It may seem like knowledge workers favor outsourcing all menial tasks to give them time to make more money, but my unpopular opinion is that things like actually going into a grocery store to shop, ironing your own clothes, cooking and cleaning aren’t things to always automate or outsource.
These tasks keep you in touch with being human, allow mental space for that curious type of reflection that happens when your body is doing something drudging that you don’t really need to think about closely, and even sometimes come with learning opportunities.
In the past few months I’ve had to move in, unmount a large TV, move it and mount it on a wall again, fill a lot of holes in apartment walls, and paint them over again. What do all these things have in common? Nothing, except that I did them without hiring professional help.
As I stood in Home Depot one day and took the sights and smells in, I realized I love the challenge of doing things myself and having to figure it out. It’s always a learning experience, no matter how small. This time, for the price of hilarious laughter from the store attendant, I learned that you need to scrape a coin-sized amount of paint from the wall to have enough for the machine to tell what exact shade of paint it is.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for convenience and would probably outsource more often than not. However for the TV, the thought of paying someone a few hundred dollars to do something I could easily figure out just didn’t sit well with me, especially when I already had all the tools I needed.
When discussing LLMs and how I started using Midjourney with my friend Kyra, I wondered why anyone’s first reaction to new emerging technology would be anything besides just diving in. Why pay for a course to learn how to use ChatGPT, instead of signing up and poking around to see how far you could go first?
“A lot of people can’t figure things out. They aren’t used to doing that, so they need to be handheld”, she said. There’s something to be said about how when you do things yourself, it reinforces a confidence that you can figure it out, and then whenever you need to, you can go ahead and do just that - figure it out.