Zen and the art of tube amp maintenance Pt. 2

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea that we all have a place where we fit in the world. Kind of like the idea that we all have a soulmate, except I don’t really believe that either of these things are singular. I think it’s entirely possible that we all have more than one soulmate and place to fit in our lives, and some people may have none. The world isn’t really set up for equity despite our best efforts.

One of the most common topics that seems to come up in conversation these days is the fact that people don’t like what they do. They feel as though they’ve done what they' set out to do and achieved a point of financial security, but they’re not content with what they spend their time actually doing. The simple motions of going through a day. The components that, once assembled, constitute a life.

We typically look at our lives or the lives of others and focus on the tentpoles— the big events that “define” us. But we don’t spend much time on what we did in between these big moments. The regular, ever day, boring stuff that ultimately defines our lives far more than the day we got married or a big promotion at work. Time slips past as we repeat these tasks and do the work of living our lives, but it’s all the lead up to or let down from one of the highlights.

So, when I talk to people who say they don’t like what they actually do every day, I usually ask, what would you rather be doing? I don’t mean what job title would you like to have? Or how much money would you like to make every year? My questions is: what do you want to do with the time in each day; the time in between the stuff you look forward to?

When my tenuous writing career imploded, I was faced with this same question: How do I want to spend my time in a way that will generate an income. That’s an important caveat: You obviously have to make money in order to live.

That I fell into repairing amplifiers was mostly just a coincidence. I needed a paycheck, and there was a local shop that needed a repairman. By that point, I was already building my own amplifiers from scratch, but that hadn’t yet turned into a job. So, when I started repairing other people’s amps it was a different experience. And I loved it.

The process of fixing an amp is not that complicated: you have to identify the problem, locate the solution, and do the work. But within the ecosystem of an amplifier, so many things could go wrong in so many mysterious ways. The difficult part is staying calm and analyzing the situation.

Most people who own amps don’t know anything about them. So, it’s common for an amp to come in with the following problem: it doesn’t work. Or, it doesn’t work correctly. It’s not a lot to work with, and when an amplifier is completely dead, it’s not always obvious where to start. Much like life… (cough) (groan) (cough)

My point is that in order to do the work well, you need to enjoy the process of doing it, or it will be too stressful. As humans, we think we want stillness. We love the idea of being relaxed and doing as little as possible. But we don’t actually enjoy this. We get bored and depressed when we’re still too long. We dread the effort it takes, but we actually prefer the activity.

People often fall into this same trap when it comes to “what they do.” We want a job that requires the least activity for the biggest payoff. But we don’t actually enjoy or find purpose in these jobs. And to make matters more confusing, we often make enough money doing these jobs, so they seem like “good jobs” that we should want.

I’m not suggesting you start a fight club. But what I realized after my first few days of repairing amps for money was that I enjoyed the time. I thought about how different it was from a typical day of writing, where I would sit in front of a screen working on a task that I would complete on time and then submit. And then it would be… gone. I didn’t much care about the work I was doing, and once it was done, it was as though it had never existed.

So, what was my time for then? What was the point of how I spent my time? How was I supposed to feel like that time was well spent when I could have been doing any number of other things (for money) with that time. I started to realize that so much of life— so much of who we are and how we are— is based not on the milestones, but the minutia. How we spend our time. And I realized that I really liked to spend my time working on amps. Either building them or repairing them. When work was finished, I felt good about what I had done that day. I could see my efforts in front of me, and I could see the people whose amps I had fixed. I was content with the time I spent, and I realized that this was starting to change how I approached the world.

That was a big realization. And suddenly a big piece of the puzzle started to fall into place: I realized that I needed to spend my life doing something that I wanted to do instead of doing something I thought I wanted to do. What I also realized is that it’s not about the job. It’s about the type of work. Our brains aren’t all wired to want to do the same kind of work. Evolution has made sure we diversified our workforce by making some people want to farm and making other people want to be blacksmiths. We need that kind of diversity, but as we slip into our dystopian future, we’re getting funneled towards very similar kinds of work.

Twenty years ago, most people didn’t spend their whole day working on computers, but now they do. That’s a huge change in a short time for our brains. And there’s no way we’re all going to adapt to a completely different style of work because it’s the kind of change that usually happens over the course of centuries, not decades.

When you’re not doing the work your brain wants to do, you don’t know it. It’s confusing because you might be making a lot of money, so it should be the right kind of work, right? But when you find yourself doing the kind of work that your brain wants to do, you know it. Patterns start to align. More soon.