I was sitting in my kitchen this morning, staring at a toaster that had just given up the ghost. It’s the third one in five years. Three. It’s a sleek, chrome-finished thing that looked great on the counter for about six months until the lever started sticking, and then today, it just decided it was done. No smoke, no drama, just a quiet refusal to work. And the thing is, I can’t fix it. It’s held together by these weird proprietary screws that require a tool I don’t own, and even if I got inside, the guts are just a messy tangle of integrated circuits and cheap plastic clips meant to snap, not bend.
It got me thinking, as I stood there with my cold bread, about how much of our lives we’ve traded for the sake of convenience. We’re surrounded by things that are designed to be replaced rather than repaired. We live in a world of “good enough,” where everything is polished to a high shine but lacks any real weight. I don’t just mean physical weight—though that’s part of it—I mean the weight of intent. The weight of someone actually giving a damn about how a hinge feels or how a seam meets.
We’ve entered this strange era where “new” is the only metric of value, and I think it’s making us all a little bit miserable. We’re starving for craftsmanship, even if we don’t always have the words for it.
The convenience tax we didn’t realize we were paying
Don’t get me wrong, I love a good shortcut as much as the next person. I’m not suggesting we all go back to churning our own butter or hand-sewing our own trousers (unless you’re into that, in which case, more power to you). But there’s a hidden cost to the “frictionless” life we’ve built. When everything is easy, everything becomes disposable. And when everything is disposable, nothing really matters.
Think about the last time you bought something that felt like it was made to last a hundred years. For me, it was a cast-iron skillet I found at a flea market. It was rusted, crusty, and honestly pretty gross. But underneath that grime was a single, solid piece of metal poured in a foundry decades ago. I spent an afternoon scrubbing it, seasoning it, and bringing it back to life. Now, every time I use it, I feel a connection to it. It has a story. It has a “soul,” for lack of a better word.
When we buy the cheap, plastic version of a tool or a piece of furniture, we aren’t just saving money. We’re opting out of a relationship. We’re saying, “I don’t want to care about this.” And when we stop caring about the objects in our lives, we start to lose our appreciation for the effort it takes to make something truly good. We forget what quality actually feels like because we’re so used to the veneer of it.
The strange soul of a heavy object
There’s something deeply satisfying about an object that doesn’t apologize for its weight. I remember my grandfather’s workbench. It wasn’t pretty. It was scarred with saw marks, stained with old oil, and had a layer of sawdust that seemed structural. But when you put your hand on it, it didn’t budge. It felt like it was anchored to the center of the earth. It was a tool built for a purpose, and it had been doing that job for forty years without complaint.
In our digital age, we’ve lost a lot of that tactile feedback. Everything is a screen. Everything is a tap or a swipe. We’ve traded the resistance of the physical world for the smooth, glassy indifference of an interface. I think that’s why so many of us are suddenly obsessed with “analog” hobbies. We’re baking sourdough, we’re knitting, we’re woodworking in our garages on the weekends. We’re desperate to touch something that pushes back.
True craftsmanship is about that push-back. It’s about working with a material—whether it’s wood, leather, or flour—and understanding its temperament. You can’t rush a piece of oak. It’ll split if you don’t respect the grain. You can’t rush bread. It rises when it’s ready, not when you have a meeting. There’s a humility in that. It forces you to slow down and match the rhythm of the world, rather than trying to force the world to match yours.
Why “slow” is actually a superpower
We’re taught to believe that faster is always better. Efficiency is the ultimate goal. But is it? If you cook a meal in five minutes in a microwave, you’re fed, sure. But if you spend two hours over a stove, chopping vegetables and smelling the garlic soften in the oil, you’re doing something else entirely. You’re existing. You’re participating in the process of your own life.
- Intentionality: When you do things the hard way, you have to mean it. You can’t drift through a complex task.
- Skill Acquisition: There is a profound sense of dignity that comes from being “good” at something difficult.
- Longevity: Things made with care don’t just last longer; they get better with age. They develop a patina. They become part of the family.
Learning to love the “fiddly” bits
I tried to fix a leaky faucet last month. Now, I am not a plumber. Far from it. I spent three hours under the sink, swearing at a nut that wouldn’t budge, getting water up my sleeves, and questioning every life choice that led me to that moment. It was frustrating. It was “fiddly.” It was objectively the “hard way” to handle the situation—I could have just called someone and had it fixed in twenty minutes.
But when I finally got that new washer in and turned the water back on, and there was… silence. No more drip-drip-drip. I felt like a king. I had engaged with the physical reality of my home and I had won. That little victory stayed with me for days. It gave me a sense of agency that I don’t get from clicking “Buy Now” on a website.
The “fiddly” bits of life are where the growth happens. It’s in the frustration of learning a new stitch in knitting, or the precision required to sharpen a chisel. We’ve been told that frustration is a bug in the system of modern life, something to be optimized away. But I think frustration is the cost of entry for mastery. If it’s not a little bit hard, it’s probably not worth much.
Why our hands are feeling a bit useless lately
I look at my hands sometimes and realize they spend about 90% of their time just tapping on plastic keys or scrolling through glass. They’re capable of so much more. Our hands are these incredible, sensitive tools that can feel the difference between a thousandth of an inch, yet we use them for the most mundane, repetitive tasks imaginable.
There is a biological connection between our hands and our brains. When we make things, we’re not just producing an object; we’re engaging our minds in a way that “consumption” simply can’t replicate. It’s a different kind of thinking. It’s spatial, it’s tactile, and it’s deeply meditative. I’ve found that when I’m working with my hands, my anxiety tends to quiet down. The noise of the world—the news, the social media pressure, the endless to-do lists—all of that fades into the background because I have to focus on the task at hand.
Maybe that’s why we’re seeing a resurgence in “maker” culture. It’s not just a trend; it’s a survival mechanism. We’re trying to reclaim our humanity from a world that wants to turn us into purely passive consumers. We want to be creators again.
Making the choice to slow down
So, how do we get back to this? We can’t all quit our jobs and move to the woods to make hand-hewn timber frames. And we shouldn’t have to. The “hard way” isn’t an all-or-nothing lifestyle. It’s a series of small choices we make every day.
It’s choosing to repair a pair of boots instead of tossing them. It’s taking the time to write a letter by hand instead of sending a text. It’s buying one high-quality, ethically made shirt that you’ll wear for five years instead of five cheap ones that will fall apart in five months. It’s about looking for the “weight” in things.
I think we need to start asking ourselves: “Does this thing I’m bringing into my life have a story? Was it made by someone who cared? Will it still be here in ten years?” If the answer is no, maybe we should reconsider. Not because we’re being snobby, but because we deserve to be surrounded by things that are as real as we are.
Quality isn’t a luxury. It’s a form of respect—respect for the materials, respect for the maker, and respect for yourself. We’ve been living in a “thin” world for too long. It’s time we started building something with a bit more substance.
I still haven’t fixed that toaster. Honestly, I’m probably going to take it apart this weekend just to see if I can. I’ll probably fail. I’ll probably end up with a pile of parts and a kitchen that smells like burnt crumbs. But at least I’ll know why it stopped working. At least I’ll have looked under the hood. And in a world where everything is a black box, maybe that’s enough of a start.
It’s funny how a cold piece of toast can lead you down such a rabbit hole. But maybe that’s the point. The world is full of these little moments where we can choose to engage or choose to drift. I think I’m done drifting. I think I’d rather have the wobbly table, the rusted skillet, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that I’m at least trying to build something that lasts.