People Used to Control Machines. They Don’t Anymore

If gratification is so easy, why don’t you feel more gratified already? Because it’s gotten harder. It’s still easy to experience individual feats of gratification when you find them (or they find you). But the ordinary circumstances that once produced so much gratification have gradually receded. Unseen choices in design, business, and social life have made it harder for you to engage directly with the sensory world.

This problem snuck up on me, and probably on you as well. Slowly, over time, the world started withdrawing from us. Automation took over ordinary tasks. Things that used to have buttons suddenly did not. Basic activities got taken over by computers. I was slow to notice it happening, too. But once I did, I saw it everywhere and every day. I can’t tell you when the realization formed fully in my brain. But a turning point came on an unassuming day as I piloted my car home from work.

I drive a little Volkswagen hatchback, the kind fanatics call a hot hatch. It’s not a sports car nor is it fancy, but it’s a lot of fun to drive. In part that’s because it comes with a manual transmission—or at least it did when I bought mine more than 15 years ago. Manuals, or stick shifts, used to be popular because they were cheaper to buy, easier to maintain, and more cost-effective to operate compared to automatic transmissions.

In America, where big cars, open roads, and freeway traffic have become cultural cornerstones, the stick shift has been on the decline for years. But also all around the world, even in Europe and Asia, where the high cost of gas had made a manual’s better fuel economy worthwhile. In 2000, the auto retailer CarMax reported that more than 15 percent of its new and used cars were stick shifts. By 2020, that number had dropped to 2.4 percent. In recent years, Mercedes and Volkswagen, the maker of my little hot hatch, announced plans to sunset the manual transmission globally. Other makers followed suit.

Car enthusiasts had been lamenting the stick-shift slump for years already. Car and Driver magazine even launched a campaign, Save the Manuals, in 2010, arguing that learning to “operate the entire car” would offer drivers a better experience. Around the same time, the philosopher Matthew Crawford devoted a large part of his bestselling book Shop Class as Soulcraft to explain how the difficult work of motorcycle repair had infused his life with rich meaning; in 2020 he published a follow-up, Why We Drive, which cast operating an automobile as an act of autonomy.

Crawford took the Car and Driver position as a life philosophy. Maintaining “natural bonds between action and perception,” as he put it, is necessary—not only to operate a motor vehicle safely and effectively, but also to feel fully human in the age of machines. Like the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the apartment in which you live, machinery extends your experience while also changing it. A car (or a computer, a paintbrush, a marshmallow) is a prosthesis. When you put on a suit, you become yourself, but different. Just like the jockey who rides a horse—or the driver who pilots an automobile.

To illustrate the point, Crawford tells a story about test-driving a 400-horsepower Audi RS3 with all the options, including a paddle-shifting automatic transmission. It was powerful and capable, he says, but he “could not connect with the car.” The human operator and the machine felt out of sync.

This is a precious observation. Crawford’s grievance might have felt a bit disconnected at the time, appealing to gearheads who still cared about clutching and shifting. But only a few years later, it became clear that soon enough, nobody would be able to do so because of electric vehicles (EVs).

Internal-combustion-engine cars burn fuel to spin drivetrains that require gearing to transfer the power generated by the engine to the wheels. But EVs have a totally different drivetrain. Their electric motors more seamlessly transfer power to the wheels. When the manual finally does die, something bigger than driving will be lost, too: an essential, everyday device that someone—even if not you—can actually feel operating.