Easy pleasure everywhere. So why does it feel hollow?
It hasn’t gotten easier to feel. Just the work is gone. Design choices. Business moves. Social drifts. All of it stripped the direct, gritty connection we once had with the physical world. The gratification is still there. Buried deep. But you have to dig for it now. The easy sources dried up. Slowly. Insidiously.
I missed it too. Who doesn’t?
Then one day I was driving home in my little Volkswagen hot hatch. A manual. Stick shift. They used to be everywhere. Cheaper to buy. Cheaper to run. Easier to fix. In 2000 more than fifteen percent of cars had them. By 2020 that number cratered to 2.4%. Mercedes is killing them globally. Volkswagen did too. The last manual is already gone for many brands.
Enthusiasts cried out early. Car and Driver started a Save the Manuals campaign back in 2010. Philosopher Matthew Crawford wrote about motorcycle repair as a path to soulfulness. Then he wrote about driving itself as an act of autonomy. He didn’t just want to get from A to B. He wanted to feel the machine.
Crawford tested a 400-hp Audi RS3. Fully loaded. Paddle-shifting automatic. Powerful? Sure. Capable? Absolutely. Did he connect? No.
He couldn’t. The machine was out of sync with him.
That felt niche. Weird. Nostalgic. Until the EV era hit.
Internal combustion engines need gears. Electric motors don’t. Power goes straight to the wheel. No clutch. No shifting. No manual transmission at all. The EV doesn’t just kill the stick shift. It kills the interface.
When I wrote about this for The Atlantic I expected a few nods. A few gearheads nodding along. Millions of people wrote back. Men women teenagers grandparents. Everywhere. They all felt the same phantom limb. They missed the control.
Then the postcard came.
Green lime embossed corner 50 francs. Liberté, égalité, fratérnitè. Stamps from 1984. Unused for decades. Now they were spent. Christopher sent it. He was a valet in the eighties. His dad drove semi. His granddad drove an ambulance in France. WWI.
He bent the card on my desk. Smudged it slightly. The physical resistance. The weight.
This tiny paper thing connected him to the machine he remembered operating. Or driving for other people. The act of cutting a stamp. Licking it. Posting it. Who does that now?
I haven’t touched real mail in years. Except packages. Except bills.
Christopher even included a die-cast car image. A Ford Anglia. A Matchbox. Made by Lesney. It highlighted the disconnect.
The loss isn’t just about gears.
It’s about the gap between intent and action closing. Then opening wide. Again. And again. Until you are just a passenger in your own life.
Think about America specifically. We wanted comfort. Sprawling suburbs. Long commutes. Automatic transmission arrived in 1940. War delayed its mass adoption. Good luck to us? Maybe.
By the time we really used it post-war ease was the only goal that mattered. AC in cars. Drive-ins. TV dinners. Two hands on the wheel always. No shifting. No fatigue.
Europe didn’t need this. Fuel costs there kept manuals alive for decades. Shorter trips. Higher prices. The math favored engagement. Or at least efficiency that looked like engagement.
EVs changed the math again. Electricity is cheap to move. Cheap to charge. Easy to manage. Now ease wins everywhere. Even where money was once an obstacle to it.
Our lives have dematerialized.
We don’t fix the things we use. We don’t prepare the things we eat. We don’t write the notes we send. The friction is gone. So is the satisfaction.
It’s cleaner now. It’s faster. It’s seamless.
Is it alive?
Not really.
You hold a phone. It slides in your palm. You don’t know how the screen turns on. You don’t choose to shift the car. You don’t lick the stamp. You just swipe. Send. Drive.
The world did it for you.
Again.
And again.
