Make So You Can Be Happy

We learn this in earlier. For most of us, school is something forced upon you, while summer vacation is free. So you grow up assuming that work is an unnatural state, and that the ideal life would be one continuous vacation: a state where you have nothing you have to do, and can spend all your time being entertained.

When we finally get that kind of freedom, though, it rarely works out the way we expected. you get a whole month of nothing to do and spend it watching, scrolling, playing, one screen at a time. It feels like rest while it is happening. But by the end we are not refreshed. we’re foggy and restless.

The reason is that most of us aren’t really designed to be passive consumers. What actually makes us happy, or at least the kind that lasts, is making things.

Why does making things feel so different from consuming them?

Part of the reason is that making forces you to encounter reality. When you consume something, you are a passive observer. You can criticize a product or disagree with a proposal without having to solve any of the problems the creator had to solve. It’s very easy to feel clever when you’re just a spectator (sport fans howdy?).

The instant you try to make something yourself, all of that changes. If you write a program, the compiler doesn’t care about your good intentions; either it compiles or it doesn’t. If you try to build a table, the wood doesn’t care that you had a great vision; either the legs are even or the table wobbles.

That friction is uncomfortable at first, which is why we avoid it. But it is also where the satisfaction comes from. When you finish something, even a very small program or refurbish something in your house that doesn’t work before, you have altered reality in some tiny way. There is now an object in the world that didn’t exist before you sat down to work. That provides a kind of proof of your own existence that consumption can never give you.

Another reason we don’t make more things is that we think what we make has to be important.

We assume that if you’re going to cook, you have to cook something glamorous, and if you’re going to code, you have to start a startup. But that’s a trap. If you set the bar that high, starting takes so much effort that you end up doing nothing at all. You get paralyzed by the distance between your taste and your ability.

Most good work actually starts out as something small and seemingly frivolous. When programmers build great things, they usually start with something small and personal: writing a script to automate something annoying, or building a silly toy just to see if it works. The goal shouldn’t be to build something impressive to others, but simply to bring something into existence that you find neat.

You can see this clearly in our younger selves. A child with a pile of bottle caps doesn’t worry about whether the little car he’s making will ever become a real vehicle. He just enjoys lining them up, pushing them around, and watching his little creation take shape. Adults lose that, and then wonder why we feel restless.

There is also a social dimension to this. When you are purely a consumer, you are dependent on the world to entertain you. If the world is boring or irritating, you are at its mercy.

Makers are much less vulnerable. If you know how to build things, you are never really bored, because you always have a project you’re turning over in your mind. While waiting for a train or standing in line, a consumer is looking for a screen to distract them, while a maker is often daydreaming about how to fix a bug or arrange the ikea table.

In that sense, making things is an antidote to helplessness. Much of “modern” unhappiness comes from feeling that we have no control over our circumstances: that the world is a giant, complicated machine run by people far away, and that nothing we do matters. Making things on a human scale reminds us that we are not just a passenger.

If you feel unhappy and don’t know why, try looking at the ratio of what you’ve consumed to what you’ve produced over the last month. For most of us who feel a lingering sense of malaise, the ratio is almost entirely tilted toward consumption.

You don’t need to quit your job or start a company to fix this. You just need to make something. It can be anything, so long as it is yours: Try to recreate something you use every day instead of buying another version of it, fix something broken in your house, write a program that does one small useful task, or Rearrange your room until something about it just feels right.

The important thing is going from someone who sits back and waits to be amused, to someone who leans forward and shapes the world. If you want to be happy, make something.