I was standing in my kitchen the other morning, staring at a bag of flour like it was some kind of ancient riddle. It’s funny how we get these ideas in our heads. I had decided, for no particular reason other than a vague sense of restlessness, that I wanted to make bread. Not the kind you throw into a machine and walk away from—though those are great, don’t get me wrong—but the kind that requires you to actually get your hands dirty. The kind that takes all day and offers no guarantees.
I think we’ve become a bit addicted to the “click and it’s done” way of living. We’re so used to things being optimized and streamlined that when we encounter a little bit of friction, it feels like a personal insult. But as I stood there, covered in a fine dusting of white powder, I realized I was actually enjoying the frustration. It’s weird, isn’t it? In a world that sells us convenience at every turn, there’s something deeply satisfying about choosing the long way around.
This isn’t just about bread, though. It’s about why we need hobbies that don’t scale. It’s about the art of slowing down in a culture that treats speed as the ultimate virtue. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about why so many of us are suddenly drawn to gardening, or film photography, or woodworking. It’s not because these things are easier. It’s because they’re harder. And that’s exactly the point.
The efficiency trap and why we’re tired
We’ve been told for years that the goal of life is to be as efficient as possible. Save time here, cut a corner there, use a shortcut whenever one is available. And look, I love a good shortcut as much as the next person. I’m not about to start hand-washing all my laundry in a creek. But there’s a hidden tax on all that efficiency. When we remove every bit of effort from our daily lives, we also remove the sense of agency that comes with actually making something happen.
I’ve noticed that when everything is too easy, my days start to blur together. There’s no texture to them. You click a button, a box arrives. You click another button, dinner shows up. It’s amazing, sure, but it’s also incredibly passive. We’ve become professional consumers of other people’s efforts. And after a while, that starts to feel a little hollow. It’s like living on a diet of only vitamins—you might be getting what you need to survive, but you’re missing the joy of the meal.
Doing things the hard way—the manual way—gives that texture back. It forces you to pay attention. You can’t scroll on your phone while you’re trying to prevent a saw from wandering off its line or while you’re kneading dough that’s refusing to come together. These tasks demand your presence. They’re a sort of forced meditation, except you get a physical object at the end of it instead of just a slightly lower heart rate.
The magic of the physical world
There’s something about the tactile nature of manual work that our brains just crave. We spent thousands of years as a species using our hands to shape the world around us. We aren’t really built to just move pixels from one side of a screen to the other all day. I’m convinced that a lot of our modern anxiety comes from this disconnect between our bodies and the physical world.
When you plant a garden, for example, you’re dealing with things you can’t control. The weather doesn’t care about your schedule. The soil has its own ideas about what it wants to grow. You have to learn to listen. You have to get your fingernails dirty and feel the humidity in the air. It’s a physical conversation. And when that first tomato finally turns red—even if it’s a tiny, slightly misshapen thing—it tastes better than anything you could buy at a store. It tastes like your own time and effort.
The Bread Experiment (A Lesson in Patience)
Back to my kitchen disaster. My first loaf of bread was, quite frankly, a brick. It was heavy, under-salted, and had the structural integrity of a paving stone. A “smart” person would have seen that as a failure. After all, I’d spent six hours and a lot of energy to produce something basically inedible. I could have bought a perfect loaf for four dollars at the bakery down the street.
But here’s the thing: I wasn’t actually mad. I was curious. Why didn’t it rise? Was the water too hot? Did I get impatient during the bulk ferment? (Spoilers: I definitely did). That failure was more interesting than a success would have been. It gave me something to solve. It turned a boring Saturday into a puzzle. And the next time I tried it, and the time after that, the incremental improvements felt like a triumph. You don’t get that feeling of earned success when everything works perfectly the first time.
The beauty of the “middle”
In our goal-oriented world, we’re obsessed with the result. We want the finished product, the “after” photo, the trophy. But when you do things the hard way, you’re forced to live in the “middle.” The middle is where the learning happens. It’s where you’re frustrated, where you’re making mistakes, and where you’re actually developing a skill.
If you take up film photography, for instance, you lose that instant gratification of seeing the photo on the back of the camera. You have to wait. You have to finish the roll, take it to be developed (or do it yourself), and wait some more. In that waiting period, you’re thinking about the shots you took. You’re wondering how the light hit that tree. You’re anticipating. That anticipation is a form of pleasure that we’ve almost entirely eliminated from our lives. We’ve traded the joy of the process for the speed of the result, and I’m not sure it was a fair trade.
- Woodworking: Teaches you that wood has a grain and a will of its own.
- Knitting: Shows you how tiny, repetitive actions can build into something substantial.
- Restoring old furniture: Connects you to the people who owned it before you.
- Cooking from scratch: Reminds you that ingredients come from the earth, not just a plastic container.
Finding your own “hard” thing
I’m not suggesting everyone needs to go out and buy an anvil and start blacksmithing—though if that’s your thing, go for it. What I am suggesting is that we should all have at least one thing in our lives that we do just because it’s hard. It could be something as simple as writing letters by hand instead of sending an email. Or learning to play an instrument where you sound like a dying cat for the first six months.
The key is to pick something where you can’t cheat. Something where you have to put in the “reps.” It’s about building a relationship with a craft. When you’re first starting, you’re going to be bad at it. And that’s okay! In fact, it’s great. There’s a certain freedom in being a beginner. You have no reputation to protect. You’re just a person with some tools and a dream, trying to figure out how the world works.
I’ve found that my “hard” things act as an anchor. When work is stressful or the news is overwhelming, I can go to my workbench or my kitchen or my garden. I can focus on a single, physical problem. The noise of the world fades away because you can’t think about your mortgage when you’re trying to use a chisel safely. It forces a level of concentration that is increasingly rare today.
It’s about more than just the hobby
Over time, this mindset starts to bleed into the rest of your life. You become a little more patient with people. You become a little more resilient when things go wrong. You start to realize that most things worth having take time and effort, and that the effort isn’t something to be avoided—it’s the point. We’ve been conditioned to think of “effort” as a negative word, but it’s actually the fuel for a meaningful life.
I think we’re seeing a collective pushback against the digital, the fast, and the temporary. People want things that last. They want to know how things work. They want to feel like they have a hand in their own existence. Whether it’s fixing a leaky faucet yourself or spending a year building a boat in your garage, these acts are a way of saying, “I am here, and I can affect my environment.”
The end of the day
The sun was setting by the time I pulled my third attempt at that bread out of the oven. It wasn’t perfect. It was a little lopsided, and I think I might have overbaked the crust just a hair. But the smell? The smell was incredible. It filled the whole house with this warm, yeasty aroma that you just can’t get from a store-bought loaf.
I sat there at my kitchen table, eating a slice with way too much butter, and I felt… peaceful. I hadn’t accomplished anything that would change the world. I hadn’t “optimized” my Saturday. I had actually been remarkably unproductive in the traditional sense of the word. But I felt more alive than I had all week. I had done something the hard way, and for a moment, the world felt solid and real and exactly the right size.
Maybe tomorrow I’ll go back to being efficient. I’ll use the shortcuts and the apps and the quick fixes, because life is busy and we all have to keep up. But I’ll know that the flour is still in the cupboard, and the garden is still waiting, and the hard way is always there, whenever I need to find my way back to myself.