Make Touch / Why We Make

Worse, Dearer, Slower: The Honest Case for Making Anyway

Most handmade things lose to their manufactured equivalents on every measurable count, and that is fine.

Here is the comparison nobody wants to run. Take the thing you spent three weekends on and put it beside the shop version. The shop version is probably straighter. Its finish is more even. Its dimensions are consistent to a degree you would need years of practice and better light to match. And it cost less than the materials you bought, let alone the time. If making by hand had to justify itself on the basis of product quality or economy, it would have lost that argument decades ago and there would be nothing left to write about.

The case for making does not rest there, and it is weaker every time somebody pretends it does. Handmade goods are not morally superior. A factory that produces excellent objects at a price ordinary people can afford is doing something genuinely valuable, and the people working in it are skilled. Treating manufactured things as spiritually inferior is both wrong and a bit insulting. The distinction is not virtue. It is that one of these objects was an experience for you and the other was a transaction, and experiences and transactions are simply different categories of thing.

So the honest framing is this: you are buying an experience, and the object is what the experience leaves behind. Once you accept that, a lot of anxiety falls away. You stop apologising for the price of good material, because material is the cost of the afternoon. You stop measuring your work against production standards it was never trying to meet. And you stop needing the thing to be useful in order to justify having made it, which is liberating, because a surprising amount of what gets made is not useful and was never really meant to be.