Lessons from the forge #3: Craft is the antidote to consumerism
The pursuit of convenience is damaging our mental and physical health, eating away at the core of what it means to be humans both individually and collectively. Craft might be one way to push back.
Toolmaking is one of our defining characteristics as a species.
It’s not (as we used to think) unique to us: Dolphins use shells to catch fish, Chimpanzees use sticks to catch termites and Elephants use palm fronds as fly swatters.
But as far as I’m aware, mice haven’t invented a way to travel to the moon and badgers haven’t worked out how to whizz up smoothies.
Only we seem to have dedicated nearly all of our intelligence to putting new things together to solve problems and amplify our capabilities.
The question is: why?
What is it about the way that we are wired which makes us constantly push the boundaries of what we can achieve?
My feeling is that it’s as much the joy of the chase as it is the desire for power or the advancement itself.
Make your own tools
In blacksmithing, one of the fundamental principles is ‘make your own tools’.
This is so embedded in the mindset of smiths that when you go on the Blacksmith UK Facebook group (a goldmine of help, support and the odd snide comment) to ask where you could buy a certain style of specialist tongs, for example, you’ll always get a number of people asking incredulously: "Why don’t you just make them yourself?”
Because as soon as you have a hammer, an anvil and a hearth, you’re pretty much set to make most of the basic tools that you could need in the first few years of learning to forge.
On paper you’d be forgiven for thinking that it’s about saving money.
Intellectually you might look at it as a sort of basic, cost-benefit analysis:
A set of scroll tongs (used with a scroll jig for making the classic spiralling ends you’d see on a traditional gate or railings) will set you back £40 or more. Whereas the steel to make them will cost you less than £5.

But - hold on a minute, is it such a bargain? It will take you time, quite a lot of time if you’ve not done it before.
And as a learner you’re unlikely to end up with something that looks as good as those you’d buy off an experienced tool maker.
So for the sake of £40 and saving yourself a massive amount of time: why would you bother?
The fundamental reason is that making things is a basic human need, so why *would* you skip that and outsource it to someone else?
There is absolutely nothing that I can think of that’s as satisfying as the process of creating something that will be valuable to you, whether that’s functionally or aesthetically.
You can’t buy this feeling for £40 - or for £1million, for that matter.
I think that nearly anyone can relate to this. Even something as simple as a delicious meal - your favourite takeaway dish, for example, follows the same principles.
A process for the soul
Whether it’s making a Thai green curry or a new hammer, the process goes something like:
You have an idea of something you want and need.
You find out how to make it and get the components you need.
You go through the process, make mistakes and overcome them.
You end up with the thing you wanted and you get to enjoy it.
Yes, as I said, of course you can just use money to get to step four with zero effort.
And sometimes, when the thing is beyond your skillset or you want to enjoy it in a particular way, then that’s a great strategy.
But most of the time, steps one-to-three fulfil us in ways that money can never hope to replicate.
And this is where consumerism has tripped us up.
The promise of our weird modern culture is that we can have whatever we want, without the effort and skill required to produce it.
The problem is - and I’m sure you can see this coming - is that it completely denies that part of us that needs to make stuff to feel fulfilled.
Instead, money serves as the intermediary between us and things we want or need. We work to earn the money, we use the money to buy the things.
Unfortunately, the work many people do is unfulfilling and bad for their health. The sedentary desk jobs that a large proportion of the workforce now do creates the conditions for a rainbow of horrible conditions, physical and mental.
This, incidentally, is another benefit of developing a craft - both the physical movement, mental stimulation and ‘flow state’ they involve are the polar opposite to work where you are uninspired, overstressed and sitting in one place.
The problem is that we’ve been living this way for long enough that craft is not at the heart of communities or passed on from parent to child - they are often seen as something rare, special and exciting.
Losing our craft culture
Not that long ago, every village would have its own smithy and large towns would have a number of them (which is why the surname ‘Smith’ is so common here in the UK). Learning the trade was a case of going to your local blacksmith, asking nicely to be taken on as one of his many apprentices and doing what you’re told for a few years.
And many traditional ironworkers kept the business in the family, passing it from father to son. Children were constantly surrounded and submerged in the craft, helping from an early age and expected to take it on.
There was nothing particularly special or exciting about being a blacksmith back then, but now when I tell people what I do, I can almost always predict that they’ll react with intrigue and even a little bit of awe.
It’s nice, in a way, but also rather telling how out of touch we are with this side of us that has been making its own tools for hundreds of thousands of years.
Consumerism has developed exponentially over the last century, driven by globalisation and technology, and the downturn in craft and specialist skills is a curve that I believe mirrors this growth.
But the important thing about this decline is not so much the loss of skills - although they are the fabric of our shared cultural heritage - it’s that our current way of life has eroded this part of our basic humanity.
Craft as therapy
I know a number of people who struggle with life at the moment and I’m very sympathetic because I’ve also been through some seriously tough terrain myself, particularly in the years immediately ‘post-Covid’.
I’ve been asking myself what the hell I’m doing with my life? Where is it all heading? Am I making stupid decisions? How do I interface with the consumer capitalist way of life and not compromise on my sense of self-direction and values?
Am I a good Dad? A good husband?
Am I a good human being?
There have been times where these questions have weighed very heavily on my mind and caused me to slip into periods of paralysis and near-despair.
But do you know when I am devoid of any difficult feelings and totally unconcerned about the point of my existence?
You guessed it - when I’m in the forge.
The process of taking the seed of an idea that’s inside of me, working out how to make it, getting into my workshop and figuring it out on the anvil is better than therapy.
The reasons for this are two-fold:
Therapy involves me focusing on my thoughts and feelings. This isn’t a bad thing in itself but, to an extent, it gives them more credence than they otherwise deserve. In themselves, the questions don’t have any concrete basis - they are aspects of my ‘self’ that are surfacing as a result of a vacuum somewhere in my life.
Craft engages parts of me that are otherwise neglected which perhaps create the vacuum in the first place - the need to be working, hard. To be involved in something that takes effort and determination. The need to learn. To test myself, fail and do better. And the need to create. To make something tangible out of almost nothing.
My life as a consumer unit, in service to the economy, requires me to be largely sedentary, mostly not learning new things and certainly not, these days using my hands.
The things I create, if I create anything at all, are usually digital.
Whether that’s spreadsheets, websites or social media posts - while they might have some utility or opportunity for self-expression, they lack substance and can’t give me the same feeling as holding something in my hands that I had to craft.
Don’t get me wrong - both therapy and digital work have been helpful to me. The former getting me back on track, processing some big transitions and the latter affording me the opportunity to do my coaching and conflict training from my remote, rural home.
But even the combination of the two can neither replace or imitate how satisfying and supportive learning a craft has been in, particularly through times where everything seemed to be pretty dark.
My experience of working through my difficulty by learning how to make things is one of the reasons I ended up beginning to teach blacksmithing and bladesmithing back in Cornwall where I had my first forge.
Forging a connection
Even though I’d only been practicing a couple of years and just mastered the basics, I knew how much it had supported me and how important these crafts were to our individual and collective wellbeing.
I wanted to share this with other people - knowing how much I enjoy teaching as a practice, something I’ve developed through my work in organisations and through martial arts.
As I got started, I found that some of my feelings were confirmed and I also noticed some unexpected outcomes.
Just like me, the reasons people would come to me and train was because they want to learn how to make something, not simply to have the thing.
They were interested in the craft and how to create an object that they wanted to use.
They could have bought one of my bushcraft or kitchen knives for much less than they paid to come to my forge and get my instruction, but they actively want to be involved in the process of crafting
What I didn’t realise is that the act of being engaged in the work would free up some other part of them.
Perhaps it’s because of my interest in people or my training in coaching and facilitation but not long after we’d got started, people would open up.
I’ve had some of the most interesting and vulnerable conversations - often with other middle-aged (and older) men who, in the dim light of the forge or over a cup of tea on the workshop doorstep, were willing and able to tell me about their struggles, their bad experiences and what they wish for in life.
For me this is deeply enjoyable. Sure, I loved seeing them with their finished knife or forged ironwork and how proud they were, but after they’ve left what leaves me feeling really good about having spent time together is the ground we covered in our conversations and the change I noticed in them.
Frictionless and loveless
Consumerism and its relentless focus on digital, frictionless accomplishment, removes so much of the opportunity for any kind real connection.
Connection with the material world - the challenges of learning a craft and the hard work that goes into it. But also connection with other people, unmediated by screens.
Our relationships are often reduced to being simply transactional - I need something from you or you need something from me. We are focused on doing that as quickly as possible and moving on.
When you’re in a workshop, for hours, busy with your hands, space opens up for very different conversations that have no pre-determined purpose or time constraints.
I might be sharing a technique or process with you, then watching to see whether you have got it, but outside of that we both are simply doing our thing, working slowly towards the next stage of our project.
It’s both deeply purposeful and intentional but unhurried. Where do we have that in other parts of our busy, post-industrial lives?
Being reduced to a consumer robs me of my basic humanity. It encourages me to believe that life should be easy, at my peril.
Life should test us at every turn. We should be learning every day. We should be brewing up ideas that we craft into real things, in real life and enjoy the deep satisfaction of holding those things in our hands.
If you’ve read this far and you’re still in doubt, just think about your last favourite online purchase. How long was it between it arriving and the excitement of its newness wearing off?
How much joy and fulfilment did you get from the process of finding it and putting in your payment details?
It’s hardly a surprise we’re drowning in throwaway goods that end up in landfill sites or break down in our oceans when it’s so easy and yet so unsatisfying to get them in the first place.
Getting dirty for a better future
At this point, I feel like I could go on but I have a need to wrap this up so it doesn’t become an unmanageable and endless unpicking of what went wrong for us in the technological age (and there’s plenty of that out there if you want it).
There is much to be said for how technology has enabled us to live better, for longer but if I’m trying to say any one thing here it is: when craft no longer has a place in our lives, we all suffer - physically, mentally and culturally.
While there may be no going back to the age of industrial apprenticeships and literal cottage industries, I wonder if in a post-AI world, there isn’t a space for crafts like blacksmithing to re-emerge with a slightly different purpose to the one they once held in our society.
Perhaps, some of the worst impacts of convenience culture - both on our individual and collective lives - could be greatly lessened if we all found a way to get sweaty, dirty and make things.
If you’re trying to unpick big questions and challenges around your work and direction and you’d like some support - get in touch via hello@maxstjohn.com
I work with leaders, entrepreneurs and changemakers through coaching, supervision and craft-focused retreats out of my forge in Mid-Devon.
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