Meaning in a Throwaway World or The Swollen Thumb of Progess

I want to be less dependent on the world. I want to leave the HAP (Hire a Pro) world and fix and maintain the things around me. I want my possessions to be an extension of me. What better way to create a legacy or at least voice to everyone who you truly are than to define, create or modify the things in life to reflect your personality and meet your needs and desires?

The DIY bug has floated in my brain for years. I have constantly thought about my upbringing and what we used to do when I was kid. My grandparents were agricultural people and their world consisted on self reliance, recycling before it was a movement, and self taught skill. We used to feed ourselves off the bounty of our gardens, from the output of our chickens and trades of goods and produce or services with other farmers. Our fences stayed mended with limited trips to a hardware store or lawn tools contained a wide array of manual implements and the power tools had a hacked or rigged aftermarket addition to get the performance levels we needed.

Somewhere in the decade that I received Pong which morphed into the Atari 2600 and then Intellivision things took a slow change. My duties as my father’s remote control for the television ended. We survived the Beta vs. VCR debate and like so many of you opted for the woefully lesser VCR. Dinners were no longer an hour ordeal of preparation because the microwave appeared and HBO was starting to creep into all of our lives. The change slowly made the nights of shucking corn with three generations of my family involved… disappear. The kitchen that was filled with the whistles and humidity of canning vegetables vanished. I never again crossed the railroad tracks and climbed two fences with a load of my grandmothers strawberry jam and peach preserves to rouse Old Mrs. Davis to barter for a couple of jars of her honey. It is this decade that I failed to teach myself the things my grandparents knew and my parents were on the road of forgetting.

Can I go back in time? Yes. Can I learn these skills that just a couple of decades ago thrived but have slowly disappeared? Yes. Can I use diversion tools like the internet to do this? Yes. Will it happen quickly? No, and I am increasingly happy for that truth.

Mark Frauenfelder is a self taught writer and illustrator who created the popular Boing Boing blog. He has written for numerous magazines and is the current editor in chief of Make magazine. Just a few weeks ago I heard him on NPR discussing the DIY ethic and its current growth in America. He was on to pitch his book, Made by Hand: Searching for Meaning in a Throwaway World. I was hooked to his interview because unlike a lot of the gurus of the DIY world he wasn’t there with a green agenda or to damn anyone for over consuming and being headed down the path of hoarding. He was talking about his own transformation from dreamer to doer and the path he took is readily available to any of us. There was no stepped program and his agenda seemed only to get us dreamers over the hurdle of the fear of failing. He quite easily points out the importance of failure as a way to learning.

In the book he tells us how to bring on the courage to try things, how he moved his family to a remote paradise in the South Pacific, how he returned to the grind and started creating his paradise, grow his own food, hack his creature comforts, raise chickens, beekeeping, made his own string instruments and even visit some easy fermenting processes. He is not a fanatic though. At no point does he preach against anyone’s way of life. He does however demonstrate the reward of all the above while keeping his feet firmly planted in a world of the majority. The book is self help without pretending to be. It is social commentary without hoping to be, it is as close to a must read as anything I have encountered. Mark delivers an almost diary like view into whims and necessity addressed and met in a rewarding manner by just trying. Most appealing not every project in the book is a total success, yet they become successful through the learning process. Some of the projects are ongoing and final outcome has yet to present a measure, but overall it tells us the rugged individualism of the past can make a comeback. Buy the book even if you are not interested in DIY it cracks open some of the mysteries of why life can remain empty with so many diversions available to us all.

Me? I was on the track before the book. I know nothing about kitchen remodels other than they are expensive and I needed one. I am 85% through it and pleased and instead of cussing a swollen thumb obtained in the process I see it as a badge of honor. My bathroom gets tackled next. My food garden is being planned and my list of wants has changed to my list of modifications. Mark’s book served as the manifesto I needed and fear and doubt I now reserve for the government.