Why Knowledge Workers Need to Touch Clay

The evolutionary itch behind our screen jobs, and the industries waiting to scratch it.

The Cloud Is Our Coffin

If Google Cloud and AWS collapsed tomorrow, most of us would lose everything. Our life's work would vanish in an instant: emails, decks, spreadsheets, strategy docs, pitch notes, the endless swirl of PDFs and Slack messages we’ve mistaken for substance. We would have nothing left to hold.

That’s the strange thing about modern work: it’s real enough to keep us up at night, but intangible enough to disappear with a server outage. Entire careers, decades of effort, reduced to ephemeral artifacts, stored on leased servers in someone else’s basement. It’s hard not to feel a quiet anxiety when you realize that nothing you produce is actually yours, or even particularly durable.

But maybe that anxiety is older than the cloud. Humans evolved to make things with our hands. The way our bodies are built: our opposable thumbs, our nervous system, our brain’s motor cortex, exists because we carved tools, molded clay, tied knots, struck fire. Tangibility isn’t a nice-to-have; it is what our brains were designed to recognize as proof of life.

And yet, here we are, venture capitalists, marketers, consultants, analysts, entire industries of “knowledge work” that are, at their core, profoundly intangible. We move numbers around on screens. We wordsmith emails. We track deliverables in project management apps. And then we wonder why it all feels so hollow, so precarious, so replaceable.

Here’s my theory: we carry an evolutionary existential anxiety about making nothing with our hands. And to fill that hole, we’ve leaned into consumerism, as if buying shiny baubles were the same thing as making them. But it’s not. Ownership is a proxy for tangibility. And a poor one at that.

Humans Are Built to Make

There’s a reason we have opposable thumbs. A reason our brains grew so large, so fast. A reason every single culture on earth, no matter how separated by time or geography, has made things: pots, tools, carvings, clothes, bread.

Making is not decorative. It’s fundamental.

Anthropologists argue that tool-making was the original human superpower. The first stone knapped into a blade was a neurological revolution. To imagine the tool, then shape it, then use it- that required foresight, planning, and abstract thought. Every time our ancestors shaped flint, their brains were being shaped right back.

Fine motor skills like knitting, carving, and kneading dough activate wide swaths of the brain. They don’t just light up the motor cortex; they recruit sensory, emotional, and even language centers. When you stir soup or trim a bonsai, you’re not “switching off” your brain. You’re syncing it.

Cognitive scientists like George Lakoff and Mark Johnson go even further: they argue that our abstract thought itself is scaffolded on physical action. We don’t just talk about “grasping an idea” as a metaphor. Our brains literally borrow the motor schema of grasping to conceptualize understanding. To “wrestle with a problem,” to “chip away” at an essay aren’t just poetic flourishes. They are neural realities.

And historically, tangible making has always been tied to identity. Pottery shards are often the only record left of a vanished civilization. Entire cultures are remembered by their tools: Acheulean hand axes, Mayan jade carvings, Japanese kintsugi bowls. What we make outlasts us, and that endurance is part of what makes it matter.

So when we find ourselves typing into screens, endlessly producing outputs that leave no residue in the world, it’s not just an aesthetic problem. It’s an evolutionary mismatch. Our bodies and brains were built for tangibility. And when they don’t get it, something inside us starts to itch.

The Anxiety of Intangible Work

Here’s the problem with most of our jobs: they never end.

You send an email and wait for a reply. You submit a deck and it comes back with “just a few small tweaks.” You write a strategy note and it gets filed in the great digital graveyard of Google Docs. Nothing feels finished. It’s all draft mode, forever.

That is not how human beings are wired.

When you bake bread, the loaf comes out of the oven and it exists. When you garden, you plant a seed, water it, and one day a leaf unfurls. When you throw clay, the first pot is a misshapen blob, but by the eighth attempt you’ve made a vase. The progress is visible. The feedback loop is undeniable. You can point to your hands and say: I made this.

Knowledge work, by contrast, erases mistakes. Backspace and they never happened. Delete a slide and it’s like it was never there. The brain never gets the satisfaction of seeing failure turn into competence, blob into vase. It’s just keystrokes into the void.

Richard Sennett, in his book The Craftsman, argues that modern work has stripped us of “narrative coherence.” When you can’t see a project through from start to finish, when you don’t hold the outcome in your hands, work becomes abstract, alienating. Harry Braverman said the same thing decades earlier: industrial and knowledge workers alike are reduced to fragments in someone else’s process. The “whole” is always out of reach.

Psychologists know how dangerous that is. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the man who coined flow, showed that people enter flow states most reliably when their skills are tested against a tangible challenge like woodworking, chess, rock climbing, or pottery. Screen work, by contrast, rarely induces flow. It’s too amorphous, too full of interruptions, too little proof that you’re getting better.

That’s why therapists often prescribe craft-like activities as part of treatment for depression and anxiety. Knitting, cooking, painting, gardening are anchors. They force the body to practice patience, progress, completion. They restore what endless digital tasks dissolve: the sense that you are capable of shaping the world and finishing something in it.

For me, it’s the gym and cooking. The gym because progress is brutally tangible: the first time I tried a deadlift, I couldn’t move the bar. Now I can. My body remembers that. Cooking because no matter how chaotic the day has been, if I chop, stir, and simmer, I sit down with food I made. A dish that wasn’t there two hours ago. Both remind me that I exist beyond slides and Slack.

And when you don’t have that? You get the peculiar, restless dread that defines so much of knowledge work today. That itch you can’t name. That feeling that no matter how many hours you log, nothing feels real.

Why Consumerism Fills the Void

If we don’t make, we buy.

It’s the most seductive shortcut in the world. Can’t carve a chair? Buy one. Don’t have time to weave? Order clothes. No energy to cook? Swipe food into existence. Modern consumerism runs on the promise that you can outsource creation, and still enjoy the illusion of tangibility.

But owning is not the same as making.

The human brain knows the difference. When you shape clay into a pot, your body builds a story of effort, failure, progress. The pot is proof that your hands can change matter. When you buy a pot from IKEA, you skip the story. You get the object, not the process. It fills your shelf, but not your soul.

Sociologists have been pointing this out for decades. Jean Baudrillard argued that commodities don’t just serve functions; they manufacture meaning. A car isn’t just transport; it’s freedom, status, masculinity, aspiration. The problem is that meaning-by-ownership is hollow. It degrades fast. A Rolex doesn’t grow richer as you wear it. Sneakers don’t change because you’ve walked in them. Consumer goods can display who you are, but they can’t show what you can do.

That’s why the buzz of shopping fades so quickly. Because ownership delivers tangibility without growth. It scratches the itch for “thingness” but denies the deeper craving for process. And so we pile up stuff, the clothes we don’t wear, gadgets we don’t need, trinkets that lose their shine, while the existential itch remains unscratched.

In other words: consumerism is the failed proxy for tangibility. We don’t actually want more stuff. We want more proof that we can shape the world.

The Case for Tangible Hobbies

If consumerism is the failed proxy, then tangible hobbies are the antidote.

And I don’t mean hobbies in the Instagrammable, pastel-aesthetic sense. I mean the stuff that stains your hands, fills your kitchen with smoke, leaves wood shavings on the floor. Work that is slow, inconvenient, messy. Work that resists efficiency but rewards persistence.

Why? Three reasons.

1. Hands re-anchor the brain.
Neuroscience tells us that fine motor activity doesn’t just move the fingers. It regulates mood, strengthens memory, and engages parts of the brain digital tasks never touch. That’s why occupational therapists use knitting, painting, or gardening with patients recovering from trauma. The hands remind the body it exists.

2. Progress becomes visible.
On screen, everything resets. Your doc looks the same after five hours as it did in the first five minutes. With tangible work, the evidence accumulates: the loaf rises, the scarf lengthens, the pot straightens. The blob becomes the vase. Visible growth is an evolutionary reward system we’re starving for in knowledge work.

3. Completion returns.
Emails never end. Slides never end. There is always one more tweak. But a cake comes out of the oven and it is finished. A painting dries. A garden ripens. Completion teaches the nervous system closure, the kind our jobs deny us.

And because these hobbies give you hands, progress, completion, they give you something else: dignity. Richard Sennett called craftsmanship “a basic human impulse: the desire to do a job well for its own sake.” That’s what hobbies restore. Not productivity hacks. Not stress relief. Dignity.

Think about the pandemic sourdough boom. Millions of people suddenly kneading, feeding, folding. It wasn’t just boredom. It was the hunger for proof that we could make something real in a world where everything felt virtual. The bread wasn’t just food. It was reassurance: I still know how to shape matter with my own hands.

That’s why gardening, pottery, woodworking, knitting, cooking, whatever form it takes, feels less like a pastime and more like survival. They are evolutionary maintenance.

The Investment Thesis: Tangibility as a Market

If tangibility is an evolutionary necessity, it will never go out of demand. And when necessity collides with scarcity, you get markets.

Just as the industrial revolution stripped us of natural movement and gave rise to the trillion-dollar fitness industry, the digital revolution has stripped us of tangibility. The next great wellness and lifestyle market isn’t about steps, sleep, or supplements. It’s about stuff you can actually make.

1. Signals

• Sourdough boom. During the pandemic, flour and yeast were hoarded like gold. King Arthur Flour’s sales jumped 200% in 2020, while Google searches for “sourdough starter” hit an all-time high. People weren’t desperate for bread. They were desperate for proof they could make bread.

• Urban gardening. Balcony planters, hydroponics, and seed kits surged worldwide. India’s gardening market is projected to cross $5B by 2030, with urban residents driving demand. Globally, the gardening tools market is expected to reach $136B by 2031.

• Ceramics studios. In New York and London, pottery studios have waiting lists longer than co-working spaces. In Bangalore, weekend pottery workshops are as hard to book as cocktail bars. Clay has become the new yoga mat.

• DIY & maker economies. YouTube woodworking channels pull 10M+ subscribers each. Etsy grossed $13.3B in 2022, but the bigger story is not the people buying. It’s the 7.5M sellers motivated by the act of making.

Each of these is a release valve for evolutionary anxiety.

2. Markets

From a VC lens, the tangibility boom creates investable categories:

• Maker-adjacent hobbies: Pottery studios, craft schools, carpentry collectives, urban farms. Think of these as the SoulCycle for hands: tangible, communal, Instagrammable. Expect consolidation plays (chains of craft studios) and SaaS for scheduling, supplies, and community.

• DIY economies: Tools, kits, and platforms. If Shopify was the infrastructure for digital merchants, we don’t yet have the equivalent infrastructure for “personal makers.” Who builds the Shopify of craft? Who builds the Stripe of DIY?

• Tactile-anchored wellness: Retreats and programs that explicitly use craft, gardening, or cooking as therapy. Calm and Headspace unlocked the meditation market digitally. The next wave will do it physically: craft as cognitive behavioral therapy at scale.

3. Historical Analogies

• Supplements. Processed diets stripped us of nutrients. The response? Vitamins, protein powders, functional beverages.

• Home Cooking. Convenience food stripped us of daily craft in the kitchen. The response? Organic groceries, farmers’ markets, meal kits, and farm-to-table culture. A multibillion-dollar industry built on restoring food as tangible process.

• Tangibility. Digital life has stripped us of making. The response? Tangible hobbies, DIY economies, tactile wellness. The missing category waiting to scale.

4. Future Trajectory

• AI & automation: As AI takes over more of what we “produce” with keystrokes, the craving for physical proof of creation will intensify. A world where ChatGPT writes, Midjourney designs, and Claude drafts decks will make hand-made even more valuable both culturally and economically.

• Scarcity of tangibility: The rarer tangible work becomes in daily life, the higher the premium on experiences that deliver it. Just as organic food costs more in a processed world, tangible making will command a luxury markup.

• Cultural signaling: Already, “I threw this pot myself” or “I grew this basil” is a higher-status flex in certain circles than owning another handbag. Expect identity to shift from what you own to what you can make.

5. The Call for Investors

This is not a hobby trend. It’s a structural correction. If modern life has stripped us of tangibility, then the products, services, and communities that restore it will command both attention and wallet share.

For investors, the question is simple:

• Who is building the infrastructure for tangibility?

• Who will be the Lululemon, the Peloton, the Calm of this category?

• Who will own the platforms, supply chains, and communities that power the next great human necessity?

This is the re-enchantment of the material world. And the investor who spots it early will own the operating system of tangibility.

Tangibility as an Antidote to Existential Drift

What’s really at stake here isn’t productivity or even creativity. It’s coherence. The sense that your life adds up to something beyond calendars and cloud storage.

When work is intangible, progress invisible, and ownership outsourced, we drift. We scroll, consume, optimize, upgrade. We mistake motion for meaning. We burn out not just from overwork, but from under-tangibility.

It’s a civilizational erosion we’re up against. Richard Sennett warned that when societies lose the craft impulse, they lose resilience. Skills atrophy. Patience evaporates. Even democracy weakens, because the habits of care, repair, and persistence vanish with them. What begins as a private itch, a VC or marketer who feels restless at their screen, scales into a collective hollowness. A culture that forgets how to make.

Tangibility, then, isn’t optional. It’s the ground under our feet. Cooking a meal, knitting a scarf, sanding a piece of wood, these aren’t hobbies; they are small acts of reclamation. Proof that we are not only consumers but makers. Proof that we can finish something. Proof that our hands still know what our cloud-based jobs have forgotten: how to hold, how to shape, how to endure.

And once you touch that proof, the drift quiets. The noise softens. You remember that you are human, not just a username.

Touch Clay, Touch Life

If Google Cloud or AWS went dark tomorrow, your emails would vanish. Your decks, your docs, your strategies, all gone in a blink. Years of effort dissolved into the ether.

But the bread you baked last night? That’s still on the counter. The scarf you knitted is still draped over the chair. The pot you threw, imperfect as it is, still holds water. The gym rep you ground through still lives in your muscles.

That’s the difference.

Our digital lives are rented. Our tangible lives are ours.

So if you work in a “fake job” like I do in VC, marketing, consulting, screens-all-day industries, then your real job is this: remember that you are human. Remember that your hands are as much a part of your intelligence as your brain. Remember that process and progress are not optional for our species.

Touch clay. Touch wood. Touch life.

Because in the end, it’s not the cloud that will prove we were here. It’s the things we leave behind.

Things we shaped, things we grew, things we made real.

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Some Further Reading

• Richard Sennett, The Craftsman: on dignity and narrative in labor.

• Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow: on why tangible challenges produce deep focus.

• George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Philosophy in the Flesh: on embodied cognition.

• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: on alienation from fragmented work.