A manifesto for embracing life fully

For a modernity of doing, human innovation and shared prosperity

Three books offer powerful insights into the digital age, an age that may be distancing us from our humanity: The Craftsman by Richard Sennett, L’Âge du faire by Michel Lallement, and Hände: Eine Kulturgeschichte by Jochen Hörisch.

We live in a paradoxical time. Never have we been so connected, and never so far removed from reality. The world now reaches us through interfaces, screens, indicators, abstractions.

We click, swipe, scroll. We brush against reality more than we truly inhabit it.

In Hände: Eine Kulturgeschichte, Jochen Hörisch gives precise words to this contemporary unease: we have entered an era of forgetting the hand (Handvergessenheit).

The hand, long central to our relationship with the world, with thought, with work and with responsibility, has gradually disappeared behind systems that promise efficiency, fluidity and speed, while also dispossessing us of our grip on reality.

Richard Sennett, in The Craftsman, reminds us of a simple yet radical truth: doing is a form of thinking. The hand does not merely execute what the mind has decided elsewhere; it learns, corrects, understands. Michel Lallement, in L’Âge du faire, shows that this return to doing is not nostalgia, but a movement already at work, in hackerspaces, fab labs, third places, wherever concrete action once again becomes a principle of collective organisation.

Touching is not living

Digital technology itself is not the problem. What is at stake is the shift from manus to digitus, from the whole hand to the isolated finger, which profoundly transforms our relationship with the world. The gesture becomes light, reversible, disengaged.

Where the hand once required involvement, commitment and accountability, the click allows immediate withdrawal.

A few years ago, “contactless” embodied the promise of ultimate progress: pay without touching, meet without seeing, collaborate without crossing paths.

We believed technology could replace human contact.

We discovered the opposite: contact is not a relic of the past, it is a condition of life.

Life cannot be skimmed over. It must be taken firmly in hand.

Maintaining the original balance between hand and mind

In German, begreifen means both to understand and to grasp. This is no coincidence. Western thought was built on a constant dialogue between hand and mind. Breaking this link means breaking a fundamental anthropological balance.

Sennett states it plainly: making is thinking. Matter resists, and that resistance educates.

It imposes long timeframes, attention, humility. It teaches fruitful error, the meaning of effort, the non-immediacy between desire and result.

Lallement observes that in communities of practice, legitimacy does not come from status or discourse, but from the ability to act, to contribute, to do with others.

The challenge, then, is not to reject digital technologies, but to reconnect them to the real world. To make digital a continuation of doing, not its substitute. To preserve this living thread between brain and hand, between abstraction and embodiment.

Rehumanising innovation

Contemporary innovation is too often disconnected from the ground. It chases speed, scale, permanent disruption. It glorifies the sprint, rarely endurance. It promises solutions before problems have truly been experienced.

Hörisch helps us understand why this innovation exhausts itself: it inherits the logic of the “invisible hand”, action without a subject, without embodied responsibility. Where the hand disappears, responsibility dissolves. Whose hand? This is also why AI will never be responsible.

To innovate today is not to add another layer of technology.

It is to restore contact:

• contact with oneself, through touch and bodily engagement,

• contact with matter, which resists and forces learning,

• contact with the living world, soils, plants, animals,

• contact with others, through doing together, through usefulness.

It is about reconnecting with long timeframes, the time of Nature, the time of Humans, taking the time to go fast.

Cultivating, building, transforming, repairing: these gestures are not marginal. They are structuring. They reconnect individuals to the world and collectives to a shared project.

Territories as workshops of a new modernity

This is why territories are becoming key spaces of reinvention. The territory is where political abstraction meets concrete local action, where global strategies are tested, validated or disproved by reality.

Fab labs, third places, shared workshops, research-action projects, social innovation initiatives: these spaces embody a modernity of doing. They do not only produce objects or solutions, but relationships, skills, and shared responsibility.

The territory thus becomes a collective workshop, a place of learning, experimentation and cooperation, where innovation regains a human face.

Recroissance as a compass

In this context, Recroissance is not a renunciation. It is a reorientation. It does not aim for less for the sake of less, but for better done, better shared, better connected.

It proposes a form of global value creation that integrates:

• the value of human connection,

• the value of work well done,

• the value of living systems and ecosystems,

• the value of long timeframes and care.

A form of prosperity not measured solely in volumes, but in global value creation, in the quality of relationships, and in our collective ability to inhabit territories sustainably, towards an economy of shared prosperity.

A manifesto to take life firmly in hand

Reinventing our modernity begins here:

by putting our hands back into reality,

by placing human connection at the heart of innovation,

by making territories the laboratories of shared prosperity.

We do not need more abstraction, but more presence. Not more speed, but more grip.

Recroissance is not a step backwards. It is a step aside, to relearn how to do, together.

To inhabit the world rather than skim over it. To innovate not against reality, but with it.

It is time, collectively, to take life firmly in hand.