#### Hemming the Divide
### Everything I create lives on a screen.
## Jul 28, 2025
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Growing up as a CS major in a hyper digitized world, I’ve often found myself caught in a quiet discomfort,, a creeping sense of detachment from the physical world. Everything I create lives on screens. It runs in the cloud, floats in GitHub repos, is parsed, compiled, and rendered in pixels. It’s a strange dissonance: I’m building things, but I never touch them.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about this more seriously, especially through the lens of Marx and his critique of the division of labor. For Marx, the division of labor was both a historical necessity and a source of alienation. In the capitalist mode of production, labor becomes fragmented. Workers are separated from the product of their work, and work itself becomes divorced from the full spectrum of human creativity.

>“The worker therefore only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself.”

— Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

The more I read, the more I feel implicated. Not in a self flagellating way, but in a deeply personal, uneasy way. As a programmer, I’m rewarded for thinking: for abstract problem solving, systems design, optimization. I am, by all accounts, doing “mental labor.” And I’ve started to notice how this classification, this distinction between mental and manual work, carries a moral weight in how society values people.

I’ll be honest: sometimes I find myself buying into it. I’ve caught myself thinking, “At least I’m not flipping burgers.” Or nodding along when my dad, who now lives in Taiwan/China, says he hires people to run errands so he can use that time to “think.” Because thinking, to him, is high-status. It’s intellectual. Clean. Efficient.

But that’s exactly what scares me. Because it creates a hierarchy of value where brain beats body. Where abstraction beats creation. And where I, and people like me, start to believe that we're worth more. Not because we contribute more, but because our contribution is seen as more “intelligent.”

It wasn’t always like this. Think about the artisan. The shoemaker. The woodworker. The tailor. People who not only conceived of something but also made it. There was no distinction between designer and laborer. No sharp line between the thinker and the doer. You needed both. You sketched, measured, cut, stitched, refined. The idea didn’t exist without the hand.

And I think that’s what I’m craving. Not just a hobby, but a reintegration. A way to stitch myself back into a more holistic relationship with labor.

That’s why I want to sew.

Not just because I thrift and want my clothes to fit better (though I do), and not just because embroidery looks cool (though it does). I want to sew because I’m tired of existing in the abstract. I want to think of something and then make it, not by clicking, but by touching. I want to bring something into existence with my hands, not just my mind.

There’s something radical about that. Especially now, when even “eco friendliness” has been co-opted by consumerism. People flaunt their green products, their recycled cotton hoodies and stainless steel water bottles, as though buying better is the same as living better. But we’re still buying. We’re still outsourcing. Still alienated from the process.

Repairing, reusing, repurposing, these aren’t just sustainable acts. They’re political ones. They resist the logic of disposability. They refuse the idea that labor is something to be offloaded to someone “lower” on the chain.

So this is my quiet rebellion. A needle, a thread, a pile of thrifted clothes. It’s not much. But it’s a start.

I want to learn to sew because I want to remember that making isn’t beneath me. That labor, real labor, with cuts and pricks and mess, isn’t lesser than thinking. That I am not better because I work with my brain. I am just incomplete without my hands.
