Make Something An Invitation To Being Human

TITLE: Make Something: An Invitation to Being Human CHANNEL: Wes Cecil DATE: 2026-06-15 URL: https://youtu.be/hw3WHFh2TcE ---TRANSCRIPT--- Thanks to our Patreon members for helping to make this episode possible and we’re now available on all the major podcasting platforms. You can find more information at the links below.

Good evening ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to an invitation to being human, make something. Now generally there’s a huge variety of human capacities and interests and possibilities and challenges etc. However, I can say pretty categorically that to be well, to be human, to be thriving as an individual or in our communities both, it is necessary for us to make something. And what is strange about the world we now inhabit, which is brand new, by the way, relatively speaking, is that we are asked precisely the opposite. And it’s a commonplace. Everybody says it all the time. It’s cliche, it’s true. It’s that we live in consumer society. We have consumer economics. We are consumer economies. We are college consumers. It’s consumer choice, consumer freedom, consumer opportunity. The importance of the consumer. Consume consume consume consume.

This is a new—and like I said, new being within the last say 70, 80 years—way of conceptualizing an individual, an individual’s relationship to their economy and so on and so forth. This is brand new and what’s strange about it and what is unfortunate about it is that it’s unbelievably damaging to the human. And so what happens is our very natural, normal, necessary human capacity to make, to build, to interact with the world has been supplanted by this faux activity which is consumption. And there is no way of consuming one’s way into feeling like you’ve made something. Unfortunately or fortunately this is simply the case.

So this episode is an exploration of this. And if you look historically this is nothing new per se. If you look at Zen Buddhism or even earlier Buddhism for that matter, there is the notion of chop wood carry water, which comes from an early Zen poem or an early Buddhist poem in which a monk simply says: my daily activities are not unusual. I’m just naturally in harmony with them, grasping nothing, discarding nothing. My supernatural power and marvelous activity: drawing water and chopping wood. And the notion here is simply that look, before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. And the message is simply that it’s the process of living is doing. We need to drink. We need to wash. We need to eat. We need to heat. We need to boil the water to make tea. And so the things that are core to human existence are the things that we need to do. And if you’re enlightened, you’ll do them. And if you’re not enlightened, you’ll do them.

And what has happened in the intervening many many centuries is this alteration in our relationship to this. And of course one could talk about Marxism and the alienation of labor, or not just Marxism but many—and that’s the notion that the product of your work is taken from you, the benefits from your work are taken from you. Well, we’ve sort of moved beyond the alienation of labor to the alienation from any sense of doing, of making, of building, of being productive in a meaningful way. And this has any number of layers to it, and again this is what I want to explore. It goes way back and has been discussed with alienation of labor, but we are in a new world that presents us with a new set of challenges and makes it really hard—again the whole purpose of the series—to be human.

So what do I mean by this? Why aren’t we asked to make anything anymore? And when did this transition come about? Again, if you look at the Marxist history, it is the notion of the alienation of labor, which is: we’re making things, but they’re being taken from us in various ways, and the way we relate to making them alienates us from the product of our own material capacities to make things in the world. Okay. Whatever the merits of that—and I think there’s a lot of interesting things to be said about that, many hundreds of thousands and millions of pages can be read upon this subject—we’ve transitioned from this and we know when the transition took place, and that is in 1946 in the United States at least, and this of course a huge influence around the world.

And what happened was, before the war you had the great depression and so people are out of work. So working, looking for work, searching for opportunities to work forced people back—there was a bit of a reruralification, there was an expansion of just make, make, mend, keep running, because you were desperately poor. Not out of choice. It’s not a great thing by any means but it was just forced upon people. And at this point, let’s just call it 1930, about half of America is rural. And of those people who are rural, about half didn’t even have electricity yet. So it took a long time for people to get electricity, and particularly in the more rural parts of the United States. Even in cities though, electricity is still coming. And it’s only around 1930 that we move from predominantly horse-driven transportation to automobile-driven transportation. And so again, this is not that long ago, 90 years ago give or take. You’re living in a world where if your horse is your mode of transportation, you have to do a lot to get around. You have to do things. You have a relationship with a horse. You’re saddling it, you’re unsaddling it, you’re harnessing, you’re unharnessing it.

It’s an activity that matters and is this sense of efficacy and capacity that making and doing gives humans, and without that sense of efficacy—the sense of I’m doing things that matter, I’m making things that exist and change the world I live in—we feel utterly and completely both unfulfilled and disoriented. So it’s important to note these are different aspects of the same problem. Unfulfilled in the sense of—that’s how we get fulfillment. I mean not the only way but one of the major ways we get fulfillment is by seeing our activities reflected back to us as meaningful in the world around us. And there’s many ways that this can happen but one of the ways is if you need to go someplace and you harness a horse and you ride that horse to get there, you’ve really done something. It’s not a passive activity. It’s a very active, skill-based, relationship-based thing you’ve done. Now that might seem small but multiply that a 100 times when the majority of the population or half the population is still on farms. You have to make things. The notion of not making things is just absurd. Of course you do. You have to mend your clothes. You have to make your clothes. Lots of people are still not very much in the money economy. You’re getting by making and mending as best you can. You’re in relationship with your animals. You’re making crops. You’re continuously in this process of production that really matters. When you make something to eat, when you grow the food you’re eating, growing it or not growing it is a vitally important activity. It’s not like a random “oh wouldn’t it be nice if we had some cabbage.” You’re like, no, if we don’t have cabbage, we’re going to starve. So cabbage. So growing the cabbage doesn’t feel like a random insignificant unimportant sort of process. It feels like a vitally important process that makes your life possible.

And so most of us for most of human civilization have been enmeshed in systems where this was necessary. And so our natural—I mean it’s the evolution of our need for efficacy, of feeling ourselves reflected back in the actions and the makings that we do in the world—this is where they come from. But by 1947, or 46-47, just post war, just a phenomenal transformation has occurred. So the industrialization that was already well underway but went mad during World War I and then sort of collapsed a bit after World War I, just skyrocketed in World War II. And one of the aspects of this in the United States is millions and millions of men—I mean this happened all over the world but we’ll just focus on the United States for this argument although you can see the elements everywhere—millions and millions of men are drafted in the military and they go away to war. So the advantage the US had is stuff wasn’t being blown up here, which is if you’re going to go to war, it’s nice not to have your things blown up. And so there was this need for production of tanks and planes and ships and war economy of all kinds. But we just sent millions of our workers overseas. So how do you square the circle here? Women. You have—and you can look at these advertisements, looking them up online, they’re fascinating—massive advertising campaigns, quote unquote propaganda campaigns saying here’s a job, put meaning in your life, get to work, make the war end, build tanks, build ships, build planes, make ammunition, go on farms, harvest crops. They’re short of labor of every kind and so millions of women rushed into the workforce to fill this patriotic duty and also to tear down a lot of the barriers that had existed between women being in the workforce. And so here’s this opportunity, go into the workforce, be meaningful, be important, be valuable, make a contribution. And they did. And you know what they did? They liked it. Now, they didn’t like that people were being killed. They didn’t like that their men were gone. No one likes this. They don’t want their husbands and brothers and fathers and sons being killed. That’s no fun. But the concept that you’re in a working environment in which you’re making real things that you can feel with your hands and you know why you’re making them and what impact they’re having, that turned out to be incredibly motivational and satisfactory.

And then the war ended. And that was a major problem because what it communicated to people was, uh-oh, now we’re going to have millions of soldiers coming home because one is too many. But relatively speaking, not many Americans were actually killed in World War II. I mean, looking at the Soviets or the Germans or virtually the other major combatants as a percentage of their population, the US was virtually untouched, again statistically speaking. So we had millions of men returning. We had a global economy that was suddenly completely disoriented because everybody had been building weapons, that’s what the factories are doing. And now the need for weapons just declined by 70%. So everything’s shutting down and it’s like oh what are we going to do? So this was a multi-step and conscious—by the way this is historically accurate, you can look at the advertisings again, amazing—they’re like, okay, the men are home. One, women, you have to go back into the kitchen, go home. We don’t need you anymore. Your husband needs you in the kitchen. This was the advertisement all of a sudden. And women are like, hey, wait a second. And it was a—the society became more conservative after the war as far as women working and all these kinds of things because it was this reaction against the change that had taken place. And now they’re like, oh, we got to stomp that out. Let’s send them home. Let’s not let them do that kind of meaningful work anymore. They’re doing the meaningful work of cooking and doing things at home. So we’ll return to that in a second. And two, for the men, oh, what—okay, they’ve just been fighting. That gives you meaning. Again this is one of the—William James talks about this, that we need a moral equivalent of war because it does provide people meaning, and as long as there’s nothing else to fill that meaning, we’re in bad straits. And so he argued in various ways to do this. But they’re like, okay, what do we do with all these men who’ve just been—try and get them their jobs back, and two, have them consume because now we have all these factories that need to make something and what they’re going to make is cars and freezers and refrigerators and stoves and ovens. And so consume.

This is the answer, and everything that you’re told to consume and that you’re being instructed to consume and told that you are being a good citizen when you consume—the number of flags that are on early advertisements. This is made in America. This is made by American troops who have returned home, and buy a fridge for America, and you worked hard, you fought hard, now it’s your turn to have a stove. It was just this wave of advertising that emphasized the need to move from an economy where your importance and value was seen as making and doing to one where your importance and value was seen as consuming, because that is what’s necessary.

But here’s the trick. So all these women who have been working and doing, now they’re trying to push them back. This only worked moderately well by the way. Trying to push them back to the home. Well, again, if you go back, remember 1930. So a lot of homes didn’t even have electricity. Now they’re getting electricity and all this. And so they’re trying to say, hey, now go home. However, we need you to consume. And so there’s a vast number of advertisements—this is where the whole frozen food movement comes from. Like, yes, you can go home, but you’re going to have a freezer that freezes all your food. So don’t worry about canning and baking and all that. No, we just freeze it. And then you just pop it into the oven, your new oven, from your new freezer to your new oven, and you don’t have to do any cooking. You don’t have to literally make anything. So the making of the food in theory is being removed from the equation. We’re going to make it convenient for you.

This is the message, and if you look at those ads they are the ads that you see today functionally, but they are new at that time, but it came from this problem that was created by the development of industrialization generally but also this very specific post-war issue of, hey, we’re going to have a major depression as we just had one following World War I. Let’s not do that again. If we don’t get these factories running—and what are we going to sell? We just got to sell consumer goods to everybody all the time. And how do we get people to do that? We make it a patriotic mission. And we make sure that they stop making things themselves. You don’t live a good life by making. You live a good life by consuming. That is the message. And if that ever breaks down—by the way, our entire economy, the global economy, is a consumption-based economy, not a make-it-yourself economy. And if we ever decide to start making it ourselves, things are going to get very interesting very quickly. I’m all for running that experiment, by the way. But this is what we’re up against. And so that message has been promulgated through our society to the extent it’s extraordinary that now we don’t believe anything is important except consumption.

And when I said that—oh look, in the utopias and the dystopias, the lifestyle that the people who are winning have seems to be the same across the board. When you look at Star Trek and Picard goes to the little thing that makes the food, he says, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” See, not chop water. Not chop wood, carry water. It’s, oh no, I have a machine to do this because wow, it’s so inconvenient to make tea. It’s so inconvenient to make food that it’s better to just pull something out of the freezer and put it into the oven. And then my man is happy when he gets back from his job because now he’s going to relax and see TV commercials and everything is going to be great. This is the message and it’s pervasive. Again, to say we live in a consumer society is just—it’s like 60% or 70% of our economies are consumer spending. And so it wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t random. It wasn’t average. It wasn’t what people naturally do. It’s been a multi-generation advertising, propaganda, social change to try and get people to embrace this pattern of living, which would all be fine except for it’s unbelievably damaging for the humans. And this is not to say there’s anything quote unquote wrong with convenience. It’s like, you know what’s nice? Electricity is nice because if you have to chop wood and bring it in your house to heat it, that is a lot of work. Electric heat, cool. Electric light, pretty cool. However, you have to at some point ask yourself, if I’m doing all these things that are convenient, what am I saving my time for? Like, what does the convenience give me? It’s liberating. Absolutely. Not having to do clothes, in theory, liberating. We’ll return to that in a second. Wash clothes by hand, in theory, liberating, but liberating for what?

And if you’re not freeing yourself to make or do, to express your efficacy in the world, well, you’re setting yourself up without doubt for this sense of alienation again, because I don’t matter in the world because I’m not making or doing things that matter, and disorientation, because it is the interaction, the physical material interaction with the world that allows us to orient ourselves in time and space, to create a history, to create a future. And that is what is being taken from us because we’re told, oh no. And it’s shown in the statistics. So people say, oh, you know, I’ve got—you can microwave your food. Okay, you don’t want to cook, that’s fine. Not everybody wants to cook, no problem. You can microwave your food. You can have Uber Eats deliver it to your door. That—oh good lord. Tired food delivered at great expense. I just don’t understand how that exists, but it does. So, people, okay, make your own choices, that’s great. Go through the list. All the things that allow us to save time in theory. What are we doing with it? Well, it turns out that what we’re doing with it is we’re watching TV or doing social media 7 to eight hours a day.

So if you figure you’re sleeping a little bit and maybe you have a job or maybe you’re going to school, maybe you’re supposed to be doing homework, all of that other time is being spent on being passive and being a consumer. You’re consuming images, you’re consuming stories, you’re consuming narratives, pictures—it’s a passive consumption. And then people say, wow, I feel depressed and alienated. I mean, all the statistics show this. And you just go, oh, you know why? Because we’ve taken all this theoretical time saving and we’ve converted it into passive consumption in various forms. And just again, full stop, humans need physical creation so that they feel like they matter and are important in the world. And if you don’t have that in some way—and there’s an infinite number of ways to express that—but if you don’t have that, then you have no possibility to create a sense of value and meaning and orientation, and you get depressed and feel like the world doesn’t matter and that you don’t matter. And it turns out, because you’re not doing anything that helps you have that sense of mattering. And again, we’re told not to.

So on the time-saving thing, one of the things they say is, oh, have a washing machine, now you can save a lot of time. There’s a trick here. What it often does and almost invariably is it leads us to wear more clothes, wash them more often, and have very much higher standards for what personal hygiene should be like. Not that I have anything against personal hygiene, entirely for it, but are we really saving that much time? This is one of the tricks of convenience. Like how much time are you actually saving? Always an important question to ask. Lots of cultures used to eat functionally one meal a day because cooking was very time consuming, and so they usually had something often for breakfast that was just leftovers from the night before or something that was cold that was always pre-made. And so you were eating a breakfast and then having your day and then at night you would have one meal. Well, if you convince yourself for some reason that you must have three meals a day—which again is a social construction, and what constitutes those meals also a social construction—now all of a sudden you’re in a place where it’s like oh I’m supposed to have a meal and it’s supposed to look like this, but to do that would be very time consuming for me to do that. So I’ll hire people to do that. So I’ll get to-go food or I’ll have to go to a restaurant. And so the notion that it saves you time, it only saves you time if you don’t alter your society completely to meet that. It’s like vacuum cleaners. People didn’t have wall-to-wall carpet before vacuum cleaners because it was really hard to clean carpets. So one, they didn’t do it very often, and two, you just didn’t have a lot of carpets, and carpets were expensive. Ah, great. We have vacuum cleaners. Now we can multiply the amount of space that needs vacuuming by a thousand. Yay. Now we’re saving time because we have a vacuum cleaner. Riding mowers. I have a riding lawnmower, by the way. But what riding lawnmowers let people do is have huge swaths, like fields of mown grass. I’ve seen these things, it’s hilarious, and often I find terrifying, if you will, because people get a riding mower and like great. So what they really have is a sense that I’m willing to mow for 45 minutes and I’ll just keep getting bigger mowers so that I can mow bigger things for 45 minutes. And it’s like, oh, you’re not actually saving time, you’re just mowing bigger and bigger spaces with bigger and bigger machines. This is not a time-saving or an expense saving. And so part of this new convenience time-saving thing is a trick, but part of it is not. But what it does is it says, hey, what are you saving time for? And what we’ve been told, again, if you look at the Star Trek, oh, the rich people just sit around and order people about and they don’t have to do anything—that’s what’s supposed to look like fun. That’s what’s supposed to look like the good life. Who wants—what a horrible life. No one wants that life, I would think. Maybe some people do. But I still think it’s a horrible life. Ask yourself, is that—you want to just do nothing? And then people go, no no no, I want to do what I want to do. And I’m like, okay, what do you want to do? If you really want to just sit and watch TV 7 to eight hours a day and look at your phone and do social media—if so, okay, I guess that’s fine. If that’s really what you want, you sure that’s making you feel good and healthy? Personally, I’m completely unconvinced. So if you are doing that, I always want to say, what would you rather be doing? Just do that.

But one of the other parts of the tricks of this is people say, oh well, I’d like to play guitar. And I was at—this is maybe 15 years ago—I was at a birthday party for our neighbor kids. And they were playing this game that I’d never seen before called Guitar Hero. And it was fascinating to me because two of these people were good. And one of these people was phenomenally good at this game. Like phenomenally good. And what it is, you have a little fake guitar and you play and when you hit the buttons it makes the chords of songs and so you’re the guitar hero. And this guy had been—I don’t know how many hours he’d been playing because he was just incredible at this game. And I thought there it is. Instead of spending that time, the exact same amount of time actually learning to play an actual guitar, which time I’m assuming he would probably have been able to play pretty well at some level, he’d rather spend his time not playing. It’s a fake guitar playing fake music. And so on one hand, it was impressive how good you could get at being at a fake guitar, but still at some point you’re just playing a fake guitar and that’s just not that nice. It’s really nice when people sit and play a guitar. When people play a nice acoustic guitar live, it’s amazing.

But one of the tricks is—and this is pervasive, not just with guitars but everything throughout our society, and this is part of having a consumer society, by the way, it’s an important part, so I want to emphasize this little section—is if you play a wrong chord, now you’re not a good guitar player. There’s some risk of personal failing, and that is an important element of having efficacy. If there’s no chance of not doing it well, then there’s no reward for doing it well, and embracing the process of learning a chord and learning another chord and being able to strum. But what we’ve done is we’ve said, oh, good guitar players are these phenomenal world-class—and they are good—these just incredible piano or guitar players, and that’s what playing the guitar is. And if you do anything less than that, well, you’re just a hack, and no one wants to be a hack because there’s no joy in being a hack. And so I just won’t do it. I’ll pretend to do it. And then when I hit the button, it’ll always make a good chord because that’s what the buttons do. They always make a good chord. It’s like, ooh, that’s a trap. But this extends to everything. If you have a shirt and a button rips off, our theory is you just throw that shirt away because you can just buy another one. Historically, what you would do is you would mend that button. It’s a skill. It’s not like an incredibly challenging skill. It’s just a skill. But one of the problems that we have now is if you’re not good at it like I am—I’m terrible at this kind of thing, but I occasionally sew a button back on because it just seems wasteful not to do that. It never looks quite perfect. It’s the same thing as with the guitar player, the piano player. If your standard is industrial perfect for everything, then it becomes very difficult to make anything that you don’t feel is second rate. It feels very weird not to. You’re like, oh, well that button’s a little off center, it looks a little wrong. What’s wrong with that? It should look a little wrong because you did it yourself. And that’s fine. I’m not an expert seamstress, but notice the way our societies judge us.

And this is pervasive. When we built our house in Port Townsend 28 years ago, 29 years ago now, I would say of the total construction we did 30 or 40% of the work on the house. I built the stairs, built the kitchen, did the bathroom tiling, all this—and not a master craftsman, and so a lot of it was not done to what you would call perfect or appearance of perfect style or finish quality. It was my first really really big job of those kinds. And so you’re like, oh wow, this is definitely a struggle, we’re making mistakes. Great learning experience. It made the house feel very much like ours, but for years—it took me a long time to absorb that and not feel slightly like, oh well, we’re going to go back and fix that someday. Never going to go back fix it. But I would say this to people, like, oh yeah, no, I know that’s wrong—there’s a little embarrassed, like oh you know, instead of going, hey I think it’s amazing that we did this at all, like what a thing to achieve. And not embracing that, I felt embarrassed. But this is the embarrassment of the consumer society that wants it to be perfect within the style. Even if it’s something like ripped jeans, which was a style for a while, they have to be ripped in the right way. Just ripping, just wearing old ripped jeans is not the same as buying the nicely ripped jeans. Which sounds bizarre to say, but we all know it’s true. We know this is how fashion works.

And to embrace that and go, no no no, look, I made this, and that’s great, and that makes it even better because we made it ourselves. And this sensibility is so difficult to achieve in a consumer society. And it is this massive barrier, the notion that imperfection equals judgment, judgment equals wrong, so don’t do anything. Don’t try, don’t make a mistake, don’t be exposed as not the world’s greatest at every possible thing. Means don’t make anything. It’s utterly and completely disabling. And by the way, this is not a mistake. It’s a message that we receive continuously. And again, to learn to embrace that, to learn to say, hey, this is great, I made it myself. And one of the interesting things about our house, and I see this in many other ways, is what we did was of quality. The tile we used, the materials, the time we spent was much higher than like a tract home. But what a tract home does, and what fast fashion clothes and food that looks good on the menu—all these things, what we’ve been trained to do is to look at the surface and to not say, oh, the tile may not be straight but that’s really nice quality tile, as opposed to like, oh, this is perfectly presented, all the lines are flawless maybe, but it’s an unbelievably cheap tile and it’s going to fall off the wall in five years. But no no no, it looks right now and that’s all that matters. This desire to be blameless, to not make something that’s flawed and sad looking. No no no, that’s not okay.

And yet that is the path of actual a sense of meaning and value in the world. If you’re going to have that, then you need to make, you need to do things that give you the sense of capacity. And I’ll simply say, if you are watching—which I find hard to believe—but if you are watching 7-8 hours of TV and/or spending that much time on social media all combined, I will 100% guarantee, money back, you will feel way better about yourself and your life if you just cut that time in half and spend the other four hours doing virtually anything else. Paint a room, play the guitar, bake a cake, fix your car, sew a button on a shirt, repair old speakers, plant a garden, plant a tree, climb a tree, go fishing. Just about any activity will be superior. You’ll feel better. You’ll go like, I feel better, like wow—and the more I do these things the better I feel. Chop wood carry water. The Buddhist monks weren’t just making this up.

And a further extension of this is the recognition that doing the things that life requires is not an imposition. Recognizing that just being alive is a joy. And it’s like, oh okay, I need to drink water, so getting water is great. I need to wear clothes, so washing clothes, that’s part of the process. This isn’t an imposition that’s stopping me from doing other things. It is just part of life. So be in harmony with the things you need to do and be in harmony with the things you want to do. But—I asked people, and I’ve done this with my students for years and years in my classes, I would say, hey, what do you really really actually want to do? And then can you do that? And look at the time that you have and how you’re spending it. And then say, do I actually have the time to do the things I think I want to do? And then if yes, then why not do them? And if you’re not doing them, do you really want to do them? And often what they would report back is, yeah, when I looked at it, one of the big fears I had was being judged, being bad, failing, all of these things. You never fail when you watch Netflix. It’s designed so there’s always something that you can watch and you just hit the button and you stream it. There you go. No failing. But if you actually pick up the guitar, oh, it might be a little struggle, might be a little hard. If you start singing or whistling or baking a cake, sewing a button—again, whatever the infinite myriad activities you can do—less good at it. If you have a garden, some of the plants you plant will die. Some of the plants you buy will not be the ones that were on the tag and you’ll have to dig them up, and you’ll have droughts and there’ll be freezes and stuff. Well, this is the process. It’s never perfect. It’s never going to be perfect. Why do we want perfect? Chop wood carry water.

Another example is I had three students, and one of the families had a piece of property in the middle of nowhere. It was on the Pacific side of the Olympic Mountains, which relative to the United States is very remote. And they said, you know, we were thinking maybe this summer we could go up and build a cabin. And they said, what do you think about that? And I said, well, what’s the worst that can happen? You spend the summer having fun building a cabin together. Maybe the cabin sucks. Maybe it falls down. Maybe it stays up. Who knows? But first, you’ve done something and you’ve done it together. So you’ve probably had fun, or you kill each other and then that’s not so fun. But now you’ve learned that. And I said, two, maybe as the years go by, you’ll use it and different people use it at different times, and maybe you’ll expand it, maybe you’ll fix it up. And so they did this. They said, yeah, that makes sense to us. And so over the years, individually each of the three said that it was one of the greatest things they’d ever done. And now at different times they go up—one of them got married, they go up, like different people would go up at different times and use it and expand it, and it’s just this thing now. But they said really it just grew out of letting go of the notion of, oh, will it fail, are we going to really use it—all of which are not unreasonable questions, but the other question, it’s like, okay, if you’re not going to do that, what are you going to do? What better do you have to do? And if the answer is 7 to eight hours of Netflix and social media, then I’m like, then build a cabin in the woods, because you’re just going to be happier. You’re going to feel better about your life having done that. Your sense of yourself will be improved. There’s no doubt about that. So do that.

And the inverse message of that, for instance—kids in school, as I’m in schools, but not just kids in school, when we go to work so often we are told subtly or not so subtly that the work we’re doing doesn’t really matter. Teachers often know—one of my most frustrating things is that they aren’t really teaching the kids. And the kids know they aren’t really being taught and that they’re not really learning. And the administration knows that the kids aren’t being taught, and the teachers aren’t really teaching and that they’re not really learning. But everybody knows that we’re not here for that. We’re here to just pretend as if we’re doing something. And so the message that students get is, hey, your work doesn’t really matter. And then there’s this whole notion now of jobs. And people go, oh well, I go to work, I go to meetings, I do these things, does it really matter? I don’t know. It just is sort of an extension of school. And then all of a sudden you have to ask yourself, well, what can I do that actually matters?

And I think of our culture and I go, what is it? Like it used to be clear. Most societies for most of history have had very clear notions of what it meant to do meaningful things, and they gave opportunities to people to do them. And in modern society, I’m like, oh, what is it we’re told is meaningful? And here it is. Be famous. Have a lot of money so that you can consume everything you want all the time, and then your life will be great. Now if you’re an intellectual, like you’re an important person, you’re literate, you’ve got some style, you read the right books and right magazines, then you know that, oh no, what you need to do is consume the correct things. If you consume the right things in the right ways, then—if I read the right books and I watch the right shows and I read the right magazines, like now I’m consuming in the correct way, I’m buying the right brands, or I’m buying the right brands that are the brands that resist the brands, that kind of sort of paradoxical self-referential—like again, the ripped jeans. I don’t want to have the new jeans. I want to buy the ripped jeans so that I look cool. And it’s like, oh, so you want to buy the professionally ripped jeans because the amateur ripped jeans, of course, those are totally unacceptable. Nobody’s falling for that. And you’re like, right, exactly. That’s the way we do that. And it’s just so weird that this would happen. Another example of this is when you bought 501 jeans, these old kinds of Levi jeans, when you bought them, they were stiff and uncomfortable and you had to wear them for a while. But after you wore them for a while and washed them a couple of times—that when they would change sizes, so you had to be careful about that, but they would kind of become like a pattern of your body and they were so comfortable. But it was a process, and you started with new jeans that were uncomfortable and weird to wear and you kind of looked a little funny and then you kind of wore them in and then you would wear them until they were so absolutely dead that you were crying, like, oh no, I don’t want to get new ones. And they just don’t even make them anymore. You can’t get these. They stopped making them; people loved them. Everybody wore them when I was a kid. And it’s like, oh, we don’t even like that process anymore. The notion that things have to be broken in, that we need to have them for a while, that we can make them our own because now I’m interacting with the clothes—me living in the clothes makes the clothes what they are. It had this sort of element to it. And even that has been taken from us.

And so this notion of what else is it? And by the way, I’m open to this, besides fame and being rich so you can just consume what you want whenever you want—I honestly don’t see anything that matters that we’re told matters. I mean, I see lots of things that matter, but what are we told that matters? As far as I can see, nothing else. Nothing else. If you’re not rich and just can—and the whole point of being rich is to consume whatever you want whenever you want—then it doesn’t—there’s nothing there. There is no there there. And so even our goal, the thing we’re supposedly working towards to give everything we do meaning, is just sort of faded. Like it just is sort of not there anymore, because the goal is consumption and pointless, mindless, actionless consumption, because then we’ll be happy because we won’t have to do anything. And it’s like, no no, but you want to do things. We always want to do things. Watch kids. Some kids want to read—how was that kid? Some kids want to build forts. Some kids want to paint, finger paint—kids love finger paint. I hated finger painting. I was like, art class, oh man. Anytime we did art in school I’m like, oh, can we stop? Like why—we have books, can we do the books? But the other kids are like, books, forget books, let’s paint. Painting, best time of class, yay. And it’s like, okay great, let a thousand flowers bloom. But now we’re like, no no, let no flowers bloom. There’s no activity that is meaningful that you can do besides just pointless consumption.

And the one that I find most disturbing is there are TV shows like Family Guy, The Simpsons. And what it is is, oh, if I watch these shows that mock and satirize this, well then I’m the cool people because I know that this whole system is mocking and satirical and pointless and meaningless. Like, yay. Yay for me. And I’m like, no, that’s not that helpful. If anything that might be worse because, you know, at some level—and yet there you go, look at you, but you don’t do anything. Because what these shows also do is they mock anybody who tries to do anything. The message of these shows: there is no escape, there is no elsewhere, there is no other. Nobody ever does anything on the Enterprise. It’s the weirdest thing ever to me, the supposedly futuristic utopia where people just never do anything. It’s only when the aliens come along and create havoc that they’re like, oh, I guess we should do something. And then second the havoc is over, like, okay great, we don’t have to do anything anymore. Like, well, that’s just madness. This is not human. And that’s just the world that we’ve inherited.

And the other one I could come up with besides just make money for consumption is fame. Which I think is this weird rearticulation of the same concept, which is, well, if consuming is what is great, then I want to be consumed. I want to make myself the kind of thing that other people want to consume because there is nothing else besides consumption. So I’m going to recreate myself as a consumable. There’s a great line in a song by David Bowie—Fame is the title of the song, which is why I thought of it—and it says what you need you have to borrow. And this is the crazy thing about fame, is that even at that level, it’s not something that you produce and make yourself and bring into the world with efficacy. It’s something that you have to borrow. It’s something that is a threat to you. It’s a danger to you. It undercuts your own sense of existence because it relies on everybody else to reflect it back at you. And again, this just debilitates the humans. And of course I won’t repeat my rant against all the versions of the instant coffee Keurig makers, but like the Earl Grey tea hot in Star Trek—it makes something that should be a joy, the chop wood carry water of life, of making a nice cup of tea, boiling water, pouring the water in the pot, drinking the nice cup of tea, and we turn it into, oh, that part of it, the making it, the part that I interact with, that’s not valuable.

But what is? Again, just answer for yourself. Look around. Tell me what is the thing that’s supposed to be valuable? And if it’s consumption, well, we’re doomed. That is it, we’re—that’s just going to doom us. And so as the title suggests, the answer here, the response here, is to simply look at time usage. Look at how you spend your time, what you do, and then ask yourself, what is it I do that gives me a sense of efficacy? What do I make? What do I build? What do I create? And again, there’s an infinite number of possibilities. And some of them are self—not self-limiting—the thing itself is not the important part, it’s the structure. Because I’ve worked in the building trades for years and years sort of tangentially, and there were some craftsmen who found it incredibly fulfilling. They’re amazing craftsmen. They could do anything. It was always impressive to me. But there were other ones who had skills, great skills, but because they felt like they were always on the churn, that they’re supposed to be making money—make another house, finish a house, work in the tract home creation—they always just felt alienated. Back to the alienation of labor. They were building, they were doing, they were making, but they were doing it in a way where they’re like, ah, if I do it with less quality and I do it faster, I make more money, so I’m just going to do that. And you can see they became cynical about the whole process and about themselves. It became a poison, because again they’re making money because you’re not supposed to be worried about making. You’re supposed to be worried about doing something else, and the something else is consuming. It’s like, oh that guy over there, he got the system, he’s just using this really cheap paint, he can spray it on, he can do it in half the time, looks like crap, look how much more money he makes. He’s home early drinking and watching TV, and out here I’m working trying to roller it on by quality. Like what am I doing with my life? And they could either cheat themselves, because they knew they were doing a low-quality job, or they could do a quality job but they hated it because they felt like they were robbing themselves, because why am I working so hard when everybody else is just cutting corners and cheating?

So this is—before enlightenment chop wood carry water, after enlightenment chop wood carry water. It’s like that’s the process. The problem is it’s like, oh, there’s nothing that we can’t alienate ourselves from because we’re magic. And our society is certainly not contributing to our lack of alienation. But if you reflect on this and look at this, I would really say ask yourself what is it I make? What is it I do? What is it I build? What is it I touch? What is it that I bring in the world that gives me a sense of efficacy and meaning and value, that is—I want mine, not in the sense of ownership but mine in the sense of productivity, that I participate in it. By the way, you don’t have to do it by yourself. It could be like build a cabin with your friends, or bake a cake over your neighbor’s house, or anything like this. And it doesn’t have to be grandiose. It’s just very simple.

But that is the ultimate disorientation of our society. It’s when people ask, like, oh, give me the five-minute précis of the Socratic dialogues. And it’s like, okay, I mean, it’s okay to have précis and all that, but at some point it’s like, really, what you want to do is read them if you’re interested in philosophy. The reading of them is the philosophizing of it. It is the thing that gives it meaning. And the fact that they’re confusing and difficult, like playing a guitar, is great because this gives you the opportunity to do it. And when you’ve done it and you make it through, like some stupid book by Kant or whatever it is—if you’re interested in that kind of thing, if you’re not, absolutely don’t do it, I understand that more than I understand doing it to tell you the truth, and yet I do—but when you do finish it and you’ve taken some notes and you’ve got an idea or two and you think you might have some vague notion of what the hell that guy is talking about, you get this feeling of, oh yeah, like I did something, look at that, I actually read that stupid book. Like why did he write it? I still don’t know, but I read it. So there you go. But if you read a four-minute précis, I don’t know, do you get that same sense, or is this just a sense of wanting to appear as if you’re somebody? But again, now you’re just robbing yourself. Now you’re in alienation. Now you’re saving your time for what?

And so add up all the time-saving conveniences. Out of all the things that we have in our lives that give us the ability to liberate ourselves from mundane occupations, which are amazing—so again, I don’t want to fault them per se, but the way they’re presented to us is okay, you’re liberating yourself for what? And it’s not consumption and it’s not passive consumption of videos or whatever. That’s not what humans are for. And that’s not what’s good for them. So look around, take a moment and say, what do I make? What do I like to make? What can I make? Where is my productivity? Where is my joy in the making? What would I do when I was a kid? That kind of question. And be okay with people going, ah, your tile work looks kind of crap. Like, yeah, my tile work looks a little crap. And you know, that wall’s not entirely straight. Like, nope, that wall’s not entirely straight, you’re right. Just be ready for it. That chord wasn’t quite right. You’re like, yeah, that chord wasn’t quite right, and I don’t know if that’s how the song goes. Like, I don’t know how that song goes either. Whatever. That’s not what Kant said. And I said, you know what? If we look it up, you’re probably right, that might not be what Kant said, let’s double check that. But the flip side of accepting all that, of putting yourself out there and exposing yourself to all of that, is to be able to say, yeah, no, I did something, I made something, I feel good about that. Even if it failed, even if the cabin fell, the wood fell down and we never visited again, me and my friends, we did something. We did something out in the woods. And just that little bit of making, doing, building, interacting with the world will reorient us and make us less susceptible to being depressed and feeling overwhelmed and so forth, the modern diseases. So it’s new and it’s not subtle. The notion of consumption as a creation of identity and value is functionally just wrong, and it’s wrong for the humans. So fight back, I guess I would say. Resist that. Make something. Make something and give it to somebody. That’s maybe the most revolutionary act you can do these days. So thank you very much.