People who want a simple life

The temperaments and challenges of manual labor versus knowledge workers

If you start reading and this isn’t what you were looking for, maybe you wanted something like this article “Living an Uncomplicated Life,” which is more about how you can choose less complexity. The following is more about how certain types of people—who might have very different lives from you—face too much complexity.

There are two main types described here. Knowledge workers get all kinds of help from their networks to navigate an overly complex world. Manual workers, conversely, often don’t have the same kind of connections to meet the mandates imposed on them by the rise of complexity in the modern economic context.

credits: teacher by Burt Flint, notepad by Flaticon, truck by Iconpacks, farmer by Surang

The Professor

Some knowledge workers just want a simple life. For example, I have a close associate who is a college professor and teacher trainer. He is an excellent teacher but hates what he refers to as "bullshit" bureaucratic details. He makes friends with the department secretaries, so when he doesn't get those details done, they either give him a pass or do it for him.

He's more of a concrete thinker. His knowledge of people is based on practical experience. He’s not as gifted in abstract thinking. There are many academics who got their doctorate without having to know more math than high school algebra (especially true of the Ed.D.). He's one of them. His dean once was challenged by another faculty member who asked why my associate was given tenure, when his academic publications barely met the minimum number, not the expected number for an intensely competitive academic environment. The dean responded something to the effect, "because what he can do, no one else in the department can." He can smooth things over. He keeps calm when it's useful to keep calm. He tells someone off in a matter-of-fact tone when that’s the most useful way to settle a matter and move on. He doesn’t create unnecessary conflict. It's not just schmoozing. He has a good instinct for social relations. One of his ancestors was among a string of el Salvadoran presidents who made a successful short-lived coup before they were toppled by the next coup. To him, managing department politics is simple and obvious.

He’s been helpful to me. He says, “cut that paragraph down to two sentences if you’re writing to a man.” He cares about people. I’ve seen him mentor students long term who others wouldn't have bothered with, because there wasn't much evidence of potential payback. He cares about loyalty, but within limits. For you MBTI aficionados, he’s an ESFP, an expert performer-entertainer in the classroom. He doesn't value the complexity of a system of ideas such as the MBTI personality sorter. He wants a simple life, and fortunately he gets help with the growing complexity of navigating one online platform after another that his work insists he learn to interact with.

The Freelance Knowledge Worker

I do freelance/solopreneur academic work. I can't do what I do without a whole lot of experts helping me. I can't code, but as a side project I paid a developers’ team to co-design a complex web-based service. I don't have time to do my own taxes. If I tried to do them myself, it would take weeks to get it all figured out. I’d probably make mistakes, lose out on deductions, and get audited, so it makes sense to hiring an accountant. I hire a consultant to do SEO, another consultant for marketing, a lawyer to file trademarks. I might be able to figure out how to jump thru the hoops for these tasks, with enough time and patience, but I'd put myself behind. I’m an N in the MBTI (relatedly a high O in the Big 5). My brain is optimized to handle this complexity, but I barely can handle it, even by hiring contractors to help. Too many DIY tasks and my business would crash. 

It makes far more sense for a knowledge worker to plug into a system with the efficiency and expertise provided by division of labor. I can pay others to do complex things, while I get paid top dollar to do the one complex thing that I am most expert at. I offer insider knowledge and skill that graduate students desperately need so they don’t struggle and stagnate. Without a qualified editor they would pay more semesters of tuition, because their overworked advisors don’t have time for the level of support many students need. My clients are usually working a full-time job and don’t have time to figure out the citation formats, let alone the politics around dissertations. We knowledge workers are all helping each other deal with the complexity of modern life. In this we have benefits that many physical workers lack.

My Trucker Friends

I haven’t kept in touch with these past acquaintances, but I remember the conversation. They were a sister and brother team who had recently bought their own big rig with the hope that they could make a bit more money on their own than they could as employees for a trucking company. Each traded off sleeping while the other drove, so they could get the miles in to deliver on time. I remember the conversation centering around the near impossibility of making any money if you were committed to being honest in your logs and getting enough sleep. Accurate records, alert safe driver, get paid adequately…pick two. A recent podcast not only confirms the stressful situation that truckers are in, but on top of that, explains new electronic monitoring designed to replace the current manual record keeping. Some truckers are dealing with the unmanageable requirements by destroying the monitoring equipment. Someone on the dark web should set up a digital record hacking service for them. That would somewhat even the playing field with us knowledge workers who can charm, schmooze, or outsource our way out of our complexity. Except, truckers don’t roll that way. Most probably wouldn’t want to have to download that hacker app and figure out how to use it. Their temperaments are realistic and conventional. They are salt-of-the earth people who are loyal to the core. They choose trucking partly because they want a simple life. They’ll take the danger, the stress, and the long hours, because most of the time they only have to do one straightforward task. Plus, in their circles, they get respect for doing a physically demanding job and doing it well.

My Farmer Friends

I have farmers and horticulturists on both sides of my family. For over a year now my teen and I have volunteered about three hours every week on a small dairy farm of a friend. Shoveling cow poo is a great core workout, and it’s a way to touch grass (in digested form).

There’ a personality study that compared American farmers to other entrepreneurs and found them less extroverted and lower in a trait called agreeableness. Some are and some aren’t as high in conscientious. They may be moody or even keel. They may be abstract or concrete thinkers. Those last three traits reportedly vary in farmers as they do with the larger population. What’s more consistent in farmers are those first two traits, described further in the subsections below.

Lower in extroversion. According to this research finding, farmers are more likely to not need or want to be around a lot of people constantly. They don't have the extroversion of the professor described above. They don’t want a job surrounded by people they’d have to interact with constantly. They don’t want to live in a city. They prefer not to deal with strangers they don't know or trust.

Lower in agreeableness. Farm owners are entrepreneurs who don’t want a job that's under a boss. They’re not inclined to be "yes men." They don't mind terribly if their opinions might hurt someone's feelings. It’s not that they’d try to hurt someone’s feelings; it takes too much time to beat around the bush to make the facts easier to hear. Their recommendation is that if it’s the truth, take a bite of humble pie as we all must from time to time, then get over it. Get the job done.

Some farmers are like my described professor in that they are concrete thinkers. They prefer simplicity. They want to deal with the immediacy that they can see. They prefer the real bullshit, not the abstract bureaucratic kind, which is one reason they passionately hate taxes and regulations of all kinds. But even those who are more abstract thinkers, like me they don't have time to learn the complexity of systems that place ever-changing demands on them. With intense economic pressure, they feel there's no way they can pay a lawyer to help them lower their taxes by creating a land trust. They are less likely to know about or be willing to navigate platforms where they can find affordable tax help. No way can they pay a consultant to help them level up to survive in the current market. They want to grow food, not manage the marketing, packaging, and delivery of five boutique farm products. Many consultants would tell them to sell the farm to a housing developer and retire early. But it’s their way of life, their culture. They don’t want to sell out.

Connecting the Worker Experiences

In our current economy, knowledge workers have a distinct advantage. We knowledge workers have more ways to manage the complexity of modern life, more access to expert help. It’s on us to understand what’s going on for workers doing physical jobs, rather than dismiss them. They aren’t expendable. Everything you eat was either grown by a U.S. farmer or delivered by a U.S. trucker. Overall I think they’ve been pretty decent about trying to manage a whole lot of regulations and increasing disadvantages that they don’t have the resources to deal with. I’m glad most of them have a cultural ethic to soldier thru instead of blame. Otherwise, we’d be in a scarier place than we already are in the culture wars.

Why It Matters

Without reverting to a simplistic dismissal of a basket of deplorables, it makes sense for urban knowledge workers to take a hard look at why Trump won, and may again, largely supported by rural and working class voters who believed he would advocate for them. Who else is advocating for them? Only the Democrat-turned-independent RFK Jr., which is why he has bipartisan support. We knowledge workers have to stop ignoring the legitimate gripes of people left behind by the shift to knowledge work and global trade.

My forthcoming book The 4 Americas (and this substack) helps conceptualize values and temperaments that help make sense of the demographic complexity of political subgroups, as shown in the first post about Pew Research Center political subtypes. Unlike this post, the book doesn’t talk about my friends or me. If you value this kind of work, please subscribe for free posts, make a pledge, or pass along this post to someone who might be interested. This will help me show an agent or publisher that it’s a book with some market potential.