On Making Things — Manu Dubey

I’ve been thinking about the feeling you get when you finish making something.

Not a big thing. A small thing - a short piece of writing, a function that works, a sketch, a meal that turned out well. There’s a specific feeling to it that I don’t have a good word for. Satisfaction is close but too calm. Pride is close but too loud.

It’s something more like: the world is slightly more real now than it was before.

I think this is why people make things even when no one will see them. The audience is almost beside the point. What matters is that the thing exists now and it didn’t before, and you’re the reason.

There’s a version of this thinking that sounds grandiose - every act of creation is significant, the universe is richer for it. I don’t mean it that way. I mean something smaller and more personal: making things is a way of leaving a mark inside your own experience, independent of whether anyone else notices.

I built this site partly for that reason. Not because I have an audience or expect one. Just because it felt right to have a place that was mine, where things I make can live.

That’s enough for now.