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On Making and Crafting

Originally written: 6/20/2016

Side note: At the time, I was doing my first reading of “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius. To preserve the original text in my notebook. I will include it in this transcription of the original text.

Book 11; 18, X, On behavior

And one more thing from Apollo,

That to expect bad people not to injure others is crazy. It’s to ask the impossible. And to let them behave like that to other people but expect them to exempt you is arrogant – the act of a tyrant.

Why bother making anything on your own if you can just buy it? A question asked of me today, and as a response: I say, why not?

Crafting something in this day and age is now uncommon in a society that thrives on consumption. To consume is easy, to build is hard. To walk to the store, pick up your item, and then hand money over to pay for it takes minutes. To think, design, build, fail, build again, and succeed takes time and effort that simply can’t be done by shopping.

Even without the spiel on counter culturist or counter-capitalist attitudes, there are plenty of other reasons to still build when you can. For instance, Building and crafting yourself requires an ability to envision a thought, to take an abstraction of your design, and then make it appear in reality. Next, building and crafting can be more mentally stimulating and challenging than the already complicated world of personal finance and economics. To calculate the price of a chair and determine your leftover money for other expenditures takes minutes with a calculator and some math. But building a chair, involves creativity, math, physics, design, labor, and determination. Finally, building and crafting is the ultimate commitment to defining yourself. Typically, defining yourself is done by the clothes you wear, or the accessories you buy. Those companies define you, but building your own material means that you are the ultimate definer of yourself, and you are unowned by anyone else.

2021 Additions:

I’ve definitely persisted in most of these ideas. I still build things for fun and need, I still find the act of crafting to be very rewarding and mentally satisfying. Up until recently, I’ve been working exclusively with cardboard, aka the poor man’s wood. I’ve managed to build a tablet case, a watchbox, and more out of it. But lately, I have been doing some woodworking and carved a spatula a couple of weeks ago from some spare wood I had lying around. Some images are below.

Watchbox




Wooden Spatula and Computer Tower Stand



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