For The Guys Who Kept Things Running

For a long time, my father fixed things. Like many men in our Indiana town, he was laid off from the local Chrysler plant in the late ’70s. To compensate, he opened a small business in our even smaller garage. There, he squeezed a TV repair shop in among the big wheels, scraps of old lumber, and about a million wiffle balls. He worked there most of my adolescence. He did a lot of soldering, as I recall.

He had, not long before, become an expert at television repair by taking a correspondence course. He would receive packets of instructions in the mail, fiddle with the television that sat perpetually on our dining room table, its guts hanging out immodestly, and send the papers back.

Time passed, and he added stereos, cassette players, and, eventually, CD players to his repertoire. After several years, Chrysler called, and the repair business became part-time until he closed it down, now many years ago.

Like my father, my grandfather, too, made a big chunk of his living repairing things, cars mostly. On his farm, among the miles of wind-tossed corn, he’d built a garage. Many days, we would visit to find him and my uncles disappearing under assorted junkers, groaning as the creepers rolled them away.

Things have changed. Nobody repairs anything anymore. Most people repair their cars occasionally, though improved manufacturing processes have meant cars need much less maintenance than they once did. Televisions these days are so cheap it makes more sense to let the defunct ones leach their toxins into the landfill, and buy a new, even more toxic model.

Moving from a repair society to a disposal society has had effects few think about. One is that this shift has curtailed the prospects of men who fix things. Among the things we’ve tossed are the values and practices that once grounded the roles and hopes of this entire class.

When we began throwing out what we once would have repaired, many men lost not just their livelihoods, but an avenue of service that gave them a sense of value and identity. The fewer things that needed repair, naturally, the fewer repair men we needed. The fewer we needed, the fewer we got. Now, a whole segment of men who once would have derived satisfaction and a positive view of themselves from seeing their accomplishments maintain their community’s standard of living find themselves disconnected, unable to figure out how to make a positive contribution.

These men are adrift. The NEETs we hear about, living in their mothers’ basements playing video games all day, would once have been busy in small businesses making things work. Don’t forget that repairmen didn’t just work for themselves, but that the American manufacturing sector employed thousands of them to keep the great factories turning. Where should their energies go now?

Today, what is not disposable is too complicated to repair. The days when self-taught auto mechanics like my grandfather and uncles could hang up a shingle and expect to do reasonably well by changing fan belts, ignition coils, spark plugs, and motor oil for the neighbors are long gone. Modern cars are governed by complex electronic computer systems, which require much specialized training to fix. It’s not so easy anymore.

Recognize, too, that the “guys who keep things going” aren’t necessarily the same as the “guys who make new things.” Think of Elon Musk as a “guy who makes new things” in the extreme. Being that kind of man requires a different set of gifts, and not many “guys who keep things running” can easily make the shift into this totally different role and way of being.

Not only did the shift to replacement culture make things more difficult for men economically, it made things more confusing for them romantically. While our culture has made the learning of repair skills obsolete, rendering them the domain of professionals or home-improvement hobbyists, many women still find the possession of these skills desirable.

A 2023 study by Angi found about 85 percent of women said having repair skills was an attractive trait in men. This means many men now find themselves in the odd position of trying to attract women who expect them to have acquired skills the rest of the culture has disincentivized acquiring. Surely, this contributes to the frustrations we hear from both sides about the current dating market.

When men are consistently discouraged, many simply drop out, as we have seen young men doing for a while. The solution to this, if there is one, is complex. We may never shift fully back to a repair culture, but the remedy to this problem lies in that direction.

Only by reigning in the culture of cheap, replaceable junk and the global trade that makes it possible, will things improve. Only by reinvigorating a culture of thrift and restraint, values once at the heart of repair culture, can we hope to see the restoration of these men. If we are unable to do this, and current trends continue, soon we will face a crisis so great not even my dad could fix it.