Whilst rebuilding my PC case, a friend commented: "Why bother? You could just buy something". This got me thinking, the same question applies to self-hosting my own infrastructure, writing my own CV in LaTeX, or even maintaining this website when I could simply exist on social media platforms. It isn't about the result, it's about what the process gives back.
There's a certain kind of satisfaction that comes from something you made yourself. It's a different kind of satisfaction than when you buy a product, even a nice premium product. This has actually been studied, and it's known as the IKEA effect - it's a cognitive bias where you place a high value on products if you're involved in creating them. I think it's more than overvaluation though. When you build something yourself, you develop an intimate understanding of its inner workings. You know where the compromises are, where the rough edges hide, and where the elegant solutions shine. This knowledge becomes part of the object's story, part of your story - it's intertwined with its existence.
We are living in an age where almost everything you want is rented or leased. Software is subscription-based, entertainment is streamed, your phone is a locked-down device streaming things from the cloud. For the physical things we still own, they're now built to fail, parts aren't available so you have to just throw them away and buy a new one.
When manufacturers make it impossible to fix your own devices, they're not just protecting intellectual property, or have no choice if you want a small device, they're enforcing dependency. The Right to Repair movement represents pushback against a world where nothing truly belongs to you, recognising that the ability to maintain and modify what you own is a fundamental consumer right. The EU's Right to Repair Directive mandates that manufacturers must offer repairs, extend warranties, and ensure spare parts availability for a wide range of consumer products, ensuring you have more choice than simply throwing products away.
The convenience comes with hidden costs. When you rent rather than own, you sacrifice agency. Your Instagram account exists at Meta's pleasure. Your Spotify library could vanish in a licensing dispute. Your smart home devices could lose features overnight when the manufacturer decides to sunset older models. The subscription economy has transformed ownership into access, and access can be revoked.
There's a reason I self-host so many of my services, despite the headaches it sometimes causes. When something breaks, I know where to look. When I want to add a feature, I'm not waiting on a companies roadmap. When a service disappears, I'm not left scrambling for alternatives. The infrastructure I've built reflects my needs, not the averaged needs of a million users.
This is what building teaches you: the process matters more than the outcome. The hours spent troubleshooting a configuration file, debugging a circuit, or sanding a rough edge - these aren't wasted hours - they're transferred knowledge. The next project benefits from every mistake, every improvisation, every moment of frustration that eventually yielded to understanding.
This understanding is also kind of resilience that the consumer economy strips away. When something breaks, the prescribed solution is to pay for a repair or buy a replacement. When your custom-built case breaks, the solution is you. It's a subtle shift, but it's a fundamental change in your relationship with the things around you. You stop feeling frustrated with things and start being more curious - a skill that's useful in every aspect of life.
It isn't about being entirely self-sufficient - I still use Fastmail for email and Bitwarden for passwords because some things bring me no joy to maintain. Not everything should be built from scratch. I'm not going to smelt my own aluminium or write my own operating system kernel (though both are technically possible for those with the time, resources, and inclination to pursue them). There's wisdom in standing on the shoulders of giants, in using well-crafted tools to solve problems rather than reinventing every wheel. The maker mindset isn't about doing everything yourself, it's about understanding what you use. When I choose to use a hosted service, I do so knowingly. I understand the trade-offs: I'm exchanging some control for convenience, some privacy for features, some ownership for ease. These aren't inherently bad trades, but they should be conscious ones.
It's about being intentional. It's about choosing what matters enough to build or maintain yourself, and what you're willing to rent for convenience. The key word is choice. The danger lies in defaulting to rental when building might serve you better. It's easy to accumulate subscriptions, to outsource every task, to let convenience become the only criterion. But convenience without consideration leads to dependency. Dependency without understanding leads to vulnerability.
In many cases, making things yourself is also an entry point into a community. When you get stuck, you can turn to a community of like-minded strangers who have solved the problem before and told others in case they also came across this problem. If you then also engage with the communities and share your solutions and information, you're not just being a consumer, you're being a contributor. And in the current world, we could all use some more community.
Building teaches you what you actually need. When you're the architect, you can't hide behind feature lists and marketing specifications. You have to decide what matters. Often, the process of making reveals that less is more, that the elaborate solution you imagined is unnecessary, that a simpler approach would have served better.
Sometimes building something yourself is an act of quiet rebellion. It's a statement that you value understanding over convenience, agency over ease, ownership over access. The things you make may not be as polished as mass-produced alternatives, but they carry something that no purchase can provide: the irreplaceable satisfaction of having made them.