The Process is the Juice

"No. I don't care." The simple phrase coming from my wife somewhat took me aback. I was showing her the latest addition to our home server. I wasn't expecting a particularly strong enthusiasm from her in any case. To her, I was reinventing the wheel. Adding yet another solution to a solved problem. Sure, I tell her with each new service that "now we don't have to use this other thing." Some of these solutions, these reinventions, have been for some sort of financial or feature benefit. A network share and file server replaces Dropbox. A photo library replaces Google Photos. A media server replaces bluray players and discs. All of them, to some degree though, are met with one question:

Is all this work really worth it?

At first, I was dismissive. If the work wasn't worth it, would I be doing it? The end goal is important. In this very specific example, it's digital independence. It's not paying hundreds of dollars a year for services that lock me in and tie me down, and of course the people in my life benefit from this too. AdGuard blocking ads on every device in the house has been a smash hit. The peace of mind of reliable and secure backups without that data being scraped by Google has been really nice.

But with every container, every service, every experiment, I began to think more about the question. Is it even the right question? Every time I feel like I hit equilibrium with the server, I find something new to do with it. A new tweak. A different application. A new service. More things I can host myself to eliminate my need for the tech giants. I am obviously not working on this thing with any sort of specific goal in mind. The work isn't worth it. I'm not trading anything here. I'm not ascribing value to my labor. No. The work is the entire point of it.

Process. Something about the process works for me. It makes me think of jigsaw puzzles. Not in that building out my self hosted infrastructure is particularly puzzle-like. No. I'm thinking about why a person might build jigsaw puzzles. You spend time, sometimes hours, putting together all the little pieces, but once the puzzle is done and on the table in front of you, there's some satisfaction, yes, but there's also a slight disappointment. It's over. The process is done and the jigsaw puzzle needs broken up and put back away. I feel the same way about most of my other hobbies. I like the act of taking photos a lot more than the act of going back to look at them. The feeling of carving into a piece at the lathe is electric, but my completed projects sit in drawers and boxes, forgotten and mundane.

Why does the process feel so much better than the accomplishment? When I'm turning something at the lathe, the thing being created feels so much more alive and interesting to me. While it's coming into being, the project feels like it is filled with the unlimited possibility of creativity. It doesn't matter how it comes out to some degree because I brought it forth from a featureless block of wood or acrylic.

But that endless possibility doesn't exist in the same way when I'm just plodding away at my home server does it? I don't think so. It's more of a satisfaction of organization. Everything goes in its rightful place and everything clicks together in such a way as to become a little clockwork mechanism. Here, the gears are of course digital, but I imagine the feeling I get when I send a test through a convoluted chain of software and get a positive result is not unlike a watchmaker seeing their creation click to life, keeping perfect time for the first time.

Another, perhaps more psychological view is that I love the feeling of rapid growth that is attached to attaining any new skill. Every art takes a lifetime to master, but you can get pretty okay at a lot of things just by practicing a little bit consistently. I know I'm not great at a great many things, but that just means there's plenty for me to choose from when I feel like I want to get better at something. It also helps when I get stuck somewhere in one hobby. There's three more that I can work on while my subconscious unpicks the knot.

Maybe that's also why I love to share my process for this site so much. The site being in a finished state isn't the point. the site being nice and pretty with all the features I could want isn't the point. The point is the process. The endless refinement and polishing of both my skill as a writer or developer becomes the thing that feels the most fun and interesting to me, so naturally it's the thing that I want to share with you, the reader the most.

Trust the process.