Nothing in the world gets made without an unbelievable amount of effort and care, and recognizing this is part of being human and understanding how the world works.

A process of alienation under modern specialization has disconnected us from the manufacture and distribution of our goods, stripping us of myriad opportunities for wonder, gratitude, and guilt, even though the same system gives us an unprecedented array of consumer goods conveniently available.

The idea that work should be connected to happiness and fulfillment is a distinctly modern concept that only took off in the mid-18th century; for the prior centuries work was almost universally assumed to be about suffering, and this shift parallels the simultaneous emergence of marrying for romantic love rather than purely practical reasons — the 'great bourgeois experiment' of working for love and marrying for love.

The airport is a complete concentration of technology, economics, and human emotion, where the rituals of arriving and departing amount to a kind of 'practicing dying' — leaving everybody behind and then being reprieved by reunion.

Society over-romanticizes knowledge-economy 'good jobs' and under-romanticizes blue-collar work, but all work is ultimately the same: it becomes satisfying when we are able to bring something personal and tied to the best of ourselves to the task of fulfilling another human being's needs — the true basis for 'workers of the world unite' is shared commitment to fulfilling others' needs, not labor organization.

By specializing deeply in a narrow field, a person is not necessarily narrowing themselves, because a particular field contains within its boundaries most of the dynamics of life; obsessive perfectionists across very different fields share the same underlying character and experience.

Business journalism systematically sidesteps the genuinely interesting reality of how people work, reporting instead on management changes and share-price movements, which represents a missed opportunity to illuminate the working world.

The role of a great artist is essentially to put 'post-it notes' on parts of the world that say 'notice this' — art's central function is to direct human attention to what would otherwise be ignored.

Hopper's paintings have so shaped American visual culture that one can hardly be in a late-night motel, bar, or diner without the word 'Hopperesque' coming to mind.

When workers are observed away from supervision, people are genuinely proud of and eager to explain their work; taking an interest in someone's job causes them to reflect that interest back, because every job demands enormous care and effort.

We hide our productive selves from our culture: most places where people actually work cannot be visited, partly because we assume they are boring (untrue) and partly because we fear visitors will cause havoc (also untrue), which is a missed opportunity for understanding and empathy.

The ambitious modern ideals of fulfillment in work and marriage can flip over into a kind of torture and neurosis; lowering expectations of everyday happiness is paradoxically a recipe for survival, because in older rural religious societies the acceptance that humans are not gods and that 'just getting by is okay' protected people from feelings of low self-esteem.

Levels of happiness and felt wealth are not fixed but relative to expectations and reference points: the same sum of money makes a person miserable if surrounded by richer people and advertising, and lowering one's expectations of happiness paradoxically makes one happier.

The more technologically developed a society becomes, the more attached it becomes to unspoiled nature; our appreciation of nature (pastoral poetry, national parks, wilderness tourism) is historically a product of industrialization and city living, beginning in Britain as the first industrial nation.

We label things beautiful or ugly not from automatic feeling but because artists have shaped our sensibilities; many industrial objects (power lines, windmills) are considered ugly only because no artist has yet come along to reveal their beauty, as shown by 17th-century Dutch attacks on windmills that are now seen as beautiful.

Modern parenting and schooling techniques focused on self-esteem and making each child feel special, often criticized by older generations as too soft, are actually well-attuned to the needs of the modern service economy, which requires cheerful, confident individualists (such as 'greeters') rather than the stoic, militaristic toughness valued in the past.

What a great writer does is give the reader a pair of glasses through which they can see new things; writers and artists put labels on things, giving us a vocabulary and images that make us less mysterious to ourselves and others, thereby increasing communication and enjoyment.

We only notice technology while it is new; after a window of receptivity passes, technologies become invisible, so histories of technology should record not when things were invented but when they became invisible — illustrated by Proust devoting many pages of wonder to the telephone and the car's gears, things we would never marvel at today, and by the prediction that the iPhone will soon become invisible too.

Many modern jobs are service and relationship jobs that cannot be done properly unless the worker is broadly content, so improvements in labor conditions over the last 50 years are driven less by employer altruism than by self-interest — you cannot abuse a complicated 'machine' (a human being) and expect good output, just as you wouldn't hit a valuable work horse.

The explosion of popular photography and photo-sharing (Flickr, Facebook, niche sites like airlinemeals.com) is making a dent in conventional aesthetics by training people to find and document beauty in overlooked, everyday subjects like cars, machinery, and airline meal trays.