People are used to controlling machines. They don’t do that anymore

If satiation It’s so easy, why wouldn’t you feel more satisfied already? Because it’s getting harder. It’s still easy to experience individual accomplishments of gratification when you find them (or they find you). But the normal conditions that once produced so much satisfaction have gradually receded. Invisible choices in design, business, and social life have made it difficult for you to engage directly with the sensory world.

This problem has crept up on me, and maybe on you too. Slowly, over time, the world began to withdraw from us. Automation took over mundane tasks. Things that used to have buttons suddenly don’t anymore. Basic activities have been taken over by computers. I was slow to notice this happening too. But once I did, I saw it everywhere, every day. I can’t tell you when the realization fully formed in my mind. But the turning point came one humble day when I was driving home from work.

I drive a small Volkswagen hatchback, the kind the fanatics call a “hot hatch.” It’s not a sports car and it’s not luxury, but it’s a lot of fun to drive. That’s partly because it comes with a manual transmission — or at least it did when I bought my car over 15 years ago. Manual transmissions, or stick transmissions, were popular because they were cheaper to purchase, easier to maintain, and more cost-effective to operate than automatic transmissions.

And in America, where big cars, open roads, and freeway traffic have become a cultural cornerstone, stick shift has been in decline for many years. But also around the world, even in Europe and Asia, where the high cost of gas has made better manual fuel economy worthwhile. In 2000, auto retailer CarMax reported that more than 15% of its new and used vehicles were fixed-shift vehicles. By 2020, this number had dropped to 2.4%. In recent years, Mercedes and Volkswagen, makers of the hot pickup, have announced plans to discontinue manual transmissions globally. Other makers followed suit.

Car enthusiasts have been lamenting the decline of the CVT for many years already. Car and Driver magazine even launched a campaign called “Save the Manuals” in 2010, arguing that learning to “operate the entire vehicle” would provide drivers with a better experience. Around the same time, philosopher Matthew Crawford devoted a large portion of his best-selling book to it Shop the Soulcraft category To explain how the hard work of repairing motorcycles has infused his life with rich meaning; In 2020 he published a follow-up, Why do we drive?which made operating a car an act of autonomy.

Crawford took up Car and Driver as a life philosophy. Maintaining “the natural links between action and perception,” as he puts it, is essential—not only to operate a car safely and efficiently, but also to feel fully human in the age of machines. Like the clothes you wear, the food you eat, the apartment you live in, and machines, they expand your experience while also changing it. The car (or computer, paintbrush, marshmallow) is a prosthetic. When you wear a suit, you become yourself, but different. Just like a rider riding a horse, or a driver driving a car.

To illustrate this point, Crawford tells a story about test driving a 400-horsepower Audi RS3 with all the options, including the automatic transmission. He says it was strong and capable, but he “couldn’t communicate with the car.” The human operator and the machine felt out of sync.

This is a valuable note. The Crawford Complaint may have felt a bit disconnected at the time, making it attractive to gearheads who still cared about the clutch and shifting. But after only a few years, it became clear that soon enough, no one They will be able to do this because of electric cars.

Cars with internal combustion engines burn fuel to spin the drives, which require gears to transfer the power generated by the engine to the wheels. But electric vehicles have a completely different propulsion system. Their electric motors transfer power more smoothly to the wheels. When the manual finally stops, something bigger than driving will be lost as well: an essential, everyday device that anyone — even if it’s not you — can feel like actually works.