wagecucks:

high-unicorn-tolerance:

people have so little appreciation for craftsmanship and it’s frustrating and sad. like i saw this video on facebook of a guy making a small throwing axe by hand, from start to finish, and half the comments were like “or just buy an axe for $15”

the dude didnt just want an axe! he wanted the experience of handwork, he wanted to engage in a tradition of craftsmanship, he wanted to practice skills. the process of making things is about so much more than the thing you make

if i knit a hat, the fact that i’ll have a hat at some point is tertiary to everything else i get out of the experience. it’s meditation, it’s how i interact with a community, it connects me to a history, it mediates my anxiety, it’s a sensory experience, it’s me engaging with my body in a way that is careful and thoughtful and elegant and beautiful

handwork is so devalued for a lot of reasons, and those reasons are almost always socially complex – there’s a lot to be said about how class and gender play out in different hobbies; how cost can become prohibitive in learning skills that were once vital to the poor, how certain kinds of labor have become a luxury, how histories of gendered labor cause that labor to become mocked. all of those things and so many more are difficult to grapple with

automation tends to lead us to believe that making is all about things, but when you practice handwork, you give the process its own kind of value and reap all its intangible rewards. if i could explain one simple thing to anyone who has ever asked me why i don’t just buy a hat, it’s that there’s a lot more involved in a process than just its product.