TV Stand, circa 2008

In shop class in 2008 I built a TV stand.

I built a few things that year, but the TV stand was the capstone. It probably scored a C, maybe a B-, if our shop teacher was feeling generous.

It looked nice… from far away. There were weird joints and cuts that were measured twice but should have been measured a third time. There were little dents from dropping a piece of wood and not wanting to start over.

Building that TV stand probably took me the better portion of the semester. The next year when I moved away to go to college, that stand and my 26″ tube TV took up most of the limited space I had in the trunk of my car, but it wasn’t staying at my mom’s house.

College came and went, and I lost track of that TV stand. Eventually I got into a career (not in carpentry), and by mid 2024, I was doing pretty well at it. That came from years of learning and experience, but also a part of that was my new copilot.

Responding to an irate customer? Copy paste my go-to prompt.

Tough email to write? Get Claude to help me sound less unhinged.

Not having any luck writing ad copy? Get AI to give me some ideas.

What am I making for dinner tonight? Ask goddamn ChatGPT.

During my extremely-AI era, I took a trip back to Canada for some remote work, catching up, a few weddings, and a funeral.

An old roommate and I got lunch. We had a few laughs, talked about the dumb shit we’d done in our 20’s, sobriety, the future.

Jason had moved a few times since we’d lived together, but he told me about a TV stand he’d kept from our old flat. After lunch, the memories came back; sawdust, tape measures, table saws, and a bunch of 17-year-old kids joking about wood. I remembered going to the hardware store after class to pick out matching knobs, hinges, and handles for this fantastic thing I was making.

My take-home project for this trip to Canada was an app design. The next day, over coffee in a hip little cafe, I fired up my browser, checked my emails, and before I’d even thought about how I was going to start, I opened up a new tab with ChatGPT.

Seeing the parallel, reader?

It would be a lie to tell you that I connected the ideas right there, and I had an epiphany about the joy of craft and how I was outsourcing my thinking to a large language model.

While we’re drawing parallels, another lie I could tell: I realised that because of my effort, my TV stand was somehow superior to a flat-pack Bestå from IKEA. In character, sure, but in quality? Likely not.

What I can honestly tell you is that I caught myself. I closed that tab, closed my laptop, and got out my notebook to start sketching ideas instead.

It was a slow transition, but in the coming months I recognised the path I had started down. Bit by bit, I saw how I had been spending my mental effort explaining the task at hand to an AI, instead of solving the task at hand. Not only did discovering solutions myself make me more proud and satisfied with my work, but I started to see how bland some of the work I had done was.

That’s not to say I went cold turkey either, a part of the process has been finding out how to mindfully integrate AI into my workflow. After all, I wouldn’t have even made a piece of furniture without a little hand holding and troubleshooting from my shop teacher.

When Jason got home from our lunch, he sent me a picture. The door had fallen off and one of the railings had unglued and bent. I remembered how the drawer had stopped closing before I’d moved out. None of that came as a surprise; it was very poorly made.

It was pretty junky looking, but when I showed the picture to my girlfriend I felt proud. I had cut every part of that amalgamation of wood myself. For a few months, that labour was a part of my life. It wasn’t perfect but I got to sweat and swear over it, I fucking made it.

This isn’t about how the Bestå has no place in this world. It’s about how I’m relearning that it’s more satisfying to measure, cut, sand, fuck up, remeasure, recut, resand and stain your own thing than it is to build IKEA furniture.

… and how happy I am that Jason is still using that shit TV stand.

Recommended reading:

Why are so many of us letting AI have all the fun? (The Cut)

Choosing Friction (Jenny Zhang)

Header photo by Khashayar Kouchpeydeh on Unsplash.