I spent June and July assembling IKEA conference tables.
After many hours—spent in a virtual tunnel, cavern, grotto! of pure, unadulterated concentration—after various sizes of Allen wrenches had worn blisters onto my thumbs—when I was done completing the endless, wordless assembly steps for the Mittzon/Kloppas but not really done—I had to lie on the dusty floor under the tables, peering up in the dim light for vacancies in which to insert all the extra screws I held in my hand, praying a few (dozen) missing pieces of hardware wouldn’t cause the birch slabs to collapse, or at least not while I was still down there.
It’s not just the tables. One afternoon I sat atop a red refrigerator, wearing my husband’s XL tshirt and painting the ceiling of a break room blue because, well, I had changed my mind about the pink. When the door to the office bathroom caught on the paper towel dispenser, I jerked the dispenser out of the plaster wall, grunting like a cage fighter, then figured out how to use a power drill and installed a new one. Inspired by this, I returned my husband’s drill to the basement and bought my own.
Just today, I hauled an old sink to the curb, slid an enormous, dangerous slice of mirror off the bathroom wall, and picked up a dead roach by its one remaining leg—all while my eight-year-old twins made friendship bracelets, cross-legged on the shag rug. All summer I’ve scoured the city’s secondhand markets for cheap-but-cool vintage lamps and velvet chairs in improbable hues. I’ve earned first-name status with the guy at Sherwin-Williams, painstakingly notched VISA and ADT stickers off the front window with a razor blade, and managed not to vomit while wiping decades of slime off a toilet before replacing the yellowed plastic seat with a shiny white one.
I’m turning an old State Farm office into a space for writers.
Picture, if you will, Dunder Mifflin, Inc. When I first saw the place, it was all shades of tan, featureless save the life-sized cardboard cut-out of “State Farm Jake” in the corner, whose crewneck sweater contributed a spark of State Farm red. On the dry erase board were the words “Good Neighbor Notes,” a few sad Post-Its floating in the white space. The ceiling fans, mantel, and budget window blinds had never, ever been dusted.
But now! Now the walls are blush pink, teal green, lavender, and denim blue. Living, green pothos trails from the mantle. Colorful textiles dot the burnt orange sofa and emerald velvet chairs. An antique Olivetti typewriter waits on the desk.
It has been a summer of making.
The fact that I have been gleefully abandoning my family in the evenings to drive across town and paint a hallway or assemble a chair has me thinking.
Why, for all the unacknowledged sweat and drudgery and toil I have expended, for all the chipped fingernail polish and dusty sneakers and that one expensive running sock I ruined by stepping into a tray of paint, why has all of this—even the replacing of the toilet seat—been so. damn. fun?
Truly, I don’t know. It is nice to make progress on things, to take ownership of a place and see it come together. But does that really explain the finger-tingling delight I’ve been feeling while sanding sheetrock, more fun than I’ve had in recent memory?
About six months ago, I knew I had to get out of the bad news funk the whole internet seems to be in. I tried to narrow the scope of the problems, to come up with something actionable. Huge swaths of the world feel unreachable to me, unchangeable. I asked myself, What is mine?
Yes, Rome is burning. But what is mine?
Yes, the past has been dire and the future is, perhaps, bleak. But what is mine?
When I asked myself this question in this particular way, I was surprised to find that I had some clarity. I came up with a few ideas. I wrote them down.
One of those ideas was this co-work space for writers and creatives in my city. Once I decided to take the risk, I found a place in three days.
It’s silly, right? AI will be doing our jobs in six months anyway, so betting on the creative writers is probably unwise or at least unimportant. In the grand scheme of things, my idea seems frivolous.
But the grand scheme is not mine.
In the teeny, tiny scheme of my city, my skills, my resources, and my energy, this feels very important. This matters to me.
Nearly everything I’ve done to get this place ready is a thing that, until a couple months ago, fell into the category of Things I Do Not Do. I’d never literally asked myself if I had the skills (and the stomach) to replace a toilet seat, but for the past decade I’ve reacted with subtle resignation toward most acts of physical labor. When you’re married to a man who is six-foot-four and built like Travis Kelce, you don’t often reach for a screwdriver, is all I’m saying.
You know what’s fun? What’s fun is doing a thing you didn’t think you could do. A thing you never even thought about doing, like installing a flag on the front of an office building. What’s fun is surprising yourself.
What’s fun is doing something small instead of nothing big.
Yesterday I was a person who did not own a screwdriver, and today I am a person with a toolbox in the back of my SUV. Hell yes! That’s fun.
A few weeks ago, I was a person who had never made a three-tiered caramel cake, and then my mom gave me a cookbook and now I am a person who has made a three-tiered caramel cake. Fun!
The “IKEA Effect” is the idea that people assign greater value to self-made products, like IKEA furniture, which notoriously requires tremendous effort to assemble.
Coined in a Harvard paper 15 years ago, the principle underlying the IKEA Effect is that “labor leads to love.” Like overgrown kids with macaroni noodle necklaces, we humans are proud of what we make. Inordinately so.
Okay, but here’s what I’ve been wondering about.
What if you could have the IKEA Effect about your whole life?
What if, at the end of it, you were a little delusional about the value of your life?
Because it wasn’t easy and the directions were unclear and you felt kind of lost most of the time, like lying on your back with a bunch of screws in your hand, but you MADE it? You made your life, the best you could, even though it turned out wobbly.
I don’t know. That sounds pretty good to me. I have this insatiable need to blame someone else, all the time, whenever something turns out imperfect. But when I’m in the office alone, making the table alone, there is nobody else to blame. The table turns out wobbly, but instead of wanting to blame someone for what’s wrong, I’m proud of what’s right. And, as I have said, I’m having fun.
Obviously we can’t “make” every aspect of our lives; our lives are not IKEA tables, and we can’t self-make our way into another reality. I’m not even talking about quitting the job you hate or leaving your marriage or moving to another neighborhood. I’m talking about, inside the many parameters we all have, working to make things. Literally.
Make a salad with a tomato you grew. Buy a hammer and hang a photograph you took. Paint your wall a weird color. Heck, make a TikTok instead of watching one.
Love something and then make it, make something and then love it, love something because you made it, make something because you loved it. It’s all the same: love, curiosity, creativity, craft.
Why don’t we make more pieces of our lives?
Maybe because, like the mother who receives the macaroni necklace, inevitably someone else is going to look at the stuff we’re making and be like, “Meh.” Someone is going to criticize our efforts, call us cringe. It might even be objectively true that our efforts are lame.
But who cares?
Because we makers are perpetually under the spell of the IKEA Effect!
Which means that what they see as wonky or amateur or stupid looks to us like something amazing! ✨
Problem. Solved.
Tomorrow, I will drive my middle schooler three hours round-trip to cheerleading camp. I will return another daughter’s saxophone to the place from which I rented it, where I will pay three months of late fees. I will unload our two dishwashers, definitely more than once.
In other words, I will do a whole lot of things I do not want to do.
But at some point, I will sneak over to the old State Farm office, and I will tighten a screw or measure a wall or fluff a pillow, and I will be giddy about the little bit of my life I am making.
If that’s delusional, I’m here for it.
You contain multitudes, Lindsey! I love what you’re doing and saying.
I love this, and have already shared with two creative friends. So much to think about. Thanks!