I was sitting at my desk last Tuesday, staring at a cursor that seemed to be mocking me. You know that blink? The one that happens every second, measuring out the time you’re wasting? I’d been “productive” all day. I’d cleared my inbox, I’d updated three different project trackers, and I’d even participated in a thread about brand identity that went absolutely nowhere. But at 5:00 PM, I looked at my hands and they were clean. Too clean. They hadn’t done anything except tap on pieces of plastic for eight hours straight.
There’s a specific kind of exhaustion that comes from a day of purely digital work. It’s not a physical tiredness—my muscles aren’t sore—it’s more like a mental fog, a thinning of the soul. We’re living in a world that is obsessed with friction-less living. We want everything to be faster, smoother, and more efficient. But I’ve started to think that we’re losing something vital in all that optimization. We’re losing the texture of life.
I don’t think it’s just me. I think we’re all a little starved for things that have weight, smell, and a bit of resistance. We need the things that don’t have an “undo” button.
The strange magic of physical resistance
Think about the last time you actually made something. I don’t mean a digital deck or a social media post. I mean something you could drop on your toe and it would hurt. For me, it was a simple wooden birdhouse. It’s crooked. One of the edges is sanded down too far because I got impatient, and the roof doesn’t quite meet the walls at a perfect ninety-degree angle. It’s objectively a bit of a mess.
But man, the process of making it was the best I’d felt in weeks. Why? Because the wood fought back. When you’re sawing a piece of pine, the wood has an opinion. It has grain that changes direction, knots that catch the blade, and a smell that fills the room. You can’t just click and drag a piece of wood into place. You have to negotiate with it. You have to use your shoulders, your eyes, and your patience.
This is what I call the “magic of resistance.” In our digital lives, everything is designed to be easy. If you don’t like a sentence, you delete it. If you don’t like a photo, you filter it. But you can’t filter a piece of wood. You can’t “command-Z” a bad cut. That lack of an escape hatch forces a different kind of focus. It pulls you out of your head and into your fingertips.
Why sawdust is better than a spreadsheet
Spreadsheets are useful, don’t get me wrong. They help us organize the chaos. But they don’t provide any sensory feedback. When you finish a spreadsheet, you close a tab. When you finish sanding a tabletop, you run your hand over the surface and feel the smoothness you created. You smell the finish. You see the light catch the grain.
There’s a neurological connection between our hands and our brains that we’ve largely abandoned. We evolved to use tools, to manipulate the world around us, and to solve physical puzzles. When we spend our lives just moving pixels from one side of a screen to the other, a part of our brain goes dormant. We start to feel disconnected from reality. Getting your hands dirty—whether it’s gardening, baking, or fixing a bike—wakes that part of the brain up. It’s a grounding wire for the nervous system.
The trap of “optimizing” our leisure time
One of the biggest mistakes we make is trying to bring the same efficiency-mindset from our jobs into our hobbies. I’ve seen friends take up pottery and immediately start worrying about how to make their pieces “marketable.” They want to know the “fastest” way to learn or the most “efficient” kiln setup. They’re looking for a shortcut to mastery.
But the whole point of a physical hobby is that there are no shortcuts. The struggle is the point. If you could press a button and have a perfect loaf of sourdough bread appear, it wouldn’t be the same as the loaf you spent three days worrying over, folding the dough every half hour, and checking the temperature of your kitchen like a hawk. The bread tastes better because you were present for its struggle.
We’ve been sold this idea that if something isn’t productive or profitable, it’s a waste of time. I’m here to tell you that’s a lie. In fact, I’d argue that the most valuable things you can do are the ones that are “useless” in the eyes of the economy. Spending four hours painting a landscape that you’ll never show anyone isn’t a waste of time; it’s a reclamation of your humanity.
- It forces you to look—really look—at the world.
- It teaches you that frustration is just a part of the learning curve.
- It gives you a break from the constant noise of notifications.
- It results in something tangible that exists outside of a hard drive.
Learning to love the “ugly” phase
We’re afraid of being bad at things. Because we see the highlight reels of experts every time we pick up our phones, we feel like if we can’t produce something beautiful immediately, we shouldn’t bother. I’ve felt this. I remember trying to learn how to knit a few years ago. My first scarf looked like something a cat had dragged through a briar patch. It was full of dropped stitches and weird, bulging sections.
I almost threw it away. I felt embarrassed that I was a grown adult who couldn’t figure out two sticks and some string. But then I realized: why do I care if it’s ugly? No one is grading me. There’s no performance review for knitting. Once I let go of the need to be good at it, I started to enjoy the rhythmic clicking of the needles. I started to notice the tension in my hands and the way the wool felt between my fingers.
We need more “ugly” hobbies. We need more things that we do just because they feel good to do, not because we’re aiming for perfection. There is a deep, quiet satisfaction in being a beginner. It’s a humble place to be, and humility is something that’s in short supply these days.
The meditative quality of repetitive work
Have you ever spent an afternoon weeding a garden? It’s back-breaking work. It’s hot, you’re covered in dirt, and you’re probably going to have a sore lower back the next day. But there is something incredibly meditative about it. You find a rhythm. You see a problem (a weed), you apply a solution (pulling it out), and you see the immediate result (clear soil). Repeat a hundred times.
In our professional lives, problems are often abstract. You “collaborate on a strategy” or “streamline a process,” but you rarely see the immediate, physical impact of your work. Gardening gives you that. It satisfies that primal urge to see the fruits of your labor—literally. It’s a way to quiet the mind without having to sit cross-legged on a mat and try to think of nothing. When you’re focused on not pulling out the carrots along with the crabgrass, your mind doesn’t have room to worry about that email you sent at 4:30 PM.
Connecting with the past (and the future)
When you work with your hands, you’re participating in a lineage. When I use a hand plane on a piece of wood, I’m using a tool that hasn’t changed much in hundreds of years. There is a connection there to the craftsmen who came before me. You start to appreciate the things you own in a different way. You look at a well-made chair and you don’t just see a place to sit; you see the joints, the finish, and the hours of labor that went into it.
This perspective makes us better consumers, too. Or rather, it makes us less like consumers and more like stewards. When you know how hard it is to make something, you’re less likely to treat it as disposable. You want to fix things when they break instead of just ordering a replacement. You start to value quality over quantity.
And I think it’s something we need to pass on. If you have kids, let them see you fail at making something. Let them see you get frustrated with a recipe or a repair. Show them that “doing” is more important than “having.” Give them a hammer or a ball of dough or a box of old radio parts and let them see what happens when they interact with the physical world. It’s the best antidote to the digital malaise that I know of.
How to start (without over-complicating it)
If you’re feeling that digital burnout I mentioned earlier, don’t go out and spend a thousand dollars on tools or supplies. That’s just another form of “optimization.” Start small. Start messy. Here are a few things that worked for me when I was trying to find my way back to the physical world:
- Pick something tactile: Cooking is the easiest entry point. Don’t use a food processor; chop everything by hand. Feel the onion skin, the crunch of the celery, the heat of the stove.
- Expect to be bad: Your first loaf of bread might be a brick. Your first painting might look like a mud puddle. That’s fine. In fact, it’s great. You’re learning.
- Put the phone in another room: This is non-negotiable. You can’t get into a flow state if you’re checking for likes every ten minutes. The physical world requires your full presence.
- Focus on the process, not the product: If you end up with something beautiful, that’s a bonus. But the real “product” is the hour you spent not looking at a screen.
I’ve found that even twenty minutes of doing something “real” can reset my mood. It’s like a palate cleanser for the brain. The world feels a little more solid, and my problems feel a little more manageable.
The slow road is usually the better one
I know it sounds counter-intuitive to say we should seek out things that are difficult, slow, and messy. We’re told every day that we should be looking for “life hacks” to save time. But what are we saving that time for? Usually, it’s just to spend more time staring at the very screens that are making us tired in the first place.
I’m not saying we should all move to the woods and start making our own clothes—unless that’s your thing, in which case, go for it. But I am saying that we need to find a balance. We need to carve out spaces in our lives where efficiency doesn’t matter. We need to allow ourselves to be slow. We need to let our hands remember what they were built to do.
The next time you feel that itch—that restless, hollow feeling that comes after too much time in the digital ether—don’t reach for your phone to scroll through someone else’s life. Instead, go find something to fix, or build, or plant, or bake. Get some dirt under your fingernails. Make something “useless.” I promise you, it’s the most productive thing you’ll do all week.
It’s a quiet kind of rebellion, I suppose. In a world that wants you to be a consumer, choosing to be a maker is a radical act. It’s a way of saying that your time is your own, and that some things are worth doing simply because they are real. And in the end, those real things are the ones that actually stay with us.