apprenticeship wasn’t only in the craft, it was in the growing into the craft. You had to show the right character to hold the future position.
An apprentice did not merely watch a master, they absorbed them. The vocabulary, the posture, the philosophy. The tricks that weren’t written down because the master barely noticed they were doing them. The thousand tiny corrections that eventually formed a worldview.
Modern life, with its bright lights and slick screens, taught us to undervalue this lineage. We replaced apprenticeship with instruction. We swapped “follow me” for “read this.” We traded generational wisdom for procedural efficiency and we’re worse off for it. Now we find ourselves at a peculiar crossroads: an age of unprecedented technological capability, paired with an unprecedented impoverishment of human practical intelligence.
It is telling that young people, raised in the soft glow of automation, are now seeking out crafts their grandparents abandoned, not because they’re nostalgic but because they’re starved. Starved of skill and more importantly of purpose, for something more interesting than managing a digital inbox.
You cannot apprentice yourself to an algorithm but you can apprentice yourself to a person.
Thankfully, it turns out we still hunger for the latter.
If there is one group who embodies generational skill more profoundly than any other, it is farmers. Their craft predates civilisation, luxury, industry, almost everything except fire.
A farmer’s knowledge is a tapestry woven from hundreds of threads, the colour of soil after a storm, the behaviour of cattle when a cold front is coming, the weight of a newborn lamb in the crook of an arm, the silence of a sick animal, the ache in the air before frost touches the ground,
the pattern of wind that will flatten one field and spare another.
You cannot teach this in a classroom you will not learn it on YouTube and you certainly won’t be able to sense it through a data feed.
It is the type of knowledge that settles into the bones of a family over generations. A father may show a son how to recognise a fungal blotch on wheat but the son will feel a shift in the field that the father can no longer articulate because skills evolve, deepen, sharpen with each and every passing generation.
No industry has tried harder to automate itself than agriculture and no industry has learned more brutally that some things cannot be automated.
Although a drone may spot the problem only a farmer can tell you what it means. A satellite image might have the ability to show moisture levels but only a farmer knows if the soil is sulking or singing. The world is rediscovering that farmers weren’t behind the times, they were ahead of them, carrying knowledge machines still cannot touch.
The resurgence of generational skill isn’t limited to barns and workshops. It has crept quietly into the world of software, where small, tightly knit engineering teams have become the digital heirs to the old artisanal guilds.
Walk into a large tech company and you’ll see dozens of engineers working on a single feature, each responsible for a sliver of the whole. No one sees the full architecture. No one feels the whole weight of the system. It’s fast, scalable, efficient and deeply forgettable. Dull and boring.
Now walk into the tiny office of a small software outfit, three or four people who have built something beautiful not because they were told to but because they had to, they couldn’t bear to ship something soulless. They speak about their code the way a luthier speaks about grain, carefully, reverently, with the slight possessiveness of someone who knows what it took to get it right. Their knowledge is generational too, handed down not from parents but from mentors, influences, earlier systems, design philosophies, the shared lineage of engineering craftsmanship.
They don’t write code, they craft architecture. The product feels coherent because the team is coherent. These people are not relics. They are the future. More bespoke apps and programs will eventually overtake all those halfwits trying to “scale the next big thing”.
The companies that will endure are the ones that have rediscovered the value of depth over breadth, of intuition over inertia, of craftsmanship over consensus.
One of the most poignant sights in life is the ageing master who has no apprentice. You see it in blacksmiths whose tools will be sold at auction when they die, in watchmakers whose apprenticeships dried up decades ago, in farms whose children have gone to the city, in tailors who worry they are the last of their line.
What do you lose when generational knowledge ends? More than just a skill. You lose a worldview, a rhythm, a language of competence that no school can recreate.
This is not melodrama, it is simple economics. If enough generational knowledge disappears, society loses the ability to make, repair, grow, interpret, and build the things that allow civilisation to function.
We’ve already begun to feel this loss in subtle ways. We’ve become a society that replaces instead of repairs, prefers automation to understanding, avoids making decisions and instead asks algorithms to make them for us and because of this, we have become clumsier with our own lives.
Generational knowledge once wrapped the world in competence. Its absence leaves us exposed.
Artificial intelligence can learn patterns, but it cannot learn judgement. Culture and history are alien in the Ai stratosphere. It cannot grasp the moral weight of decisions made slowly, repetitively and with consequence. It is, regardless of tech giants telling us different as they sell us the next product, second best in many ways. AI can generate a thousand designs in a second but a carpenter spends a lifetime perfecting the strength of a single joint. AI can predict weather more accurately than ever but a farmer knows when the land is about to break before the sky even hints at it. AI can analyse terabytes of data, yet a watchmaker knows a movement is wrong because it sounds anxious.
The machines may become cleverer than us but they will never become older or wiser than us. They will not accumulate the weight of human experience. They cannot and never will replace the generational mind.
The future will not belong to those who choose tradition over technology, nor to those who choose technology over tradition, but to those who understand that generational skill and modern innovation are meant to be partners, not rivals.
For example, the farmer who uses soil sensors yet still walks the field, the tailor who drafts patterns digitally but cuts by hand, the engineer who uses AI to analyse but human instinct to decide and the software team who automate what should be fast and handcraft what must be right. This is the future and the future is very bright for those that already understand.
Understand that generational skill is not conservative. It evolves, it absorbs and it adapts. Relentlessly. That’s exactly as it should be. The old world teaches the new how to be human.
The new world teaches the old how to endure. This is the partnership we need.
Perhaps the most beautiful truth about generational skills is that they turn people into living archives. Every master is a library disguised as a person, a carrier of everything their teachers taught them and everything life taught them that their teachers couldn’t.
When they pass their knowledge on, the library grows. When they don’t, it burns.
Technology may store information but craft store’s identity, personal, familial and cultural is the richest form of knowledge we possess.
The world, thankfully, is rediscovering this. Perhaps quietly, definitely instinctively and hopefully with gratitude.
In a time when machines are learning everything, people are finally remembering the things that cannot be taught.
Summary The Quiet Comeback of the Craftsman
I tried very hard while I wrote this not to let my individual views seep into the text. My wife jokes with me constantly that, for me, it doesn’t matter about anything else that the look. She sites the Alfa Romeo I drove when we met and how I argued passionately against her Germanic vehicles of Audi and Mercedes. She berated me for spending £500 on a pair of shoes that then lasted me for 10 years. Of course, in the end she came round to my way of thinking and she’s happier for it. Not because we agree but because she gets her own quality and aesthetic. Who wants more than that?
I still get called elitist and worse but I’m happy to debate this with anyone including the Zara clad oaf who thinks that changing his look every season makes him a fashion icon.
For me it’s not even about the personal items, that I buy, I know that a handmade saddle is a thing of extreme beauty and I don’t even ride a horse. However, I appreciate the craftsmanship. This article, spread over a few weeks is a homage to the important people. Those that give up “scale” to concentrate on quality, on class, on style and service to a greater cause. Meeting them over the course of many years has filled me with joy. A shoemaker in Zagreb, a butcher in Athens, a shirtmaker in Prague. I love them all. However regardless of my attempts to not be xenophobic, nothing cheers my heart like Great British workmanship. It is still, in my humble opinion, the best on earth. At Mural Crown we’re lucky, we get to meet these people on a level field and talk about their lives, hopes and dreams. They are the inspiration for this and long may they reign.
