Crackpots #6: On Tinkering (Patreon)

Hello friends,

Yung Chomsky here. Pleased to be with you again. This month, I’ve written something of an ode, a paean if you will, to a practice which I feel is not only an important part of a life well-lived, but one of the very things that makes us human. It’s something that I like to call tinkering. I’m going to do my best to explain what it is, what it isn’t, why I think it’s valuable, and why it can be tough to keep up.

To tinker is to engage in unalienated creative labor. Tinkering is self-directed. It may involve goals, but never deadlines. It should be easily accessible, and it should be enjoyable, although it entails frustration, too. Tinkering is for everyone, not just self-identified “creative types.” Tinkering is a means of achieving a flow state; that mental posture during which you’re fully immersed in the activity at hand.

I see many direct and indirect benefits to a practice of tinkering, but I think the most significant one is the way it contributes to a sense of personal agency. The tinkerer can look at their projects and say: Where before there was nothing, I made something. Where there was chaos, I created order. Where the problems of the wider world may seem random and inscrutable, in this domain the challenges are all self-imposed, and with time and persistence they are all comprehensible and solvable. This is a very empowering feeling.

So, tinkering is about having a hobby, but it’s not just any hobby. There are many hobbies, habits, or practices which are enjoyable and valuable and worthwhile, but do not fit into this category. For example: Producing TrueAnon is gratifying, but it’s not tinkering. For one, tinkering can’t be something you get paid to do. Even if you’re your own boss, even if an activity starts out as tinkering, it ceases to reside in that category once you get paid for it. You can chalk this up to “capitalism” if you like, but I think it’s more fundamental than that — it’s about freedom from expectations. Once someone else expects you to do something, which they certainly will if they’re paying you to do it, you’re no longer beholden to just yourself and your own whims. You’ve lost some of the freedom and the sense of exploration that defines tinkering. I can’t, for instance, spend as much time as I please on any given episode of the podcast; it has to be finished and released so we can start on the next one. This isn't necessarily a bad thing! It's a blessing to be able to make a living doing something that you like and which other people see value in. And such constraints can be a boon in that they prevent you from getting too lost in the weeds of your work. Regardless though, the introduction of commerce fundamentally changes the nature of an endeavor. However, here I must also point out that I was only in a position to produce TrueAnon because of all the hours I’d spent tinkering with audio in the years before the podcast came to be. So that’s an indirect benefit: Tinkering is a way to develop skills that may be useful in ways you can’t yet anticipate.

What about physical training? I think that’s tinkering-adjacent, but doesn’t quite qualify. On the pro side: activities like weight lifting can be scaled to match any level of ability, so they’re eminently accessible. There’s a lot of studying and learning that can go into the pursuit of physical performance: You can manipulate all sorts of variables in an experimental way and observe what outcome they have. And it can provide that empowering sense of control: You get out what you put in. But while lifting does provide the mental clarity and quietude of a flow state, it does so only for brief periods. Endurance training may come closer in that regard, but in the end neither are really creative endeavors. So developing physical fitness is a good thing, but it’s not tinkering.

Tinkering is active, not passive, so reading books and watching films doesn’t count. It’s not about buying or collecting, so it’s hard to say that being stylish fits the bill. Tinkering can, in ideal circumstances, be a collaborative effort; if you can make that work, I think you’re very fortunate. But most of the time, it’s going to be a solo activity. While collaboration is wonderful, it’s important to build self-reliance, which tinkering does.

So what qualifies? For years, music-making was my tinkering activity of choice. Electronic music is particularly well-suited for this — it allows knowledge, rather than physical skill, to be the limiter on expression, which is not usually the case with traditional instruments. Though the rows of knobs and faders of a typical synthesizer are intimidating and incomprehensible to a newcomer, only a bit of know-how stands between them and endless sonic landscapes. I’ve spent many days and nights alone in small rooms, twisting knobs and pushing buttons, losing my sense of time inside intricate loops. While even a beginner can make compelling, complex, and beautiful sounds with a synthesizer or sampler or other such tool, the possibilities immediately and continually expand with further study and experimentation.

And as with other ideal tinkering activities, the practical accessibility of electronic music-making resembles its skill curve; which is to say that while the ceiling on monetary investment in this pursuit is astronomical, the floor is extremely low. You can start making electronic music right now, using free software running on the same device you’re using to read this essay. This gets at the first of many lies we tell ourselves to stop from tinkering: namely, that we’d get started if only we had the means. Perhaps if we inherited a bunch of high-end equipment from some great-uncle’s disused studio. But there is no such inheritance, so we go back to video games or mindless scrolling or binge-watching. It hardly needs to be pointed out anymore that countless great works have been made with basic tools. It is rather remarkable to think about how the inaccessibility of tools was a major barrier just a generation ago when it came to things like audio or video but it hardly is at all anymore. Although the march of technological advancement is by no means an unalloyed good, it has certainly meant such tools have become more readily available. But more significantly, our concern shouldn’t be with whether or not we can make great works, or something of “professional” quality. Tinkering should be an exercise, not a business strategy.

More recently, my tinkering medium of choice has been programming. Building software ticks all the boxes for me. It’s like a series of puzzles where you get to set the difficulty level. When you solve one, you have something to show for it. Working on it doesn’t require any specialized tools or ongoing expenses. You can freely share what you make with as many people as you want. When you get stumped on something difficult, you know that the answer exists somewhere, and that with enough research and study you can eventually find it. There are tons of free resources for learning it. There’s no limit to what you can do, as long as you have patience. Software can be useful; it can save labor and increase productivity. But it doesn’t have to do any of that. It can be fun, it can be expressive, it can be artistic, it can be weird or silly. You can tweak and polish it until you’re ready to move on. You’ll always be learning and getting better. When you get stumped, you can set a problem aside, or solve it in an awkward way, only to come back later once your skills have advanced and implement a more elegant solution.

Making software in this way is a striking contrast with the experience of software engineering as a profession, which is what I did for a few years before TrueAnon’s inception. Even though I enjoy writing code in different contexts, there’s a lot more to the job than just that — and almost none of the other stuff is very fun or rewarding. And even if it was vastly preferable to many other possible ways to get a paycheck, and even if it did offer that satisfying flow state in fleeting doses, it rarely provided me with a sense of control or empowerment. Even when I had some leeway in how to solve problems, it was ultimately about doing as I was told, because it was a job. I suspect this same contrast applies to any tinkering-style endeavor when done in the context of employment. So beware the pull of monetization!

But there are endless ways to tinker. Knitting, sewing, drawing, painting, writing, cooking, model-making — the list goes on. It’s a very old practice. Think of yourself as a monk illuminating manuscripts, a cartographer charting the frontier, a clockmaker fitting gears. Tinkering helps us form connections with and develop appreciation for the things we already use and enjoy. Even a novice painter has infinitely more appreciation for the masters than someone who’s never held a brush. If you want to learn how to choose quality pieces for your wardrobe, learn to sew. I took a handful of sewing classes years ago in San Francisco, and while I’ll never be Tony Shirtmakers, it certainly deepened my understanding of the work that goes into the things I wear.

Most of us tinker as children, but fewer as adults. Maybe it’s because the responsibilities we accrue in order to keep food on the table and a roof overhead come to weigh on us so heavily that we can only imagine filling our limited downtime with more passive activities. Tinkering is certainly a luxury in some sense. But I think we too often trick ourselves into thinking that we can’t tinker, or that we don’t need to. I’ve gone through periods where I let such things fall by the wayside, and I think I experienced less fulfillment and less growth in those times. Maybe it’s a fear of failure that stops us from trying; when we’re used to succeeding in one field, it can be psychologically challenging to enter a new one as a beginner where we stumble over the basics. But by that same token, no one makes faster progress than a beginner, and what we’re really after is relative progression rather than absolute mastery.

Even if we manage to establish a tinkering practice, it can be difficult to maintain long term. Sometimes we allow ourselves to stray from the purity of tinkering due to the lure of money or fame. This isn’t always a sin; sometimes it’s a natural progression. But when tinkering becomes business it ceases to be tinkering, so we must seek new ways to tinker. And in a broader sense, it’s only natural that with a certain level of investment in a project will come a desire to share it with others, hoping that their enthusiasm echoes your own. This can be fraught, though. It’s rare that anyone will care about your tinkering to the extent that you do. You perceive the effort and time that you invested; they just see the end result. It’s easy to become disappointed and disillusioned by the reaction, or lack thereof, to your creations. And, if my experience is at all generalizable, when there are people who do show enthusiasm for what you’re doing, they may not be the ones you’d expect or want. You have to be careful not to put too much stock in the response to your work; what matters is that you keep doing it. This is easier said than done. There is also such a thing as too much tinkering. If you’re at all like me, you might be liable to get lost in your work to the point that you isolate yourself. You might tell yourself a romantic story about the permanence of art versus the ephemerality of a fun night that leads you to turn down invitations so you can tinker. You should be wary of this, too.

Other important considerations: having a designated physical space for your tinkering is ideal. An office, a study, a workshop, a studio, a woodshed, even just a particular desk or chair. That’s where you go to make things. Arranging your tinkering space so it’s as inviting and convenient as possible is very important. The time I’ve invested in organizing my instruments so they’re accessible at a moment’s notice, or creating various project templates that I can call up as needed, or simply making sure my desk and chair are comfortably configured, has always paid off. Keep track of what you do. Look back every so often at where you started, how far you’ve come. Spend as much time as necessary on something, but be prepared to move on when you feel the urge. Seeing things to completion is gratifying, but you can abandon projects, too. Maybe you’ll pick them up again later. Nobody is keeping score.

I’m not here to tell you that tinkering is a radical act, or that it’s left-wing, or that you need to do it in order to be ready for the revolution. This is also not a call to turn inward, to stop engaging with the world and live a life of hermetic craftsmanship. But I do think tinkering makes you a better person. So, are you a tinkerer? What are you working with? Let me know in the comments.

Until next time,

YC