We live in a time where each day feels like a quiet war — a pull between an analog life and a digital one.
And most days, the digital wins.

We don’t wake to the brilliance of the sun, but to the blue glow of our screens. The answers to life’s problems — or distractions from them — seem just a scroll away.

I remember mornings that didn’t begin this way.
Waking up meant silence. A kind of stillness. The only sound a radio clock beeping, offering no headlines, no feeds. Just time moving forward and urgency to the day.

There wasn’t a disconnection between what is and what will be.
Now, we live in fragments. We watch movies while scrolling. We text while talking. We share life in pieces. We’ve become distracted from each other – and from ourselves.

This shift touches every part of life. Including work.

There was a time journalism felt like a trade. I remember.
You had to show up. Knock on doors. Sit across from people. Listen with your whole body.

But when the pandemic hit, I became a ghost behind a screen. I tried to keep those interactions alive — talking to sources through webcams, conducting interviews in digital waiting rooms. But it wasn’t the same. The spark — the intimacy — was gone.

You can’t smell the room through a screen. You can’t see the sweat on someone’s brow or hear the quiet between sentences. You can’t write about real life if you’re only half in it.

That’s what construction returned to me. That’s where I found it again.

A return to an analog life

Life on the job site is, by nature, analog.
It’s raw. It’s direct.

You don’t get to edit your words — or your work — after the fact. What’s done is done, and if it’s done wrong, you fix it. Right there. With your hands.

There’s no “maybe later”. There’s no “I’ll circle back”.
There’s only the task in front of you — the cut, the angle, the bend in the flashing, the grip on the hammer, the weather rolling in, the boards drying in the sun.

It’s the opposite of the digital world, where everything feels slippery and abstract.
Trade work is real. It’s physical. It’s immediate. Tangible.

And it’s shared.

There’s connection in working beside someone. No apps. No feeds. Just face-to-face communication. Work spoken plainly. Adjustments made in real time. You measure twice, you cut once, and you learn to listen when someone’s telling you something — because your safety, and theirs, might depend on it.

I appreciate the job site for what it strips away.
There’s no room for performance. No curation. No image to manage. Honesty, epitomized.

I can stand at the break, cut and bend metal to shape, and know it has a purpose. Know it’ll protect a house from water, from wind, from time. Know that something I built will outlast this day, this moment. A legacy built from care.

That kind of purpose is hard to find online.

I’ve spent hours painting trim boards under a wide sky. One coat, then another. Slow, purposeful strokes. No rush. Just layers of paint settling into the grain.
Overhead, clouds move in no hurry.
A car hums past down the road in Eagle Lake.

But mostly, it’s quiet (on this day), except for the wind through the trees and the birds’ serenade, broken occasionally by the bark of a resident dog.
And in that quiet, something returns: presence.

Not the kind you talk about, but the kind you feel in your soul — when your eyes are on the cut, your hands on the tool, and your mind is nowhere else.

When held to scrutiny, shoddy work doesn’t hold up.
And neither does a life built on distraction.

An honest day’s work doesn’t lie

To be present in this work — whether I’m painting trim pieces, bending metal, or hauling lumber — is to invest in something that lasts. You can’t fake it up close. From a distance, a house or a person might look put together. But when you step closer, you can see: Were the corners cut? Did someone care?

The trades are honest in that way. You show up or you don’t. The details say everything.

We talk a lot about finding ourselves.
But I’ve learned that sometimes it’s not about finding anything —
it’s about building.

Building homes, yes. But also, building connection.
To the work. To the people around me.
And maybe most importantly —
to myself.