Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and the Spectator Attitude

Robert M Pirsig's classic from 1974 never stops yielding nuggets of wisdom. There's a bit in the book where the character recounts a story of mechanics bodging a repair job on his motorcycle. Eventually, he decides to take it back, broken, and focus on learning how to maintain it himself.

But what's interesting is his analysis of what makes people "not care".

It points to the meaning crisis and erosion of values that he perceived back then, this is what he's writing.

"The question why comes back again and again. Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology. These were the technologists themselves.

They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. There was no obvious reason for it.

The radio was a clue. You can't really think hard about what you're doing and listen to the radio at the same time.*

The speed was another clue. They were really slopping things around in a hurry and not looking where they slopped them.*

But the biggest clue seemed to be their expressions. They were hard to explain. Good-natured, friendly, easygoing and uninvolved. They were like spectators. You had the feeling they had just wandered in there themselves and somebody had handed them a wrench. They were involved in technology but not in such a way as to care".

He finds this "spectator attitude" even in his job as an editor of computer manuals. Somehow, the relationship with the world gets severed and there's a loss of holistic perspective to give way to reductionism.

"Here is the machine, isolated in time and in space from everything else in the universe. It has no relationship to you, you have no relationship to it, other than to turn certain switches, maintain voltage levels, check for error conditions.."

There's so much good stuff in this book, well worth reading it, if you haven't.