If work is a four-letter word, leisure your escape, and neither satisfies, then I have an antidote for you.

The antidote to the stresses of life in the digital age is learning to make beautiful and useful things by hand for the people you know and love. (While it is woodworking for me, it doesn’t have to be for you. It can be any creative hand craft).

This is a lesson I have learned through 40 years of woodworking, which I contrast with the lessons of many other jobs I’ve had — from parking lot coordinator in a summer stock theater, to associate editor at a magazine, to senior project manager at an experience design firm, from freelance bartending to teaching High School English in an international school, and many more. Those jobs taught me everything from emotional exhaustion to anger management.

The only work that rivals creative making for satisfaction is teaching other people how to make beautiful and useful things. I get to see the lightning in their eyes as they discover the joys of the process.

If you love your work, you are among the lucky few. In many jobs today, we work because we must. Jobs have become industrialized, digitized, and commoditized. It can be hard to find purpose or value in our jobs when they are insignificant, impersonal contributions to giant enterprises. Driven by necessity and fear, we believe that the hard work that leads to success, or that the idle leisure it buys, will eventually make us happy. But instead that hard work gives us little more than increasing rates of depression and anxiety.

Before industrialization, making things for the people in our lives was how our species survived and thrived. Hand work was all work, and it was the central, joyful process of life. Creative making was our purpose.

Pleasure is the original motivation for all work, feeling fully alive its reward.

We can’t all quit our day jobs and survive in the Digital Age. But we can access the joy of workmanship--and truly pursue happiness--by finding creative work that fits our inclinations.

If you’re not a woodworker at heart, you might be a weaver, or a potter. You might be a cook or a blacksmith. You might find your passion in gardening or leatherwork. You won’t know until you explore.

My latest book, The Manual Manual: Your Guide to Learning Hand Crafts, an antidote to the stresses of the digital age, will be available in April, 2025. It will be a guide to access the deeply pleasurable, satisfying, and meaningful process of making things by hand, whether as a hobby or a profession. Until then, you can’t go wrong just taking a class, or talking with a friend who has a craft hobby or profession. Also, my interview-based podcast, Hand Craftsmanship in the Digital Age explores how master craftsmen got good, and what they get out of their work.

Just make something! For someone! Make it as useful and beautiful as you can! Keep doing this and eventually you will become a master of your craft! You and the the people you make things for will all reap the benefits.

Thought of the Day, February 4, 2025

“I never wanted to be famous, I only wanted to be great” -- Ray Charles

If this quotation is true, Ray Charles was crazy by today’s standards.

We live in an era of Famous for Being Famous. The desire to be known, valued, and esteemed is widespread. We almost don’t care of the famous have any real talent or not.

What of the unsung heroes, which is to say, the merely “great”? This is when someone is particularly good at something, but only those who know that person best--the people who love them--know how great they are. We might know one or two, or be one ourselves.

We become great when we achieve the capacity to make or do something that is among best. We recognize greatness when we see it, because we feel it. We shouldn’t have to be told something is great to appreciate it. A great meal is simply an amazing experience, delicious and presented in a way that heightens our pleasure. If we have to be told what we ate was amazing, it wasn’t a great meal for us.

Soetsu Yanagi, a Japanese craft critic, argued that the most beautiful things were made by artisans who never wanted to be famous. His book, The Unknown Craftsman, compresses this idea in the title. But if you feel a sense of injustice, that somehow it would be better if these artisans were recognized, personally, for their tremendous accomplishments, Yanagi argues otherwise.

His counterintuitive point is that you can’t make beautiful things by trying to make beautiful things. Beauty is the unconscious result of just doing what you do really well. Striving to make something beautiful will often make it nice. But consciously-intended beauty comes from the head, not the heart. You have to think it through to understand it, you can’t just intuitively feel it. Consciously-intended beauty announces itself. It is made to be famous, for many people to appreciate and applaud it. The greatest beauty, however, is an immediate--and very personal--experience. A bowl made for anyone is not personal, but a bowl made by a great artist, just for me, is more beautiful than anything, in part because it encapsulates that act of giving.

I am not certain, but I think Ray Charles was making a comment on how fame can be a burden. Imagine not being able to walk down the street without people turning their heads, demanding autographs? I guess it would be amusing and enjoyable for a day or two, but pretty quickly, normal life would become hard. You’d always wonder if your friends were friends because they liked you, or were attracted to your fame.

Yanagi is thinking of the quality of greatness. I am thinking of what greatness gets you as a craftsman. He appreciates the beautiful bowls the unknown craftsmen of the Song Dynasty created. I imagine the tremendous satisfaction they got making those beautiful bowls. I like to imagine they made each while thinking of the person who would use them.