Lessons from the Forge #4: use friction to stay functional
My anvil was rusting.
So was my favourite hammer.
I’d only just got them and it was causing me anxiety.
I knew that I could probably take it off with wire wool or the angle grinder and give it a little coat of oil, but then what?
I lived on the far western edge of the UK and my workshop was only a mile from the Atlantic, feeling the full force of all the salty, wet weather that came off thousands of miles of open ocean.
Pretty much anything in there made of metal was guaranteed to be covered in a fine layer of orange iron oxide within days.
So even if I cleaned them up, they wouldn’t stay that way.
And what about all the other tools I’d make and buy?
Panic might be a bit strong but it definitely caused me some angst.
When I asked the wider Blacksmith community for advice, online, I immediately felt a bit stupid.
While there was a bit of understanding and friendly direction, I also got laughed at.
That’s because, all I had to do to keep the rust off was…
To use them.
While I was standing round looking at them and worrying, sure they were going to sit there, slowly oxidising in front of me.
Pick them up, hit some hot steel and… bye bye rust.
Friction keeps it functional.
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When I’m putting an edge on a tool - whether that’s a kitchen knife, a billhook or an axe, the last bit is always done on a grinder.
Traditionally that might have been powered by treadle, driven by your foot rhythmically pressing up and down to keep the grinding stone spinning at a constant pace.
Or in a more industrial set up, driven by a waterwheel turning in a leat (an intentionally diverted portion of a nearby waterway) that ran alongside the workshop, in turn driving the machine that ground the blade.
I don’t need foot or water power as I have the magic of electricity and a purpose built belt grinder.
I carefully shape the hot steel with hammer and hand, giving the blade its overall shape and then add the bevels (the slope of the knife from the spine to the edge), which will dictate how it cuts whatever material it’s designed to.
Once it’s heat treated, following the quenching and tempering process, I take the blade to the grinder.
The coarse grit sanding belt spins like a vertical whirling dervish and as I press the steel to it, the friction that results starts shearing off layers of steel.
Slowly, as I work up the grits from coarse to fine, the blade begins to take its final shape.
As I press it against the gyrating belt, it heats up. Almost like it’s acknowledging the pressure it’s under, feeling the strain of being ground away.
Periodically I dip it in a jar of cold water which I place next to my grinder, to prevent it from overheating and undoing the heat treat treatment which would render it useless as a professional tool.
Finally, once I’ve taken it as far as it needs to go, the ground edge is near mirror-polished and the edge fine enough to cut almost anything.
Friction, as always, made it functional.
//
In our modern, digital consumer age, there’s a constant pressure to make life and work as ‘frictionless’ as possible.
It’s like we’ve decided that nothing we do should have any inconvenience or difficulty involved.
Companies - even whole industries - have sprung up predicated on making the next, slightly annoying bump in our busy lives, less inconvenient.
The irony is that every attempt to do so brings with it a new set of inconveniences and robs us of something else.
Self-checkouts in supermarkets are a great example.
No more waiting in the queue to place your items on the conveyor belt and no need to try and make polite conversation with the person diligently swiping your goods over the scanner before taking your payment.
But in reality we still queue and, when we get to scanning our goods, inevitably the machine beeps at us indignantly when it fails to recognise the bag we brought in with us or a tin of tomatoes doesn’t register on the scales.
We wait for the harassed staff member to scurry over, look at our shopping and confirm we’re not just trying to nick a bottle of vodka so that we can get on with paying and move into the rest of our ‘frictionless’ day.
At least we didn’t have to make the polite conversation, right?
But aside from the added inconvenience of fallible technology - the uppity self-checkout or the online booking service that keeps going down - there’s real value to the ‘friction’ that consumer society is hellbent on removing from our lives.
That person working at the checkout is a human being, as is the person at the hairdressers or takeaway, sitting in a building somewhere in the world, behind the opaque filter of digital interfaces, waiting for your order to pop up on a screen so that they can service it.
The idea of having to acknowledge their presence, think about how to answer their cheery ‘How’s your day going?’, perhaps relaying your order to them only to correct a mistake they made about whether it was a green curry or red, naturally brings up a tiny little ‘ugh’ inside many of us.
That resistance is magnified and made ever-more concrete the more we are smothered in options to bypass the human interaction in all other areas of our lives.
But - to trot out an overused phrase - we are social animals. We have evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be constantly exchanging information with other humans in order to get our needs met.
Even when that is entirely transactional - the takeaway order or time and date of your next haircut - a connection is made.
We navigate the little discomforts, find our way through and often have a bit of small talk in the process.
These tiny exchanges are packed with value that touch on our very basic needs.
We notice and adjust the way we communicate, to interact well with this individual, right here, with their own unique history and way of showing up.
We unconsciously acknowledge that here is another human being, in the world, with needs and feelings.
There’s a sense of collaboration, however tiny, having exchanged information, expressed a need and got that need met thanks to this other human, in the process helping them to get their need met, even if that’s something as pragmatic as getting paid for their time.
When we constantly push for ‘frictionless’, all of this much-needed bumpiness is rooted out and consigned to a bin marked: “Yuck”.
As a result, these basic needs remain unmet, undermining our core humanity which is entirely dependent on being human with other humans.
Not only this, but our tolerance for other people and the ‘inconvenience’ that comes with them becomes increasingly intolerable and we become ever more fragile.
Our self-perceived ability to handle this atrophies and our social muscles weaken.
This isn’t because we were never built for dealing with other people, it’s because dealing with other people is part of regularly pushing us towards the outer limits of our comfort zones, or not even that far most of the time, which is the normal and natural way for humans to grow and develop.
In the BBC Radio 4 series Oliver Burkeman’s Inconvenient Truth, Jonathon Rowson, the Chief Executive of Perspectiva says:
“The human condition is that we are a kind of living, walking context, and every time we meet another human being we meet another context…
The context they are living in is very different from ours and, very often, in order to connect with them we have the inconvenience of having to update our sense of their context and share our own, before we can even get to business.
The fact that other people are inherently inconvenient isn’t a sign that you shouldn’t spend time with them, or love them, or build your life around them.”
But this isn’t just about ironing out the crinkly discomfort of dealing with other people.
Life itself is one very long, inconvenient process that is only interrupted by our final end.
It’s one that forces us to do things that we don’t necessarily enjoy, that make us sweat or even cause us pain.
But without the struggles we can’t truly enjoy the times of ease, and without sweating, we can’t truly enjoy the fruits of our labour. And pain is an essential part of learning where our physical and emotional boundaries are, so that we can adjust our responses and actions.
Sure, at the click of a button consumer society wants to give you what you want without any risk of feeling anything approaching discomfort or strain - whether that’s a piece of homeware from Amazon or an AI-generated website for your business.
But these things can never, ever satisfy us in the way we need to be satisfied (more on that, here)
I’m convinced that the massive uptick in mental and physical health issues, like anxiety and depression or obesity and diabetes, are partly linked to this intentional disconnection from regular, daily negotiation with others and the need to force ourselves to strive through the reality of life’s minor inconveniences.
How can we be fully human without jostling back and forth with other humans or effortfully crafting our lives around us?
And if we can’t be fully human in these ways, how does that unfed and untended part of us start showing up?
In dissatisfaction, dysfunction, lethargy and loneliness.
This is an inquiry that follows me through blacksmithing as much as it does my wider life, a craft that forces me to actively embrace the struggle, strain and pain that you might expect, but also provides the immeasurable joy of creation, collaboration, learning and more.
There is no frictionless system, platform or technology that can meet my needs in the same way and, equally, it helps remind me how cooking my own meals, growing my own food or getting to know my neighbours who have very different political ideas to me brings something approaching a sense of living fully, if not comfortably.
The disconnection from the people around us, whether that’s those servicing our consumer needs or walking their dogs passed the house, and the disconnection from the basic means of sustaining ourselves, like making the things we need, while inherently ‘inconvenient’ leaves us feeling unrooted, adrift and unsafe in the world.
To close, a quote from Oliver Burkeman himself:
“To be open to all the pleasures and meaningful experiences, you have to be open to the discomfort, too. You can choose and the highs and the lows, or maybe neither the highs nor the lows, but you can’t smooth out all the negativity without smoothing out the good stuff.
When all the technological and economic pressures are pushing us towards a smoother and smoother existence, we might have to get proactive about keeping life rough and unsmooth.”
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