Skip to main content

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



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mandates and the Madness of Middle Managers

  Premise It’s been almost two years since COVID19 pandemic containment and quarantine protocols began in the United States. Since the protocols such as masking and travel restrictions began, I’ve had the luxury of traveling and living between two areas of the country that have had completely different attitudes levels of strictness from the very beginning. The first is a suburb of a large metropolitan area on the east coast (Metroburb), and the second is a medium sized town approximately 60 miles away from the metropolitan suburb (Medtown). As I’ve been about my business in both of these two areas without a mask for a very long time, only in Metroburb have I been actively harassed for not having a mask. To recount my experiences in Metroburb over the past 6 months: 2 x kicked out of a store for not having a mask 2 x followed by employees urging me to put a mask on 2 x cashiers refusing to accept my payments without a mask 1 x employees debate me on mask wearing 1 x people taking p...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Different Framework for Determining Human Rights

 Originally Written: 05/31/2019 Premise I had a conversation with a couple of my co-workers about a week before the time of this writing on the topic of child support. Although it revolved around whether or not child support should even exist in the first place, I found myself to be really uninformed on the topic. What proceeded after that discussion was a quick google search that led me to this quote from the Wikipedia page on child support: “The 1992 United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child is a binding convention signed by every member nation of the United Nations and formally ratified by all but the United States. It declares that the upbringing and development of children and a standard of living adequate for the children's development is a common responsibility of both parents and a fundamental human right for children, and asserts that the primary responsibility to provide such for the children rests with their parents.” I found this interesting as the de...
Post a Comment
Read more

COVID19: Tales from the Field

  Premise Throughout the pandemic, there have been a small collection of strange cases or phenomenon that I have been taking notes on, but do not really exist in the literature. Some with an academic or questioning personality may approach such a blog post with a lot of skepticism. To try and alleviate this, I’ll provide some details about myself that should help with the legitimacy of my hearsay. I’m a mid-career scientist at a large research organization on the Eastern half of the United States. I previously worked in neuroscience, but I now work on clinical trials related to HIV and COVID19. We currently work on four clinical trials on COVID19, and two of them involve us reaching out to local hospitals in our region for current cases of COVID19. Our other two studies involve people who have recently recovered from COVID19 as we follow them over time. In other words, just trust me, bru. Tale 1: COVID-19 Vaccines and Surgery One of the nurses that I work ...
Post a Comment
Read more