Sore Foot
Commenter Josh takes us out to the woodshed to remind us there are better uses of our time than the internet, such as crafting things you can drop on your foot.
One trait that distinguishes manufacturing from services is that manufacturing produces something you can drop on your foot. While not a perfect test, this simple observation helps in deciding whether a company makes goods or services. Of interest today, people who have succeeded in the service sector have come to find making things as more fulfilling, and are pursuing it as a hobby. Those who have made fortunes in tech are finding leisure artisanal handicrafts are satisfying.
The interest in cultivating handiwork skills goes beyond wood. The maker movement, where people use do-it-yourself techniques to construct things, has been flourishing in the Bay Area for about a decade. In the pandemic, some tech workers rekindled their Lego obsessions. Glass-blowing, welding, pottery-making and other art forms have also taken off.
The Washington Post dilates on the joys young tech wizards find in working with their hands (all without mentioning the growing service sector of providing artisanal skills courses to the hurried youngsters). Slow, deliberate work can be difficult for people trained to focus on speed and efficiency, the report tells us.
Sharmila Lassen, a 60-year-old retired software engineer, says during a recent class at Clayroom that the experience is as much a lesson in patience as it is in woodworking. When she tried to “optimize” — tech jargon for making a process as efficient as possible — by stacking two pieces of wood on top of one another, she then had to even out her imprecise cuts. Overall, she’ll spend $300 and 12 hours to construct a small serving tray.
The story, if a bit clichéd with all its pat phrases for “Bay Area” whiz kids and their exploits, indicates something everyone who makes things knows already: the effort can be rewarding. You learn things as you go along, for instance. You learn from the experience, from making and adjusting for mistakes. Part of acquiring skills lies in learning to overcome errors and flaws, and figuring out how to take a different direction than originally intended—not just that you embark on a project to make a fancy bit of furniture but wind up with several odd-shaped paperweights.
In a way, the story could be categorized as a hipster-front update. The reporter begins by declaring a new trend, which appears to mean the reporter just heard about the thing. It goes on to extoll the trend’s virtues for high-IQ keyboard workers with plenty of money to burn: learning to slow down and cool their over-powered cerebral cortices on something fun. Finally, the report ignores the long-standing existence of such crafts among non-tech-industry hobbyists and artisans who have been creating their own wares and selling them where possible at local and regional crafts fairs for ages. But none of the latter bit rates as glamorous enough to write about.
At any rate, making things by hand is certainly not a bad thing—even if some hipsters and hipster-beat reporters just discovered it. Making physical things by hand is a rewarding activity on its own, even when you have to suffer from dropping things on your foot from time to time.
As always, wording can make such a difference. I saw this headline for Nature.com,"Does shingles vaccination cut dementia risk? Large study hints at a link" and I thought, suggests a link is not particularly strong and it could probably be 'Does shingles vaccination cut dementia risk? Large study only hints at link'. Other than slant, what difference would there be if the study hints at but does not prove a link?
Yes, I've been having "oh, you just discovered that" responses more often than I used to. I like to think I wasn't that way when I was under 40. But then I used enjoy reading old issues of Life magazine and National Geographic from before I was born, so I had developed a sense of what came before.