Output Over Labour
15 December 2025
With the approach of Christmas, and the encouragement of consumerism, and my stress-induced sink into the mind-numbing pit that is infinite scroller social media on my phone, I am noticing that output is more valuable than labour. At large, it is more important to have an item than to have a good one, for it to be cheap over durable. Whether the making of the item required any skill is not relevant, but the fact that the item is available right now is very much so.
It's hard to see the rise of Temu, outpacing even the convenience and cheap plastic novelty of Amazon, filling dumpsters with crappy trinkets. It's hard as someone who cares about labour to see generative AI tools used for everything under the sun from writing to logo design to music, when doing the work yourself is "too difficult" or "time consuming".
Hire someone! Or, God forbid, do the work yourself!
I am knitting my first ever sweater right now, and the pattern I am following has a much different gauge measurement than me. I know this thing is going to turn out with the world's weirdest measurements and very obviously fit me poorly. But I am doing the labour myself. Not only do I get joy in the process, I will be proud of the end product and get to show it to people as something that came from my hands. This ugly sweater will not come from a network of servers that simultaneously drives up computer part prices, plagiarizes the work of real artists, and does measurable damage to the environment.
This sweater is only a quarter complete. I have been working on it for a year. Granted, I took a 10 month break, but making a knit sweater by hand will never approach the manufacturing speed of a machine knit sweater. No one could afford the labour I have poured into this horrible little garment, nor would they want to. What if the design is no longer trendy when it's done? The colours out of season? SHEIN is selling them a more stylish sweater at the cost of a single ball of yarn. Whether that sweater survives until next winter is not even a question worth asking, because there will be more cheap sweaters to come.
To me, AI is accelerating an existing problem where patience is in decline and skillful labour feels as if it is shaking out a death rattle. I know there will always be a niche that craftsmanship can occupy, but working class people have been squeezed of their ability to engage meaningfully with craft. A family can't afford a dinner table and chair set from a carpenter. Even on the public scale, buildings don't have carved facades or inlaid stonework as often as they used to.
I want to value craftsmanship and labour in my life more. My ugly homemade sweater will be one of many projects that I will value. I make custom bookmarks for my reading, I paint my nails myself, one day I will finish my Ibérico magazine, and the two times a year I think of it, I update this website. I want to be happy with the items I have as well as the time that went into making them.
Over my Christmas break I think I will hammer out a detailed list of New Year's Resolutions for increasing the amount of labour I put into my life, as well as the community. The way labour shapes a community is a diary entry for another day.