With These Two Hands

I just want to make some­thing. Or fail­ing total cre­ation, at least fix or improve something.

I’m sure that desire is hard-​wired into all of us, but it’s dif­fi­cult in this day and age for a lot of us to make a liv­ing that way. So many of us deal only with the abstract and intan­gi­ble in our daily lives. Even jobs in man­u­fac­tur­ing are usu­ally lim­ited to being a cog on an assem­bly line, with no sense of crafts­man­ship or own­er­ship over the fin­ished prod­uct like arti­sans of old. I’m sure that’s at least in part why there’s always a pas­toral move­ment counter to indus­tri­al­iza­tion — you can’t get more DIY than sub­sis­tence farming.

For most of us, that desire has to be ful­filled through our hob­bies — from cook­ing, gar­den­ing, and craft­ing to car mod­ding and Arduino build­ing. I’ve played on the fringes of all of those, but can’t really com­mit heav­ily to any par­tic­u­lar one, due to time and cost con­straints. Usu­ally, if I can’t work with tan­gi­bles, I’ll at least try to code. It’s easy to pick up and put down, and there’s a sem­blance of a fin­ished product.

Of course, pro­gram­ming is pretty rapidly chang­ing, so I’m try­ing to refresh, which can be frus­trat­ing. At least with this hobby, though, I can try to spin it into free­lanc­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties pretty eas­ily. And then maybe I’ll have the time and money to try some more hands-​on stuff.

(These ideas have been cov­ered in more detail by greater minds than my own.)

Any­way, this was all brought up when I saw this paper­craft project online -

(See the whole process at the orig­i­nal post.)

Now I’m off to go work on a car.

Tags: fresh, Work