I was in Front Royal, Virginia the other week, exploring the small city’s old downtown and walking around Rural King, a neat farm-and-outdoor big-box store in an old K-Mart on the town’s edge.

Front Royal isn’t so far from D.C., really—an hour and 15 minutes without traffic. But it’s not quite the same world. Different cars (older, more pickup trucks that look like they might be used for actual work), people dressed more casually, more beards, southern accents, country music.

One of those overproduced Nashville-industrial complex songs came on while I was in Rural King—“Sunrise, Sunburn, Sunset,” by Luke Bryan, the refrain of which not surprisingly goes “Sunrise, sunburn, sunset, repeat.” (It’s not a great song.) It’s actually a party/beach song—the refrain referring to partying and lounging all day, every day (at least for the summer when “Your daddy had a lake house / He had me paint it that summer sophomore year.” If they switched to AI to write this stuff, nobody would notice).

But when I heard it playing in the store, looking at baby chick lights and horse ivermectin douses and a bunch of tools and implements I couldn’t identify, I thought it was about farm work—about the routine of getting up with the sun, putting in a full day’s work, and doing it all over again. Because you have a family, and faith, and are invested in your land. Something like that. Would have been a better country song.

But I’m not making fun of that, and it’s not a fake thing. There’s even some part of me that wishes my work involved my hands more (typing on my laptop and picking up my coffee every few minutes doesn’t count). There’s something about how the manipulation of physical things works with or engages your brain that, I suspect, a lot of us are missing.

I’m conscious of how my ideas are shaped by living in a very cosmopolitan, multicultural area, full of all sorts of fancy, refined, things...