Bearly a diary

On creating digitally versus creating manually

For the purpose of this essay, I want to define the two:

By “creating digitally”, I mean any method through which one may craft an artifact or a product that exists in a digital format, such as a video file, image file, audio file, text file, website, program, etc.

By “creating manually”, I mean any method through which one may craft an artifact or a product that exists in a physical format (that isn’t a container for a digital artifact or product, such as a CD or DVD), such as a hand-written letter, a painting or drawing, a sculpture made from any material, a piece of clothing, or even food (such as a cake, or any other creation that follows a recipe).

Clear?

Good.

Regrets

I often bemoan to myself that my father didn’t teach me his craft.

According to what little he has told me about his childhood, in his early teens, he began working in construction, either with his father and/or other people.

When I was old enough to be self-aware, I also immediately noticed that he could pretty much do anything: from brick laying, to tiling, to roofing, to plastering, to painting, to even being able to do some plumbing and electric work, and much more. I’ve seen him erect buildings practically by himself, from scratch.

He’s self-taught, which baffles me. He never explained to me how he learned to do all these things (and honestly, I never had the courage to ask). He did drag me around his many “projects”, but I never even noticed that he was “practicing” any of his skills. He seemed to me to always have had them.

That can’t be true though... can it? He must have learned at some point how to do all of those things. He must have done them poorly at first. He must have messed up properly aligning some bricks, or tiles. He must have failed to mix the cement properly at least once. Whatever! Someone must have gotten mad at him for it at some point, right?

If so, then all of that likely happened before I was five years old, because I can’t remember ever hearing about one single unsatisfied costumer.

Side note: It doesn’t hurt that my father has this mentality that he’ll do everything to please the client (that’s to say, not a single member in our family has ever received as much respect from him as he has given to any of them).

However, I have to acknowledge that my father is a master at his craft. Even at age sixty, he has not gotten any worse. Quite to the contrary. Whatever his hands touch, turns to luxury. He’s just that skilled.

Regretfully, he never cared to pass his craft on to me. He is very skilled with his hands, and maybe also on a mathematical level with his mind (all of my three siblings studied in math-related fields for some reason), but he’s... not acing it (let’s put at that way) at pretty much anything else, especially anything that has to do with interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligence. That’s to say, even if he would have liked to teach me, he wouldn’t have been a good teacher. That’s not his gift.

Also regretfully, when I was a teenager, I was a brat. I’m still a brat, though slightly less so. Back then, I never cared to learn. I never cared to ask him to teach me. I never even thought about the future. It never occurred to me that in order to be able to work, earn my wages, provide for myself, and survive, I would need to develop some kind of skill, sooner rather than later.

Side note: My parents subtly-not-so-subtly warned me all my life that I needed to get a college degree for this exact reason, but I obviously didn’t listen to them. I’m their oldest child, and the only one without any higher education or a career to speak of.

Yes. I’m also their greatest disappointment.

At age 36, I now look back and wonder how different my life could have been if I had taken on the same trade that my father did.

Sure, I’ve worked with (for) him many times as a teenager and in my early 20s (he forced me to, because he needed the extra hands ASAP and he didn’t have to pay me), and I hated every minute of it because (as the whole family would acknowledge) he transforms into a bit of a nasty person when he’s working (which is an understatement), but I know that part of it is because the business of construction, especially when one is self-employed like my father is, can be a very stressful environment.

However, consider all the upsides of my father’s profession and employment status:

I also can’t help but think how much more fulfilled I’d feel in life if I had built something with my bare hands. There are cities in my country that are littered with his projects, small and big. He could drive you around them and never run out of buildings to point at.

Ironically though, my parents also told me all my life that I was meant to not have to work with my hands... because that would have been “beneath me” for some reason. They also often told me that I could [citation needed] make more money working in a cozy office, and earn more respect from people.

That’s gotta be some baby boomer/gen X sort of myth. I mean, sure, for some odd reason, society looks down on the people that build the comfortable homes they live in, which is such a backwards way of thinking that it hurts my brain, but where did my parents get the idea that anyone is guaranteed to make more money sitting in front of a computer from 9 to 5?

Now, I will say this: I don’t know anyone else like my father. I know other very skilled men who do other such construction work, but they are skilled in only one discipline, such as tiling or painting. My father is a one-man construction company. That’s rare. He’s also worked for so long and is so skilled, that he has a large clientele, networked with nothing but word-of-mouth, that guarantees that he’ll always be busy. He can also pretty much name whatever price (I think). Even if I did become as skilled as him at all of these arts, there’s no guarantee that I’d be able to take on as many jobs or earn as much money.

Still, I can’t help but feel that if I was as skilled as he is at construction, I’d certainly at least not be the complete fool of a useless bum that I am.

That’s just my father’s craft though. I could have learned to do just about anything else useful “with my hands” at a trade school, but that also never occurred to me until it was too late.

Digital daydreaming

It gets worse.

At around the age of 13, my parents bought me my first desktop computer, thinking that I “needed it for school” (I didn’t). It’s crazy to me how fast I got into the online world through it, and all the way back in 2003 nonetheless. It didn’t take more than a couple months before I was fully immersed in online forums, chat rooms, and blogging.

I also began to dab with text and image editors, as well as HTML and CSS, and immediately started imagining how much less boring my life could be if I could somehow make money working not with my “hands”, nor with my “brain” (mathematically speaking), but with “creativity” (although, fingers are necessary for that).

I’m not kidding you. I’ve tried to be an “influencer” all the way back in 2004, before me or anyone else had ever heard that term. I wrote entire books, both fiction and non-fiction, that I never published. I was grinding hard to get attention on places like Blogger and DeviantArt, and later Tumblr, or YouTube. In fact, I was there before Instagram got bought up by Facebook. I had great aspirations from earning my wages through “content creation” before I knew that was even an industry.

I started thousands of projects.

You name it, I probably tried it.

How many of them succeeded, you ask?

None.

No website, no blog, no e-books, no drawings, no videos. Nothing I ever “created digitally” translated into a product, a service, a business, or a career. I very often made a fool out of myself for sure (case in point), but I never made any money.

Still, all these years, I just could not stop chasing that dream. I so desperately wanted to...

It may be that I never succeeded because I always got too discouraged too quickly and never stuck to any project for long enough for it to go anywhere, mostly because I was never satisfied with my output. I wanted it to be “perfect” from the get go, like my father’s work seemed to be, but that’s obviously not possible.

Also, when someone has failed as often as I have, I think you begin to wonder if it isn’t maybe fate (not that I believe in that in any meaningful way) that is preventing you from achieving your goal. Some of my projects had promise and potential, and I stuck with them for longer, but they still didn’t get off the ground.

On top of that, even if through all that experience I’ve become a jack of all trades, I’m still the proverbial master of none. I have no value to offer to anyone online. Since I also don’t have any credentials in any field (which, by the way, I’m a thrice college dropout, but that’s a story for another time), it would be very unwise for me to pose as an “expert” of any kind on the Internet.

You may be wondering about this project.

I’m tentatively treating it was a repository for my thoughts, because I constantly feel that I need to let them out, or else my mind, like when steam builds up pressure inside a boiler, will explode. I don’t want to treat this blog as another project, because I feel that the likelihood of me giving up on it later will be that much greater.

The dilemma

Back in late 2023 (and I may write about this someday), I made a resolution to fully delete my Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok accounts.

That was the best decision of my life so far.

However, I think that it had an unintended effect:

Over the years that have followed, I began to really just... dislike the Internet (another understatement). With the exception of platforms like this one, that’s truly how I feel now.

I’m still “chronically online”, I think. I mean, I consume a lot of YouTube (though that’s the only such platform). I still hang out on Discord (though that’s rare). I’m still on Bear Blog (I was a lot on here last year, and then went on an unplanned half-year hiatus). However, I’m still far less online that I have ever been in my life since I got my first computer. Some days, believe it or not, I don’t boot up my M1 Mac Mini at all.

With my changing habits, my tastes and interests have also begun to morph.

For one, the Internet has become a hellhole of vitriolic and pointless debating. This space used to be a lot more simple and fun when I was young. That’s to say that I’m tired of the online culture wars and want to have nothing to do with them, especially because they now also carry real-life consequences. I’m honestly afraid that if I publicly engage in wrongthink, I may end up imprisoned or worse. Even getting back into Bear, I have been repeatedly telling myself to be careful with what I write or share, so no one gets too upset at me.

Most of all, I have given up on creating digitally... 99%, maybe. There’s always that little voice in my head that tries to pull me back into those daydreams, and tries to convince me to give it another try, but I have mostly been able to resist it.

One way that I’ve been able to do that is to repeat to myself that I don’t want to create digitally anymore. I’m just not interested in that. Sure, I’m saying that on my blog, but I’m talking about making money. I don’t want to chase that fever dream. I don’t want to compete with hundreds of millions of other creators. I don’t want my “career” to be a digital one. I don’t want to chase algorithms or trends. I also don’t want to become known or famous anymore (I wouldn’t feel safe enough for that in today’s societal environment).

Conversely, the older I grow, the more I want to create manually, that is, with my hands. I feel more and more that I’d like to have some kind of business, maybe working in construction like my dad, maybe running a little bakery or pastry shop. Anything that I could do with. My. Hands.

I have experienced over these last few years, that I feel the happiest and most fulfilled, if at least half of my active work during the day is spent doing something with my hands. Becoming a stay-at-home-husband, as I mentioned in my previous essay, has only served to reinforce this idea in my mind. I’m very happy to do all the chores and run all the errands, because I do them with my hands and I can see the results of my work and my effort right away. They feel, for lack of a better word, tangible, in a way that the greatest YouTube video that I could create never would.

However, how is a 36-year-old Portuguese, living in Latvia, with no education or skills to speak of, who is now staying at home full time to help his wife get through residency, going to learn a “trade” and also somehow turn it into a profitable business?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m not trying to get rich. Honestly, if I could run my own pastry shop and just pay myself, not even a full wage out of the profit, that would be more than enough for me. My wife and I don’t need more. (Though, maybe even that isn’t realistic in this current economic climate. I don’t know.)

What I want more than anything is just to work with my hands, feel that I’m creating something tangible, not have my income involve me sitting in front of a computer for eight hours a day, and most important of all: Be. My. Own. Boss.

Am I the only one?

Is this even possible in [current year] in [wherever you live]?

Especially for someone as uneducated and unskilled as me?

I wouldn’t even know where to start.

Without capital? Without means?

Anyway, I don’t know how to finish this essay, so I’ll pass this question on to you:

In terms of how you make your income, what do you prefer? Digital creation or manual creation? Why? What’s your story?

#essays