The Coming Age of Durable Work
The Skinny with Ginny #7
A few weeks ago, I read an article that’s been echoing in my mind ever since. The author described how, after moving to Texas, she was stunned by the cost of hiring tradespeople; plumbers, HVAC technicians, electricians. Everything else in her new town was cheaper than California: gas, groceries, real estate. But when her air conditioner broke, the bill was sky-high.
As she watched life unfold around her, she noticed something else: the most financially stable customers at her family’s restaurant weren’t tech executives or influencers. They were tradespeople. The electricians, plumbers, and contractors, like the ones whose hands built and fixed the world the rest of us depend on.
It struck me how much that observation aligns with what my friend and podcast guest Rory Groves calls “durable trades.” Rory’s book by the same name looks at which vocations have stood the test of time, those that not only survive but actually thrive across centuries, wars, and technological revolutions. Farming. Building. Healing. Teaching. Shepherding. Craftsmanship.
They are the vocations that keep civilization going when everything else collapses.
And here we are, living in a moment where those very trades are vanishing.
The Vanishing Workforce
The statistics are staggering. More than half of the skilled trade workforce in the U.S. is already over 50. For every new tradesperson entering the field, there are twenty job openings. Plumbers? We’re facing a half-million shortage by 2027. Electricians? Demand is growing three times faster than most professions.
By 2030, nearly 80 million tradespeople will retire, while only 40 million new workers will step in to replace them. The gap isn’t just economic, it’s existential.
Because while artificial intelligence can write a poem or generate a computer program, it cannot crawl under a house to fix a pipe in February. It cannot install a furnace, milk a cow, weld a joint, or harvest a field. It cannot look at a broken water heater and intuitively sense what’s wrong because it’s been there, done that, and smelled that before.
This, of course, mirrors another quiet crisis: the loss of the family farm. The average American farmer is nearly 60 years old, and we’re losing small farms every single day. Yet, food, like electricity, like clean water, isn’t optional. We can’t DoorDash dinner without a farmer. We can’t stream Netflix without a lineman. We can’t flush a toilet without a plumber.
So what happens when the people who keep life running are gone?
Relearning What Really Matters
Rory Groves says that somewhere along the way, we traded resilience for convenience. We were told that progress meant leaving the land, leaving the trades, leaving the home, and chasing degrees and careers that looked cleaner, shinier, and more comfortable.
But comfort can be brittle.
Rory calls it the fragile economy - a system dependent on global supply chains and specialized knowledge that can crumble with a single disruption. We saw it in 2020 when store shelves sat empty. We saw it again when small towns couldn’t find plumbers, when lead times for building materials stretched into months, when something as simple as a broken appliance became a full-blown household crisis.
In our conversation, Rory talked about how he started with one tomato plant—just one—and realized how far we’ve drifted from the skills that once defined human life: growing food, fixing things, building community, caring for family. It wasn’t about nostalgia; it was about durability. About doing the kind of work that endures storms, pandemics, and AI revolutions alike.
The Family Economy Returns
I think this is why so many families are quietly rethinking the path forward.
Homeschooling is on the rise. Apprenticeships are coming back. Young adults are rediscovering welding, carpentry, and regenerative agriculture. Parents are realizing that “college for all” might not be the only, or even the best, path to meaning and financial security.
And underneath it all is something deeper: a longing for wholeness.
When Rory and I spoke, he described how industrialization separated not just work from home, but families from one another. Dad went to the factory. Mom stayed behind. Kids went to school for seven hours a day. The family economy splintered, and we’ve been trying to piece it back together ever since.
In durable trades, work and life are intertwined. Children see what their parents do. Skills are passed down, not just through textbooks but through daily rhythms: milking goats before breakfast, sanding a table after dinner, watching how the seasons shape the pace of labor.
This isn’t just about economics, it’s about formation. It’s about what kind of people our children become when they grow up watching creation at work rather than pixels on a screen.
Why This Matters for Our Kids
At 1000 Hours Outside, we often talk about how time outdoors restores mental health, imagination, and resilience. But it’s also about competence.
The outdoors teaches us how the world actually works. How water flows downhill. How heat rises. How materials expand and contract. How effort leads to fruit. These are the same physical laws the trades depend on.
In other words, when your child builds a fort, digs a ditch, or fixes a bike chain, they’re learning the physics of real life - the kind no algorithm can replicate.
And perhaps that’s what the future will belong to: the grounded, the capable, the ones who can fix, grow, build, and mend. The ones who know how to work with their hands and not just their thumbs.
The Hope on the Horizon
There’s an old proverb: “The wealth of the wise is their diligence.”
I see that wisdom in the electricians and farmers, in the roofers and mechanics, in the small business owners keeping their towns alive. These are the quiet heroes of stability, the ones who show up, day after day, in weather, in heat, in mud.
They are the ones who will build the next chapter of our nation. Literally.
Maybe the future millionaire won’t be the coder or influencer, but the tradesman who knows how to wire a home, repair a tractor, or restore an old barn. Maybe our greatest innovation won’t be artificial intelligence at all but a cultural return to authentic intelligence: skill, character, craftsmanship, and connection.
So perhaps the call for our generation isn’t just to spend 1000 hours outside, it’s to spend 1000 hours learning what lasts.
To teach our children that the most enduring work is often the kind that leaves dirt under your fingernails and gratitude in your heart.
Because the truth is: the world will always need people who can grow food, fix what’s broken, and keep the lights on.
And that, I think, is a future worth building.
What a lovely read!
I loved the episode about durable trades. It was both eye-opening and very encouraging. (As a side note, I thought it was really cool that musician made that list....) Love your tireless work, Ginny. Thank you for putting your voice out into the world.