From Code to Carpentry

In a world plagued by burnouts and depression, I’ve found solace in working with my hands. This is a story of how I built a small play house for my kids and how I (re) learned invaluable lessons after a month of hard, manual work. At the end of 2020, after 9 years of intense startup life, I quit the company I had helped cofound. My dad had passed away, COVID had hit the world, and I needed to do something new. The company no longer needed me and after some reflection, I decided to leave. I only took one month off between that and the next thing, which turned out to be a mistake. I should’ve taken a longer time. But hey, it was meant to be, right?

For that month I decided, nudged by my wife, to build a club house for my kids. I had volunteered building houses in university, so I embarked on a mission to design and build a 3 by 2 meters elevated hut by myself.

I doodled a basic design, calculated how much wood and material I needed, went to the store, and started to work. The experience was amazing. I was hammering all day, cutting wood, calculating things, and seeing the house take shape, little by little. I made lots of mistakes, my memories weren’t so fresh, but nothing critical or unfixable. I had to buy more wood, more tools, more nails, and I got so physically tired it hurt.

The final result was not a masterpiece, I made some mistakes, but it looked great on the outside and the kids loved it. After finishing it, we made a fire, ate some marshmallows, and spent the night in the house.

I hadn’t felt so rested, so at peace, in a long time. I was so proud of what I had done that I didn’t feel tired at all, despite being physically exhausted. The concreteness, the physicality of the house was a stark contrast to the previous 9 years of life building a fintech startup.

It’s not like I didn’t have fun or wasn’t challenged working on a startup. Building a startup is hard, but fun (if you’re that kind of person). NVDIA’s founder and CEO recently said he wouldn’t start the company if he could do it all over again, moments later he said he’s still enjoying it. I’ve felt that, I feel that every day now with Koywe. But building a house is different, it challenges you in more physical and more concrete ways. You can touch what you’re building, no abstract numbers or metrics, a physical thing that could host my kids’ play or even us for a night!

Most people work on abstract things most of the time. I am one of those people. I stare at a computer screen for longer than I look at my wife or kids, I type more words into a machine than I speak out loud, I even “talk” to machines when I write code! And with hybrid work I don’t even need to commute to work. I believe we have lost something with that. Our brains haven’t had enough time to adapt to modern times, and thus we get frustrated, burnt out, and depressed. Our grandparents and ancestors dreamed of times of abundance and leisure, with more free time and more freedom thanks to automations, and yet we have less time and are less free, specially if you’re poor or live in developing countries.

There’s a way to cope with that: work on something with your hands! Yes, not everyone has a month to build a house for their kids, I don’t have that time now, nor everyone can just quit and get a more concrete job. But you can find hobbies or activities that require the use of your hands! Baking bread, cooking, fixing the house, exercising, going for walks are all things you can make time for. You can find a young child and play with them, everything will be concrete and physical and afterwards you will be tired, but happier.

Barry López, an American writer, has some very good advice “on the Cure for Our Existential Loneliness and the Three Tenets of a Full Life”. He writes about how getting to know a place, a physical and natural place, helps us find our place in the world. “Intimacy with the physical Earth apparently awakens in us, at some wordless level, a primal knowledge of the nature of our emotional as well as our biological attachments to physical landscapes.” Connect with the physical places you live in, go for walks, discover the things around you, and again, ideally with kids who are always discovering things.

I fully agree with Barry, but to me that’s just the starting point. If we’re not creating or shaping something real or concrete, we won’t ever be truly happy. Behavioral economists have a term called the IKEA effect. The concept refers to the increased value and affection people have for products they have partially created or assembled themselves, compared to identical or similar products produced by others. This cognitive bias highlights a sense of accomplishment and personal connection, enhancing the perceived value and emotional attachment to the self-made products. It also implies that when people invest effort into a task, they are likely to value the outcome more highly. To illustrate it, if I were to sell the house I made I would ask a much higher price than the one I would pay for a similar house built by someone else.

That month of building reminded me of feelings I had almost forgotten, it helped me reconnect with myself and energized me like nothing else could in a long time. I re-learned an ancient lesson: Connecting with our physical spaces gives us a sense of self, working with our hands gives us satisfaction, we learn new things, and we feel better.

Try it out, build something with your hands, cook, lift weights, play with a kid, or just take a walk around the neighborhood trying to get to know it, really know it. You might find yourself… and then some more.