Make things with your hands

The benefits of physical hobbies

I’m now over 2 months into my self-employment journey after returning from travel. One theme I’ve already noticed is that I have gravitated towards creating things.

The definition of creation is broad here — I’m including the act of writing this newsletter every week, scripting and filming YouTube videos, and working with Claude Code to build websites and micro-apps.

But pretty much everything I’m working on is mediated through a screen.

In contrast, I had one experience over the holidays that made me realise the power of doing something more physical and tactile. I was at a birthday lunch for one of my friends, and she had set up a craft corner where we could make hand-carved linoleum stamps. Given some of my historical struggles with fine motor skills, I expected this to be a pretty frustrating activity.

But I ended up loving it.

Carving smooth curves in the lino was so satisfying and required such intense focus that time seemed to fly by. And even though the end product looked hilariously misshapen, I was proud of my little stamp.

I’ve found a similar joy in learning physical skills — whether it’s getting incrementally better at a yoga pose, or the brief period last year when my girlfriend and I took salsa dancing classes. There is something extremely rewarding about understanding how your body is meant to move in space, and working on it until it finally clicks.

The stamp-carving afternoon was a good reminder to keep learning physical skills. The next thing on my agenda is to get better at swimming. I’ve signed up for lessons at the local pool and will keep you posted…

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Update log

• ⚽️ Started scripting the next episode of Playbook. I’ve been blown away by the response to my first video on the history of the IPL - with 150,000 views and counting in a week! It’s inspired me to start on my next video straight away, which will be on the business of Manchester United and how they’ve got themselves into a financial hole.

• 🌿 Went for a lovely walk in Royal National Park. For Valentine’s Day, Vaidehi and I did the Wattamolla to Eagle Rock walk - a beautiful coastal trail surrounded by bushland. We just managed to beat the rain and stay dry!

  

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Recommendation Zone

This week’s recommendation is Everything is Tuberculosis by John Green. It’s an exploration of how one disease has shaped our society and culture more than most people realise.

Tuberculosis (or ‘consumption’ as it was previously known) is a disease I had vaguely heard of, but never understood the true scale and impact of. Since its discovery in 1882, over 1 billion people have died of tuberculosis, more than malaria, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, cholera and the plague combined.

It’s also been associated with many world events, at least tangentially. You might know that the catalyst for World War I was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in modern-day Bosnia. But what you might not know is that the group of young men who went after him were all consumptives who had nothing to lose because of how advanced their disease was.

Or take the acceptance of New Mexico as a state in the US. For decades, Congress resisted granting statehood to a territory it viewed as too Mexican and too Indigenous. So, New Mexico actively encouraged thousands of white consumptives to migrate west for the desert air. It worked — the influx reshaped the territory's demographics, and Congress allowed New Mexico to become a state in 1912.

What has been particularly interesting to learn about is how intertwined the disease is with social norms, particularly class and beauty. TB was once seen as a disease of poets and the nobility, with the pale skin, thin bodies and rosy cheeks of consumptives shaping beauty standards that persist today. But over time, it has come to be seen as a disease of poverty and industrialisation, where crowding in huge cities with packed tenements and factories allows the disease to spread. This shift happened swiftly, after Robert Koch showed that TB was caused by a bacterium, changing the previous belief that it was purely genetic or caused by a lifestyle of excess.