Ellen Dissanayake's The Pleasure of Meaning and Making (1995) is about the positive impacts using your hands and creating things have on us. She explains it is an inherent primal trait.
"Such specialized anatomical and cognitive abilities, and their emotional/social correlates, indicate that surely the use and making of things manually--that is, handwork--is something we were born to do."
"One could say that nothing recognizably human is achieved without hand use--writing, painting, carving, sewing, building. If we haven't realized this before, it is only because in our lives machines do these things for us--but until very recently, human lives were made by human hands."
"Early anthropologists called us Homo faber--the making, or toolmaking animal. The earliest humans were the earliest craftspersons: to be human was to make. It can even be said that, unlike other species, we use tools not just functionally but, even as babies, to leave our mark on the world, to achieve our ideas. The ability to use tools lets us leave a permanent trace of our actions and thoughts for others to see."
“There is an inherent pleasure in making. We might call this joie de faire (like joie de vivre) to indicate that there is something important, even urgent, to be said about the sheer enjoyment of making something exist that didn’t exist before, of using one’s own agency, dexterity, feelings and judgement to mould, form, touch, hold and craft physical materials, apart from anticipating the fact of its eventual beauty, uniqueness or usefulness.”
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