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DIY isn’t exactly easy, as everyone who’s ever spent a while learning how to fix up an old car, or deal with some complex and dangerous job in the home, such as rewiring, can attest to.
For that reason, no doubt, DIY skills aren’t very widespread, and they’re certainly less widespread than they were in the past.
This is thanks, in large part, to the fact that life is more convenient today than it’s ever been, and we have better communications than we ever have before. With the internet at our disposal, we can search up every tradesman who lives in our city within minutes, and make a booking on the spot.
To fix things yourself, on the other hand, requires time, sweat, and research — difficult things to muster when you could be watching TV instead.
Of course, if you have no idea where to start and have a complex issue, or the work is very dangerous, it’s often worth your time calling up a plumber or other professional. In all other cases though, it’s well worth your time honing your DIY skills.
Here are a few reasons why DIY can be worth all the trouble.
It forces you to engage more mindfully with different elements of your life
It’s not much of a stretch to say that most of us take the majority of our blessings and conveniences in life for granted. To a large extent, this is due to our disconnection from the workings of the different systems in our lives.
We eat meat mindlessly and without much appreciation, because we don’t have to rear, butcher, and prepare our own animals.
We feel entitled to attractive garden features because we pay other people to create them for us.
We feel entitled to central heating because we don’t have to go and chop firewood to feed a burner stove.
Practicing DIY is a way of forcing yourself to engage more mindfully with the different elements of your life, in a way that will increase the appreciation and respect you have for everything around you.
It pushes you out of your comfort zone, expands your sense of what you can achieve, and builds character
It’s specifically the fact that DIY is often difficult and uncomfortable that provides one of its major benefits — namely that it pushes you out of your comfort zone, builds character, and expands your sense of what you can achieve.
Every time you are forced to engage with something difficult, you have to consciously decide to keep going. To research the next step. To try again. To put in the extra hours.
Although the scale is completely different, it’s this same sense of “self-overcoming” that drives people to climb mountains.
It makes you more self-sufficient, and capable of being useful to others
The clearest and most directly pragmatic benefit of doing DIY is, of course, that it makes you more self-sufficient, and also more capable of helping and being useful to others.
If you know how to fix a damaged tap, unblock a drain, or do some drywalling, you are that much more able to manage your own business without paying someone else to make a trip out to your home and resolve an issue for you.
You are also, then, better able to be the kind of person your loved ones can rely on for help, rather than someone who stands by in confusion.
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