I don’t remember where I read it, but the quote goes something like this: “Anyone could go to their local fish market and buy fish far healthier and tastier than they could catch themselves. Some people just like fishing.”
In an increasingly globalised world, almost anything can be outsourced, and yet, we still have a drive to ‘do things ourselves.’ Why grow a beautiful floral garden when you can buy a bunch of flowers for $30/wk? Why make your own sauerkraut or jam when you can buy it from the supermarket for $10/jar? Why paint your own pictures when you can easily purchase one from a professional on Etsy or Bluethumb for less than $50 (or Kmart or Ikea for even less)? Why clean your own house when you can pay someone $60 to do it for you in an hour while you go out to have breakfast?
To pretend there’s a single reason for these decisions attempts to falsely reduce the complexity of how humans work. There can, and will be, many reasons for why anyone does anything ‘less efficiently’. Maybe they enjoy steep learning curves? I do. Maybe they enjoy the multi-sensory process that comes with tending a garden, or squashing some sauerkraut? I do. Maybe it’s something to do with manufacturing some periods in our day that allow the brain to make more lateral connections, those ‘mindless repetitive tasks’. I do that too. And maybe cleaning one’s own mess is a moral reminder that we are not perfect, that we consume, destroy, and leave things behind in our wake. Or that the process of de-cluttering is also meditative in its own way. I am constantly reminded about this when I spend Saturday morning cleaning the house or my studio.
One might say, “but imagine how many more books or drawings you could produce if you outsourced some of the mundane work, or focussed on just one thing instead of being occupied by so many other things.” Or, as I’ve heard said before, “adding one brick at a time to 7 different houses will only leave you with 7 half-built houses.”
In the end, it comes down to how we measure success. Is it by what we achieve – number of books, number of friends, amount of money? Or is it more about who we become? It’s difficult to shoot for the latter when you can’t quantitatively measure things like kindness, patience, & compassion. But, it seems to me, that sometimes the more difficult way may be the more valuable one.