I am trying to write more this year, and as a result of that decision, I have found myself on the other side of consumption. Making things. Did I make things as a kid? I think so. I can say that my favorite mode in Minecraft is creative mode. But making things as a grown-up is super hard. I certainly take for granted the amount of effort it takes to get a matcha latte in my hand. Millions of people have to coordinate to make it happen. You don't think so? Just take one look around you and pick one item. I'll start.
As I am writing this, there is a chair made out of wood in front of me. It looks pretty standard to me, but upon closer inspection, I see that it looks like all the other chairs in the coffee shop. And none of them are discolored or wobbly. They also fit in with the rest of the coffee shop's aesthetic. That means that the coffee shop's head of chairs put so much effort into picking the right supplier for the chair, going to the designer to get it just right, or coordinating the supply chain themselves to make it less wobbly. This is not an easy problem.
Then we go one level deeper: how are chairs made so well? Well, you need to make sure that the wood is high quality and the process of making those chairs is repeatable. You need to make sure that the sourcing of the wood is good too. So the chair person at the coffee shop was not the only person putting in a lot of effort. From the person sourcing the wood to the person making the chairs and the person sitting on them to test them out, everyone had to put in a lot of effort. The designer of the chair also had to put in a lot of effort. I challenge you to wake up, open a CAD program, and design a chair that is not uncomfortable to sit on. As a professional sitter, I can say that you can get a chair very, very wrong. You can get a lot of things wrong just getting a chair into a coffee shop.
That was just a thought experiment with one object in front of me. If you play this out for your phone, a car, or a GPU, we will be here all day. What I am trying to say is that we are surrounded by things that people just like you and me put a crazy amount of effort into getting right. So much effort that making them looks easy to us. You might think, "Yeah, it's a chair. How hard can it be?" It's very hard. "It's a website. How hard can it be?" It's pretty hard. Unfortunately, we don't talk about this enough: everything around us feels easy because it was very hard to do. It feels easy for us to consume these things and make them part of our lives.
So when you are on the other side of the equation and you make things for the first time in your life, you are hit with the shockwave of how hard things are to make. So why do any of it? I think most people don't need to think about this. It's a feature that things are easy to use in our world. We want more people to use them. It's easy to use TikTok because it's designed this way. So this was all intentional. But for people who want to make things, what's the motivation behind that? I am not sure about this. This is a way for me to question my motivations for the products that I am making right now. Why make something instead of being the consumer?
I will give a few reasons that I have become aware of, but this is not the whole set. Disgust is one of the things that could be very motivating. If you have a slow internet connection and you imagine a future where the internet is not slow, disgust at the present conditions will move you to make things better. Notoriety could be another. You might want to be known as the person who created an electric car that did not have bad range. Pure passion for creation. I am not entirely sure about this one, but I have seen some people take up the mantle of builders. To them, building is everything, and making things is important. Take any musician, entrepreneur, or scientist, and you will find a mix of these motivations.
So what makes me tick when it comes to building rather than consuming? A similar mix of being able to show the world what I can do, a lack of satisfaction with the current way things are made, and a passion for creation. Deep down, I want to be in Minecraft creative mode all the time. I want to make things so good that someone using them will look at them and scoff: "That looks easy." Because that's the whole point. That was the feature.