As it turns out, this isn't a problem just for me -- it's a problem for America. We've lost our Everyman ability to build, maintain, and repair the devices we rely on every day. And that's making it harder to solve the country's nastiest problems, like oil dependence, climate change, and global competitiveness.

The decay has been rapid. Only a few decades ago, most serious adults were expected to be fluent in basic mechanics. If your car or stove or radio broke down, you opened it up and fixed it. "Magazines like Popular Mechanics in the '40s and '50s would publish projects like an automated pig-feeding trough, and they assumed you had the tools and skills to make it," says Dale Dougherty, editor and publisher of Make magazine.

But as we migrated to an information economy, those skills began to seem as quaint as, well, mechanical clocks. America's bright future, we were assured, wasn't industrial. It was in the hands of "symbolic analysts" -- folks who sat at desks and thought for a living. In the '90s, the rise of the Internet sent this post-mechanical age into a sort of giddy overdrive. Remember Nicholas Negroponte urging everyone to "move bits, not atoms"?

But when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works.

You see this on a personal level. If you can't get under the hood of the gadgets you buy, you're far more liable to believe the marketing hype of the corporations that sell them. When things break, you toss them and buy new ones; you accept your role as a mere consumer. "I think it makes you more passive as an individual," says Matthew Crawford, a former motorcycle repair-shop owner (and postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies) who's writing a book on the demise of mechanical aptitude in America.

It might even screw up our brains. Neuroscientists have shown that working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating. Ever wonder why Detroit isn't producing 100-mpg cars? One reason might be that the engineers there spend all their time tinkering with CAD software -- developing design concepts in a purely virtual sense. They aren't ripping open cars to see what's possible, the way those amateur ultra-mileage Prius hackers do (some of whom, by the way, have modded their hybrids to get 100 mpg).

I'd argue there are even larger political effects of our post-atom age. Take the epidemic of corroded highways and collapsing bridges. The basic mechanics of how bridges and roadbeds work are so beyond us that we don't have any sense of urgency about the issue, and we don't put anywhere near enough pressure on our politicians to prioritize infrastructure upgrades.

The good news? A counterrevolution is afoot. The past few years have seen an uprising of DIY hobbyists, people who've realized that making stuff is not only cognitively empowering but also a lot of fun. Dougherty's Make magazine -- which publishes plans for building cardboard guitar amplifiers, board games, and VCR-powered cat feeders -- has been a surprise hit, selling 100,000 copies each issue. Weekend robot-building societies are cropping up everywhere. And I can't turn on the TV without stumbling across some extreme home-renovation show, complete with a hyperactive host and loving descriptions of how to, y'know, mix concrete. In prime time!

Notably, all this is happening outside our broken educational system. America is healing itself at the grass roots -- rediscovering the mental joy of making things and rearming itself with mechanical skills.

And, hey, I'm doing my part. After a couple dozen tries, I finally get my soldering technique back up to scratch. The clock is telling time -- and I made it.