Dopamine and The Search for Healthy Rewards

I’ve written before about the search for mental well-being, ancient practices, and functional patterns that humans have carried for thousands of years. Crafts. Tai chi. Things that feel old in the body, not just old in theory. Practices that seem to tune us back into something deeper, call it the Tao, call it nature, call it reality before distraction.

Punk rock played a role in that, too. It stripped things down. It cut through pretense and excess. It made me suspicious of systems that sell comfort, speed, and status while quietly hollowing people out.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about dopamine not in the internet pop-psych way, but in a practical, lived sense.

People talk about “good dopamine” and “bad dopamine,” but I don’t think that framing is quite right. What matters more is whether a reward is short-term and extractive or long-term and generative.

Dopamine itself isn’t the enemy. It’s a survival mechanism. Without it, organisms don’t move. They don’t leave the cave. They don’t hunt, build, explore, or learn. Dopamine is the internal signal that says, "This effort matters, do it again." 

The problem isn’t dopamine. The problem is how easily that system can be hijacked.

Some pursuits create a fast spike with no depth. Gambling is a good example. You don’t need much exposure for it to start damaging your life. A weekend can do real harm. Drugs can do even worse—sometimes in months, sometimes faster. The dose makes the poison, and the margin for error is thin.

Other pursuits are different.

Exercise is an interesting counterpoint. To become “addicted” to exercise in a way that truly harms you, the volume required is enormous. Elite endurance athletes might flirt with that edge, but most people will never get anywhere near it. The ceiling is high. The damage threshold is far away.

That matters.

It suggests that some reward loops are structurally safer than others. They demand effort. They build capacity. They return something tangible.

Hunting is another example. Skill. Patience. Movement. Failure. Learning. Food. There’s a feedback loop there that shaped humans for tens of thousands of years. The reward is real, but it’s earned—and it leaves you stronger, not emptier.

Bushcraft fits into this category for me.

You’re building skills. You’re making objects. You’re engaging with materials, tools, weather, and terrain. Even if those objects aren’t strictly necessary for survival anymore, they were for most of human history. The nervous system recognizes that. The body understands it at a level that doesn’t require explanation.

You’re not just consuming a hit of pleasure. You’re participating in a process.

Tai chi does the same thing in a quieter way. The movements are not arbitrary. They are old for a reason. They train balance, structure, breath, and awareness—things that once mattered directly to survival and still matter to health. You’re rehearsing patterns that kept people alive, even if you no longer need them to fight or flee.

That, to me, is the difference.

Healthy reward cycles don’t just feel good in the moment. They build something over time—skill, resilience, presence, capability. They feed the spirit and the body at the same time. They don’t collapse into compulsion because they’re anchored in effort, reality, and limits.

We need a reward to get off the couch. That’s not weakness—it’s biology. The task isn’t to eliminate dopamine, but to choose pursuits that deserve it.

Ancient practices, honest movement, craft, skill, and contact with the real world seem to do exactly that. They don’t numb you. They wake you up.

And once you feel that difference, it’s hard to unsee it.

Following the Grain: How I got into wood carving

 

When I was a kid, there was a movie about a boy who carved a small wooden man in a canoe and set it into a mountain stream. It was called, Paddle to the Sea.

The figure traveled all the way to the city, following rivers, lakes, and hidden waterways. I don’t remember every detail of the film, but I remember the feeling. The idea that something made by hand could move through the world on its own, guided by gravity and terrain, not by control.

That image stayed with me.

Years later, when I went to art school, I tried to move in the opposite direction. I wanted discipline. I wanted lineage. I trained myself as a painter, drawn to post-Impressionists and Renaissance masters, and eventually to Michelangelo’s sculpture. I focused on rendering, anatomy, proportion—learning how to see accurately and reproduce what I saw. I worked hard at the craft of art and reached a high level of technical control.

At the same time, something else was happening. I was hiking in nature for the first time in my life. Spending long hours in the mountains. Doing hallucinogens. Letting the edges soften. And I found myself pulled again and again toward work that was rougher, more immediate—natural forms, instinctive marks, the kind of punk-rock energy that refuses polish. People sometimes call it naïve art, though that word never quite fits.

What I struggled with was honesty. How do you let work be simple without pretending to be untrained? How do you avoid faking naïveté once you’ve spent years learning technique? That tension followed me everywhere. In studios. On trails. In my own head. There is a famous Picasso quote that perfectly sums this up: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.”

One day, walking toward the mountains near an apple orchard in New Paltz, New York, I noticed a piece of wood lying on the side of the road. It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t precious. But it stopped me. I picked it up, and something clicked. I started carving.

Not as a project. Not as a statement. Just responding to the material. Following the grain. Letting the form suggest itself instead of imposing an idea onto it. I carved on and off over the years, slowly, quietly. That thread eventually led me to Taos, to totem carving, to all the small objects that come from listening rather than forcing.

Carving did something that drawing and painting never fully did for me. It removed the illusion of control. Wood pushes back. It splits. It resists. It demands attention. You can’t fake your way through it for long. The knife tells the truth.

The other day, walking along the road, I saw another piece of wood. Just sitting there. And instantly I was back in New Paltz, back at that first moment by the orchard. Same feeling in the body. Same quiet excitement. The sense that the material already knows something, and my job is simply to pay attention.

I don’t start with a plan anymore. I don’t need the object to be anything in particular. I’m interested in what the wood reveals, not what I want it to become.

Maybe that’s what stuck with me from that childhood story. Not the carved figure or the canoe, but the idea of release. Make something carefully. Set it into the current. Let the land finish the work.

Working in a Native American Community and Chronic Disease Prevention

A large part of my work is chronic disease prevention within a Native American community. What I have learned, both professionally and personally, is that many modern conveniences are a major driver of chronic disease. This is not a rejection of technology. It is a recognition of its cost.

Comfort, efficiency, and labor-saving tools often remove the very movements and stresses that kept human bodies resilient for thousands of years. In the process, we often throw the baby out with the bathwater. Traditional ways of knowing and older methods of living were not primitive. They were refined through lived experience, long before technology insulated us from consequence.

Working for a Native American tribe has given me the rare opportunity to see this firsthand. I see the struggle many Native people face as traditional lifeways collide with modern systems that reward convenience but quietly undermine health. I also recognize this struggle in my own family history. My father was a craftsman in the 1960s, deeply committed to making things by hand. He battled large corporations, mass production, and a culture that increasingly valued speed and profit over integrity and craft. Balancing those worlds is not easy.

There are certainly areas where technology is beneficial and even necessary. But labor-saving does not always mean health-saving. Often it means the opposite.

A simple example is wood processing. If you are cutting down massive trees all day, a chainsaw is the right tool. But if you are splitting your own firewood for home use, replacing physical work with a machine removes an important form of functional movement. Swinging an axe is not just about efficiency. It builds strength, coordination, timing, and endurance. When you outsource that work to a motor, you lose more than calories burned.

The same pattern shows up with footwear. Modern shoes are a form of technology. Highly cushioned, rigid, and expensive running shoes often weaken the feet rather than protect them. Minimal shoes or barefoot movement strengthens the foot, improves balance, and reconnects the body to the ground. Weak feet contribute to ankle, knee, hip, and even back problems. This is not theoretical. It is a biomechanical reality.

Back pain offers another clear example. Sitting for long periods weakens the glutes and the posterior chain. When those muscles atrophy, they stop doing their job. The body compensates elsewhere, and pain follows. This is not a mystery. It is the predictable outcome of removing movement from daily life.

All of this ties directly to an idea I once wrote about called the inner accountant. The body is efficient. If you do not use a muscle, it does not maintain it. That efficiency keeps us alive in harsh conditions, but it works against us in a world designed to minimize effort. When movement is optional, the body assumes it is unnecessary.

This is where indigenous ways of knowing matter. They are not nostalgic. They are practical systems that embed movement, effort, and skill into daily life. Tai chi, bushcraft, traditional food preparation, walking, carrying, lifting, and working with the hands all serve the same purpose. They keep the body honest.

The unifying idea is simple. Health is not created in the gym. It is created through daily interaction with the world. When technology removes that interaction, disease fills the gap.

The old ways were not anti-progress. They were pro-resilience. And in a time of chronic disease, they may be exactly what we need to remember.

From a chronic disease prevention perspective, tai chi and bushcraft address the same root problem: the gradual removal of meaningful movement from daily life. Conditions like diabetes, joint degeneration, chronic pain, and balance loss are not simply the result of poor choices; they are the predictable outcome of lives structured around comfort and efficiency. Tai chi restores coordination, balance, joint integrity, and nervous system regulation in a low-impact, accessible way. Bushcraft restores strength, load tolerance, and confidence through real, purposeful work. Together, they rebuild the physical capacities that modern life erodes—without requiring gyms, machines, or high-risk intensity. This is why these practices are not alternatives to public health efforts; they are foundational to them. They quietly reintroduce the kinds of movement, attention, and self-reliance that once prevented chronic disease before it needed to be treated.

The Difference Between Bushcraft and Survival That Nobody Talks About

I love bushcraft. I love the skill, the patience it demands, and the quiet satisfaction of making something useful with my hands. Carving spoons, reading grain, refining cuts, learning how wood responds to pressure and edge. It is deeply human work, and it feeds something important in me.

But over time, I have started to notice a difference between bushcraft and survival that nobody talks about.

Bushcraft can quietly let you forget your body. Bushcraft is highly skill-based. When you are good at it, efficiency replaces effort. Problems get solved with technique instead of strain. That is part of what makes it so enjoyable. You can work for hours in a focused, almost meditative state, feeling productive and grounded, without ever pushing your heart rate or demanding much from your legs or lungs.

The human body, though, is brutally honest. It only maintains what it needs. Muscle costs calories. Cardiovascular capacity costs calories. If those systems are not regularly demanded, the body lets them go. I have written about your inner accountant here. 

I noticed this very clearly recently. Over the past month, I carved about a dozen spoons. Long sessions. Deep focus. A lot of joy in the work. During that same stretch, I skipped hiking. When I finally went back out on the trail, the feedback was immediate. My legs felt weaker than they should have. My breathing was shorter. My lung capacity was not where it had been. Nothing dramatic, nothing injured. Just the body reminding me of what I had stopped asking it to do.

This is not a criticism of bushcraft. I respect it deeply, and I will never give it up. But I am also sixty years old, and do not have time to confuse skill with readiness.

When people talk about survival, they usually jump straight to extremes. Getting lost in the woods. Accidents. Severe weather. Emergency preparedness. Civil unrest. All of that matters, but it tends to distract from a more basic truth.

Survival is not primarily a craft problem. It is a capacity problem.

Before you can build a shelter, you have to reach the site. Before you can make a serious fire, you have to process and move fuel. Before you can help a downed hiker, you have to move your own body under stress, often while cold, tired, and scared.

Skill matters, but skill alone does not override emergencies. Cardiovascular capacity and muscular strength do.

Bushcraft often happens in controlled conditions. There is time. There is comfort. There is room to work slowly and beautifully. Survival rarely offers that. It shows up when conditions are bad and decisions are rushed, when everything in your body wants to stop or seek comfort.

That is why it is so easy to fall into the trap of beautiful work. You can spend hours carving a spoon, improving your technique, and feeling productive, while slowly letting go of the systems that actually keep you alive when things go sideways.

Cardio is not romantic. Cold-weather hiking is not cozy. High elevation effort does not feel meditative at first. When it is cold and snowy, and the wind is up, every signal in your body says to stay inside and be comfortable. That is exactly why it matters.

For me, the best cardio is getting out on a trail and pushing myself. Sometimes gently, sometimes hard. Sometimes, when I really do not want to go. That is not punishment. It is maintenance.

The same blind spot exists in tai chi. Tai chi is beautiful. It opens the body, sharpens awareness, and calms the nervous system. It is essential work. But if tai chi replaces cardio and strength instead of complementing them, you end up cultivating sensitivity without capacity. You feel more, but you can do less.

That is not balance.

The real relationship is simpler than people make it. Bushcraft, survival, tai chi, and fitness are not competing philosophies. They feed each other, but only if one is not allowed to replace the other.

Bushcraft refines skill.
Tai chi refines perception.
Cardio and strength maintain your ability to act.

Survival demands all of it.

If you had to reduce preparedness to one question, it would not be about tools or techniques. It would be this.

Can you move when it matters?

Everything else is secondary.

Carve the spoon. Practice the form. Enjoy the craft. Just do not skip the trail.

Because skill without capacity is comfort, and comfort is the first thing survival takes away.

Getting Off The Couch Is The Prime Directive of Survival

Before tools. Before skills. Before plans, gear lists, or fantasies of self reliance, there is one directive that governs survival training. Move. Act. Engage. Everything else is secondary.

Survival is usually imagined as a technical problem. People picture fire making, water purification, the right knife, the right pack, the right system. But most real world failures do not come from a lack of knowledge. They come from inaction.

People freeze. They hesitate. They wait for perfect conditions. They cling to comfort just a little too long. The couch is the real enemy, not because sitting is evil, but because inertia kills. If you cannot get yourself moving when things are uncomfortable, inconvenient, or unclear, no amount of skill will save you.

Movement is the first training skill. Not fitness. Not athletics. Not optimization. Movement is willingness. This is where Tai Chi belongs. Not as performance, not as self defense choreography, but as training the ability to initiate action while staying calm. Tai Chi teaches how to move without rushing, how to stay connected while stepping into uncertainty, and how to act without tension.

This is training, not a command to move blindly. Real survival sometimes requires staying put, breathing, observing, and letting panic pass. Tai Chi trains that as well. Stillness that is awake. Breath that regulates fear. A body that does not lock up under pressure. Preparedness is built by practicing movement so that stillness is a choice, not a freeze response.

This is why walking is such a powerful survival practice. Not because it is intense, but because it trains continuation. Walking forward, when it sucks! Survival favors the person who can continue forward or remain grounded without losing clarity.

When plans break down, when tools fail, when knowledge runs out, the body still remembers what to do. Stand up. Take a step. Or stay rooted and breathe. Engage the world in front of you with presence. That instinct, practiced daily through movement and stillness, is the real foundation of preparedness. Everything else comes after.

Tactics, Patience, and Tai Chi

Bill Waugh spent his life operating in environments where impatience got people killed.

Behind enemy lines, in surveillance, in tracking targets over months, he learned something most people miss.

Tactics are not about aggression.
They are about timing, listening, and restraint.

Waugh famously said:

“Heroes are men who have a plan, and who understand the plan is ever-changing and dependent on enemy action.”

That single line could be written on the wall of any Tai Chi school and still be correct.

Tai Chi, at its core, trains the same discipline. You enter a form with structure, but you never cling to it. The moment you force a movement, balance is lost. The moment you refuse to adjust, you’re already behind.

Waugh’s approach to tactics wasn’t speed or dominance. It was presence. He spent weeks watching before acting. He waited for patterns to reveal themselves. Listening came before movement.

Tai Chi calls this listening energy, but stripped of mysticism, it simply means this:
You don’t impose your will until the situation gives you information.

Another lesson from Waugh’s life is patience as an active state. He wasn’t waiting in a lazy way. He was constantly observing, calibrating, refining his understanding of terrain, behavior, and timing. That same patience shows up in Tai Chi when you settle your weight, regulate your breath, and feel for alignment instead of rushing to the next posture.

In both cases, stillness is not hesitation.
It is preparation.

Waugh adjusted constantly. Small shifts in position. Slight changes in routine. Nothing dramatic. Those micro-adjustments over time created survival.

Tai Chi does the same thing to the body and nervous system. Tiny corrections in posture and movement prevent collapse. Large, forced corrections create instability.

The overlap is simple and practical:

• Have a plan, but don’t worship it
• Listen longer than feels comfortable
• Move only when movement improves position
• Conserve energy
• Adjust early and quietly

Tai Chi doesn’t teach tactics in a military sense.
What it teaches is something more durable.

How to stay engaged without rushing.
How to act without panic.
How to wait without freezing.

Those are not philosophical ideas.
They are survival skills.

And they’re the same ones Bill Waugh trusted with his life.

A Man Caught in a Cultural Shift ( how I now see my father's life and death)

 

In the early 1960s, my father was an adopter of two things that would later become mainstream and then commodified: marijuana and crafts. He made handmade leather goods to sell. Items like jackets, bags, belts, and one small item in particular stand out in my memory: a leather pouch he called a pot stash. Bushcraft people today would recognize it as a kind of possibles bag, but his was made for weed, not flint and steel.

He was a deeply curious and active thinker. His shelves held books on Hinduism, Daoism, shelter building, and design. He was immersed in graphic design and interior design, always thinking visually, structurally, philosophically. Craft for him was not just making things. It was his worldview, identity, and resistance all rolled into one package.

During the hippie era, handmade goods were a reaction against the industrial machine of the United States. Making something with your hands was a statement of integrity. It said, "I am not just a consumer. I belong to a lineage older than factories."

But cultures shift.

When John Lennon was killed, something changed. When yuppie culture emerged, money, status, and ambition were polished into a uniform; my father cut his hair and tried to follow along. He began chasing financial success instead of craftsmanship. He leased a Mercedes-Benz. He opened a business in Manhattan that combined antiques with modern design. His heart was not fully in it, and he did not truly understand the game he was playing.

The business failed. He lost our family home. That collapse sent me down a difficult path of my own.

After that, he drank hard. He smoked heavily. Somewhere along the way, he lost his center.

For a long time, I carried resentment toward him. But now I see his life differently. I see him as someone crushed by a cultural transition he could not metabolize.

I think about early human stone tool makers that had mastered flint knapping and who understood the language of stone. Then copper arrives. Some adapt. Some do not. Some love the stone too much. They do not disappear because they lack skill. They disappear because the world moves on without caring what they were good at.

My father lived through a similar shift. Handmade leather goods were once a countercultural strength. Later, it became nostalgia, and then fashion. Then mass-produced again. Some people rode those waves successfully. Others never recovered.

He had three kids. And maybe handmade leather jackets were not the safest way to support a family under that kind of pressure. I understand that now. I have compassion where I once had judgment.

What is tragic is that not long after, handmade leather jackets came back into fashion. And even today, the bushcraft and mountain man movements never really disappeared. There has always been a quiet current of people who value hand skills, wood, steel, fire, and shelter. He could have found a way to stay rooted in his strengths. He almost did. But he did not trust them enough to endure the lean years.

That is the part that still hurts.

When I graduated high school, I wanted to be a famous painter more than anything. If there had been a devil offering a deal, I would have signed it. Instead, I took a different risk. I hitchhiked across the United States and found Taos. That changed everything.

Taos gave me space to keep my hands busy and my spirit intact. I found wood carving. I found bushcraft. I found Tai Chi. Those practices became ways of staying honest. Ways of keeping my soul tethered to something real. I still carve wood today. I am not successful as a seller. But I am still carving away. Ironically, when I arrived in Taos, I found a strong culture of sheepskin and leather goods makers. 

My father didn't have the vision or faith to look elsewhere. That is where I feel the lineage split and also where it reconnects.

My father lost his way because he could not identify what truly mattered to him as a human being. He believed money would restore meaning. It did not. He died early as a result of his drinking and smoking.

I do not tell this story to judge him. I tell it because I understand him now. He was not weak. He was displaced.

And maybe what I am doing, carving wood, practicing tai chi, and walking instead of running, is my way of staying on the narrow ridge he fell from. Not chasing success at the expense of integrity. Not abandoning craft when culture devalues it. Learning, slowly, to measure life not by applause or profit, but by whether I can still recognize myself in the work of my hands.

Humans Need Something to Do With Their Hands

 

Depression and anxiety are often talked about as personal failures or chemical imbalances that need to be corrected. But I think there’s another layer that rarely gets enough attention. For nearly all of human history, people were occupied for most of their waking hours with physical, tangible work. We grew food. We hunted. We built shelters. We made tools. We repaired what broke. Our survival depended on daily engagement with the physical world.

That reality has changed radically in a very short span of time. In the last fifty years, large portions of the population no longer need to do much with their bodies or their hands to survive. Yet paradoxically, we are more mentally overstimulated and stressed than ever.

I notice this very clearly in my own life. When I am the most anxious or depressed, it is almost always when I am sitting still, mentally spinning. My mind starts running endless scenarios, what-ifs, regrets, and imagined futures. None of it is productive. None of it is grounded. It’s just noise.

The moment I pick up a craft, something changes.

When I start carving wood, cooking, fixing something, or engaging in physical movement, the mental clutter quiets down. My attention narrows. The hands take over. The mind no longer has the bandwidth to spiral. It isn’t forced into silence; it is occupied.

Occupation as Regulation

This isn’t about productivity or hustle. It’s about regulation. Humans evolved to regulate their nervous systems through physical engagement with the world. Making, moving, lifting, shaping, walking, tending. These activities give the mind a place to rest because attention has somewhere to go.

I often think about autoimmune disease as a loose metaphor here. In overly sterile environments, the immune system sometimes loses its appropriate targets and begins attacking the body itself. I am not saying all autoimmune disease works this way, or that everyone with autoimmune illness is idle. But I do think the pervasiveness of sterile, low-engagement environments has consequences for biological systems that evolved in a very different context.

The mind may not be that different.

When it has nothing meaningful to do, it often turns inward and begins attacking itself. Rumination, self-criticism, catastrophic thinking. Not because the person is weak, but because the system is under-used in the way it evolved to function.

A World That Doesn’t Need You, But Still Stresses You

We now live in a strange contradiction. The world does not require much from our bodies, yet it demands constant mental vigilance. Emails. Deadlines. News cycles. Financial anxiety. Abstract stress with no physical outlet.

Unless you have Zen-level mental discipline, this is a brutal setup.

I wish my mind were strong enough to simply will its way through this. I do believe that kind of training is possible, and I work toward it. But I also think it’s important to be honest about what humans actually need. For most of history, we didn’t meditate our way out of stress. We worked it out through physical engagement.

We whittled. We cooked. We built. We repaired. I honestly don’t know if there has ever been a time when humans weren’t doing this, until now.

Keeping Your Head Together

This isn’t about the root cause of depression. It isn’t about dismissing therapy, medication, or deeper psychological work. It’s about something much more basic.

Keeping yourself occupied in a tangible way is a form of mental hygiene.

Using your hands calms the mind. Moving the body organizes attention. Making something creates feedback, satisfaction, and a sense of completion that abstract tasks rarely provide. Sometimes that turns into gifts. Sometimes it turns into skills. Occasionally, it even turns into a career. But that’s not the point.

The point is simpler.

Staying human in a world that increasingly asks you to be disembodied requires intention. Craft and physical activity are not hobbies in that context. They are stabilizers. They are ways of staying sane. They are ways of keeping your head together.

And for a species that evolved by doing, there might not be a better way to stay grounded.

Carving a Spoon and the Importance of Listening

Spoon carving has taught me a lot about balance—specifically, the balance between direction and intent.

When you decide to carve a spoon, certain things are non-negotiable. It needs a cavity. It has to fit comfortably in the mouth. It has to feel good in the hand. It needs to be light enough to use, not clunky or awkward. In that sense, form really does follow function. There are clear outcomes that have to be met.

But within those constraints, there’s another force at work: the wood itself.

Most of the time, I don’t get to choose the “ideal” carving wood. I work with what I have access to. Right now, that’s Russian elm, a beautiful but stubborn wood that doesn’t shave easily and doesn’t forgive mistakes. It doesn’t like symmetry. It doesn’t like being forced. Because of that, I have to compromise my original vision. I have to let go of perfection. The grain, the knots, the tension in the fibers all start to dictate the direction.

The wood tells you how it wants to be carved, if you’re willing to listen.

That’s one reason I don’t always connect with highly detailed carvings made from very soft, cooperative woods. They can be impressive, even technically masterful, but when the material is so malleable that you can impose anything onto it, something gets lost. My preference is to work in collaboration with the material, not domination over it. I like hearing what the wood has to say.

What’s interesting is how closely this mirrors the way I like working with people—especially kids.

I don’t believe in dictating outcomes or forcing people into a shape that fits my idea of success. I prefer guidance over control. Structure with flexibility. Listening over imposing. This feels especially important to me as a non-Native person working with Native American children, given the history of boarding schools and the horrific attempts to erase culture by making children “malleable.” That history matters. It demands a different approach.

There are still goals. There are still outcomes. But they come second to agency. The kids guide the process more than we often allow in institutional settings. Just like the wood, they aren’t raw material to be shaped; they’re active participants in becoming.

Spoon carving reinforces that lesson every time I pick up a knife.

I love carving spoons because they’re functional. They aren’t abstract objects. They have a purpose and a set of criteria they must meet. And yet, within those limits, there’s infinite variation. A handmade eating spoon carries character. You feel it while carving: the feedback between your hands, the blade, and the grain. Every small decision matters.

That’s very different from a mass-produced spoon. Whether it’s metal or wood, machine-made utensils are dictated, repeatable, and anonymous. They work, but they don’t speak.

As we move deeper into an era of AI, CNC machines, and automated design, that distinction matters to me. Spoon carving is a moment-to-moment conversation. It requires attention, humility, and responsiveness. You adjust constantly. You listen. You make thousands of tiny decisions based on feel, resistance, and feedback.

At least for now, that kind of listening still belongs to human hands.

And maybe that’s the deeper wisdom of spoon carving, not just making something useful, but practicing how to pay attention, how to compromise without giving up purpose, and how to work with the world instead of trying to overwrite it.