The Builder's High

"This is a reminder not to let a digital world full of others’ moments deceive you into devaluing your own. Their moments are infinite – yours are finite and precious."

For some time now, I've been spending the majority of my day jumping between Reddit, HN, and YouTube. Any time that I'm not on the computer, from the time I wake up to the time I go to bed (with a few exceptions), I'm listening to podcasts. Basically never idle, and rarely truly living my life - just endlessly consuming information in an attempt to fill the void.

I used to be a builder, living the high described in the post almost every day, but I've lost it somewhere along the way.

Something I hope to change. This post was a big kick in the pants for me.

Decided to write a bot at 8pm. Had it done by 3am (scraping, posting, scheduling, and all). https://twitter.com/NEWS_XX14

I know that high well. For me, especially for short projects (a day or a week), it's a giddiness, a literal shaking with excitement. Now I wish I could maintain that for a year long project.

And we’re slowly and deviously being trained to forget this.

Good article, yet the author seems to be making the same mistake so many make - to assume that our present generations are being eroded away and forgetting how to be productive because the masses are hypnotized by social media and news on demand.

If you stop for a minute and look at what's being spread via social media and TV/Internet news, you quickly realize it's the exact same things that hunter-gatherers probably spend 99% of their downtime gossiping about too: this person said that thing; this guy slept with that girl; this guy has so many resources and isn't that so unfair to the rest of us; the guys in charge of tribal society have secretly been spying on all of us, isn't that scary... social media and online news isn't changing anything more than the mediums we gossip through and making said gossip more permanent and apparent and less ephemeral and transitory than it's previously been. But just because it's still there doesn't mean people are spending much time obsessing over the gossips of yesterday; just like those in tribal societies, the news of yesterday is quickly forgotten, and soon supplanted by the urgent, pressing news of TODAY.

I'm pretty sure in Archimedes's or Newton's days most people weren't sitting around removed from society on their parents' farms inventing calculus, or holed up in towers devising calculating machines and giant ship incendiary weapons... rather, they were going to the county dance, swilling home-brewed beer with the neighbors, and gossiping about the same things we gossip about today: wasn't it scandalous how Ellyn was behaving with the men at the dance? Isn't it a crime how much the poor are taxed by the local lord, while he lives in luxury? How unfair it is that the law applies so unevenly between peasant and lord! Can you believe that Brom and Beatrix are fighting again?

Despite the very long period of leisure that medieval peasants had during wintertime, not a whole lot of scientific or technological progress came out of the peasantry. While I agree there's little more satisfying than building something yourself, I'd differ with the article in suggesting that the masses of people today are in fact no different than the masses of people of times past - a minority produces new things, while the majority handles the day-to-day of maintaining what we've already got, and spends its leisure time consuming the output of those producers who've successfully managed to produce things others want and/or things useful to those others.

[citation needed]

Just built a side table out of white oak.

I suspect (like myself) many, many people are interested in the idea of setting aside time in their lives to spend creating, whether it's writing, cooking, building, crafting, photography, whatever.

I also think that (like myself) many people, especially in the age of the internet, blogs, twitter, facebook, etc, are essentially stopped in their tracks before they start, by a fear of (for lack of a better word) "publishing".

I wonder if we would be freed from our fear if we agree with ourselves to create, but without publishing. Write 500 or 1000 words per day, but don't publish it to your blog. Take a photo every day but don't post it to instagram.

The enemy of creativity is the inner censor ... and I wonder how many of us just need to be reminded that it's ok (indeed, arguably better) to create for nobody but ourselves.

(at least for the first 10,000 hours)

Something he doesn't address is the ennui of post-completion blues. I've suffered it for significant duration many times as an engineer and am in the middle of one now, primarily spending my time in other people's moments like right now. He provides the solution though; whether or not I feel like it it's time to start building the next thing. Thankfully I buffered a list when enthusiasm ran high. :-)

I'd like to change that this year. When he posed the question "What was the last thing you built that gave you that Builder's High?", I sure as hell couldn't remember much that I've built recently that gave me that feeling.