Making Vs Consuming As An Identity Shift

The Maker/Consumer Distinction

The making versus consuming distinction is not about craft romanticism or anti-industrialism. It is about two different orientations to capability, and they produce meaningfully different lives.

The philosopher Albert Borgmann, in "Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life" (1984), distinguished between "devices" and "things." A device delivers a commodity while concealing the mechanism that delivers it. A furnace delivers warmth while hiding the processes of combustion, distribution, and heat transfer. A television delivers entertainment while concealing the entire production and transmission apparatus. Things, by contrast, are focal — they engage you in their use and reveal their workings. A fireplace delivers warmth but also demands fuel preparation, fire building, and tending; in doing so, it gathers people around it and structures activity.

Borgmann's argument was that device consumption progressively displaces focal practices — cooking, making music, physical work — that used to structure meaningful life. The devices are not bad; they are efficient. But they deliver their goods while eliminating the engagement that made those goods meaningful.

This maps onto the maker/consumer distinction. The consumer receives outputs — meals, entertainment, warmth, transportation — without engaging the processes that produce them. The maker engages the process and receives the output as a byproduct of that engagement. The difference is not in the output but in what happens to the person in the process of obtaining it.

The Psychology of Making

The psychological research on making and consumption is consistent in finding that making produces more durable satisfaction than purchasing.

Michael Norton and colleagues at Harvard Business School documented what they called the "IKEA effect" — the overvaluation of self-made objects relative to professionally made identical objects. Participants who built IKEA furniture themselves rated their own products significantly higher than identical pre-assembled products, and as highly as products made by experts. The act of creation increases perceived value, even when the objective quality is lower.

This is not simply about sunk cost rationalization. The satisfaction survives subsequent assessment and comparison. Norton's interpretation is that completion of tasks provides a sense of competence and accomplishment that affects how the resulting object is perceived. The object becomes evidence of capability.

Csikszentmihalyi's research on flow — the state of optimal engagement characterized by absorbed attention, time distortion, and intrinsic satisfaction — consistently identifies skilled making among its most reliable triggers. The conditions for flow (clear goals, immediate feedback, challenge matched to skill) are naturally present in craft, fabrication, and skilled repair in ways they are absent from most consumption activities. Shopping does not produce flow. Building something can.

The work of Matthew Crawford, in "Shop Class as Soulcraft" and subsequent books, provides a sustained phenomenological account of what skilled manual work does to a person. Crawford, a philosopher who left a policy job to open a motorcycle repair shop, argues that skilled engagement with physical reality — the kind of engagement that making requires — grounds cognition in ways that purely intellectual or commercial work does not. Working with your hands on a physical problem provides feedback that is non-negotiable: the engine either runs or it does not. This contact with resistant reality disciplines thought in specific ways and produces a kind of confidence that abstract work does not.

The Identity Mechanism

Identity change is different from behavior change. Behavior change attempts to produce new actions directly, through willpower or incentive. Identity change targets the beliefs that generate behavior. If you believe you are someone who makes things, making things becomes the natural expression of that identity rather than an effortful departure from it.

James Clear's "Atomic Habits" popularized a two-word version of this: "identity-based habits." The thesis is that habits attached to identity — "I am someone who exercises" rather than "I want to exercise more" — are more durable because they are self-reinforcing. Every instance of the behavior confirms the identity, which makes the next instance more likely.

The same logic applies to making versus consuming. The first few instances of making something — learning to bake bread, building a simple shelf, growing a crop — may be effortful and motivated by explicit goal-setting. But if those experiences are positive and the skill develops, the identity begins to shift. "I am someone who makes bread" changes how you experience grocery shopping (why buy this when I could make it?), how you respond to seeing an interesting recipe (I could try that), and how you think about the range of things you can produce.

The identity shift is domain-general over time but typically begins in one domain. The entry point matters less than the quality of the experience in that domain. A failed first attempt at bread-baking that produces a flat, dense brick is not an obstacle if the process was interesting; it is information. A successful first attempt that produces something edible creates the evidence that matters.

The Economics of Making

The economic argument for making is real but needs to be made precisely, because it is often overstated.

Making things yourself is not always cheaper in direct cost. A handmade shirt from quality fabric often costs more in materials than a factory shirt at H&M. A home-brewed beer, including equipment amortization, often costs more per unit than cheap commercial beer. A home-grown tomato, accounting for water, soil amendments, and labor time, is probably not cheaper per pound than a supermarket tomato.

Where the economics clearly favor making:

Quality differential: when what you can make is substantially better than what you can buy at equivalent cost. Homemade bread, properly made, is genuinely superior to most commercial bread available at equivalent price points. Home-cured meats, home-grown vegetables at peak ripeness, custom-fitted clothing — in each of these categories, the maker can produce quality that the market does not offer at the equivalent price.

Service substitution: when the alternative is paying for a service rather than a product. A haircut costs $20-$60 per session; learning to cut your own or a partner's hair has a one-time cost of $30-$50 in equipment and an hour of practice. A bicycle tune-up at a shop is $60-$100; doing it yourself takes 30 minutes once you know how. Plumbing repairs, basic electrical work, vehicle maintenance — each of these represents a high labor cost being substituted by skill.

Dependency reduction: when making something eliminates a supply chain dependency that carries other costs. Growing food reduces grocery bills but also reduces exposure to supply disruptions, contamination events, and the price volatility of commodity food markets. Making your own tools from raw materials is usually not economically competitive, but it means you can make tools when the supply chain is unavailable.

The economic calculus changes when you factor in the skill itself as an asset. A person who can make bread will always be able to produce bread, regardless of commercial bakery availability or price. That capability has option value that is not captured in a simple cost comparison.

The Cultural Erosion

The shift from making to consuming as the dominant mode is not just personal; it is structural, and the structural shift has consequences that accumulate across generations.

Mid-20th century American households had much higher rates of food production, clothing repair, and home construction than contemporary ones. This was partly necessity — real incomes were lower and goods were expensive — but it was also cultural infrastructure: skills were transmitted through apprenticeship within families and communities, and the social expectation that adults had a range of material skills was broadly enforced.

That infrastructure has largely dissolved. Shop classes were eliminated from public schools. Urban and suburban housing eliminated space for production — no workshop, no garden, no livestock. The professional economy valorized abstraction over manual skill. The consequence is not just economic (though it is that) but developmental: people grow up without the experience of making things from raw materials, and so without the basic evidence that they can.

The maker movement — the community of hackerspaces, Makerspaces, Fab Labs, and DIY culture that emerged in the 2000s — is, in part, a cultural response to this loss. It has restored some of the infrastructure: shared tools, accessible instruction, community around making. But it has disproportionately attracted people who were already oriented toward technical skill; it has not broadly rebuilt the making culture that was lost.

The deeper restoration happens at the household level, through deliberate practice of making in specific domains over time, and through transmission — the explicit teaching of making skills to children, the creation of household cultures where making is expected and valued.

The Frontier of Making

The contemporary range of what individuals and small groups can make has expanded dramatically through two converging developments: digital fabrication tools (CNC routers, laser cutters, 3D printers, vinyl cutters) that make precise manufacturing accessible at small scale, and open-source design libraries that provide the intellectual substrate — the plans, recipes, specifications — that industrial manufacturers have always had.

A person with access to a modest workshop (a few thousand dollars in tools) and the open-source design ecosystem (free) can fabricate metal parts, produce electronics, build furniture to professional tolerances, and create objects that would have required factory production a generation ago. The Fab Lab network, initiated by MIT's Neil Gershenfeld, has distributed this capacity to communities globally.

This is not democratization of mass production; it is something different — the return of small-scale production capacity to the individual and household, enabling the production of specific things that matter to specific people rather than undifferentiated goods for mass markets.

The maker identity, applied to this expanded capability, produces a different kind of person: one who sees the designed world as something they can participate in producing, not only consuming. The shift from product user to product maker, applied across multiple domains, is the practical expression of sovereignty at the personal scale.

The Decision Point

The identity shift from consumer to maker does not happen all at once and does not require repudiating consumption. It begins with one question, applied to the next want or need: could I make this instead?

Sometimes the answer is no — not because the skill is absent, but because the tradeoff is wrong. Consuming is not failure. The goal is not to make everything but to make deliberately, with an understanding of what making gives you that consuming does not: skill, satisfaction, knowledge, resilience, and the evidence of your own capability.

Applied consistently over years, that orientation compounds into a fundamentally different relationship to the material world. You know how things work because you have worked with them. You have less dependence because you have more skill. You have more of what matters — not possessions, but capacity.