Note: I’ve been away from here for just over a month, and my backlog is so huge that I can’t put off posting any longer!

Illustration of knitting (hands, needles, wool)

I’ve said many times over the last few years to friends and family that I’ve achieved all that I want to in life. That, I think, makes it easier to ‘pursue things that don’t scale’ — but so does studying philosophy from my teenage years onwards.

This post talks about “doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale” which is a great way of saying doing things that are human-scale. One of the examples given in this post is knitting, which cited in an article in The Guardian as being an example of the kinds of arts and crafts that promote wellbeing.

To some extent, of course, all of this is borne of maturity, of life experience, and of approaching and then reaching middle-age.

Chasing scale seems to be a kind of early life affliction. The more you chase it, the bigger the thing you chase gets. Perhaps it’s a natural desire to see how important we can be or at least how important our creations can be to the world (and hence how important we can be by proxy …). A desire to take on a seemingly insurmountable challenge, perhaps a noble one (though not always), and see if we can conquer it.

Yet without limits, we try to find them. This is true on many levels, whether it’s about how big we want our creations to become or how people should be able to lead their personal lives or how much candy kids can eat after a Halloween haul. But I think having no limits is unnatural. Chasing scale to the level we do is too. Whether we succeed or not, it stresses the system and inevitably burns us out.

Then a new motivation seems to surface, a desire to pursue something that can’t scale. See, my theory is that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. The antidote to burnout and the existential inquiry it brings seems to be doing things that don’t scale in pursuit of things that can’t scale. It becomes exciting not to see what you can do without limits, but to see what you can do with them.

What are these pursuits that can’t scale? They could be skills, like archery or chess or cooking. They could be close relationships, like making friends. Maybe it’s building a truckload of IKEA furniture. Or maybe it’s starting a local small business. These pursuits could be considered hobbies or something more serious. It doesn’t matter so much what it is than that it has a clear and visible ceiling.

Source: Working Theorys