DIY

24 june

Why is it so satisfying to do stuff on your own? 

Today I expend few hours reshaping a tool, which I need to open a diving regulator and service it. I believe the act was perhaps half an hour, but me being not a tool maker, I had to figure out lots of stuff, like where to buy the tool that I needed to modify, check which ways of modifying might or might not work, check that the tools that I actually have are enough to modify the new one… etcetera etcetera. Considering my income per hour, this was a grandiose waste of money. I have not yet open the thing, I just made a tool that will help me open it. Once opened I have to clean it following a specific procedure, with ultrasound and acid, then replace parts inside and then reassemble it.  I suppose I will be busy quite some hours more. If I would have given the regulator to a professional, she would have expend like one hour and probably charged me like 100 euros. All in all, before taxes, I could earn about 5 times that in the time I believe I’ll be busy. As I said, a grandiose waste of money. 

And I loved it. 

Later on, I was wondering why is that. Few years ago there was a rebirth of TV shows on people fixing things. Some were comedy, some were the real deal. Of course, there is the well known nostalgia for a world that never was, those idealized decades after the war where men were real men, and (among many other manly things that they did) fixed everything that needed to be fixed, with their bare hands, a smile, and few or no words. And a muscular jaw plus a faraway look, of course. And yet. That silly nostalgia, that explain quite some of the political nonsense of our days, does not quite explain the real pleasure in doing things on your own. 

One of my best friends studied history, and after a succession of unhappy jobs, he finally discover himself as a maker of stained glass. For some years now he runs a workshop capable of making, never mind that he is my friend and I am saying it, very beautiful things. But their prettiness is not the whole deal. When he started, the satisfaction of making those things himself, that was what clinched the deal. And of course, with time, the quality that he managed to achieve. But why did it matter so much for him to be making things?   

The industrial revolution, in principle, took away from us that making stuff thing. After a little while it became pretty obvious that a assembly line can make pretty much everything, and sell it for little money, at a profit. But also, the standardization that makes industry possible, allow us to make stuff again. Is like the motor of a VW beetle, my first car. With a 10 mm wrench, you can disassembly it completely, as I did many times. Steinbeck has a very nice passage in “Cannery row” where he explains that the interchangeability of pieces of Ford T changed the psiquis of the NorthAmerican for ever, and I believe him. So meanwhile the industrial revolution took agency from us, it also gave it back, at least some of it. 

But it might be that nowadays there is too precious little of it left. There is no way in heaven that I can put apart and then reassemble the motor of a Tesla, even if I would have all the tools needed. My wife tells me that to open an Iphone to change its batteries, you need to buy a special screwdriver.  Maybe because we know that we are less and less capable, paradoxically enough in the same measure that we have nicer and nicer toys to play with, maybe is that knowledge what makes us appreciate the little DIY that there is still left to us. We know that even that little is becoming less. In some countries, me having serviced my own diving regulator will make my claim to insurance in case of a diving accident complicated or impossible. We wanted to minimize risks and we ended up reducing our own agency. 

Perhaps we should roll that back. At least some.