There’s a profound difference between 3 seemingly similar ways to spend time:

1. sitting around and making things, either alone or with people you want to be around, which is a fundamentally human experience
2. sitting/standing around and making things with people you’ve been ordered to work with, on things you’ve been ordered to make, on a full-time work schedule set by someone else
3. performing all the capitalist ceremonies of the previous bullet point, but you’re not even making anything yourself

All 3 get muddled together in discussions and in subjective experience, and in any case most people only experience the 2nd or 3rd one for large swaths of their lives.

It takes a while, post-retirement, to let go of all the nonsense from those ways of being, and instead to return to the simpler and more human acts of chopping wood, carrying water, and making things for their own sake.

— Redditer ScoobyDoobyGazebo on how deeply “people don’t understand the grasp work and productivity has on their lives.”