The Friction of the Strop

The leather strop felt cool and slightly resistant, pulling against the fine edge of the mortising slick. Schhh-thck. Schhh-thck. It’s a mindless rhythm, the kind of repetitive, demanding task that requires all your attention but none of your calculation. I was focused entirely on achieving that mirror polish on the bevel, a pointless exercise considering this tool hadn’t cut anything substantial in maybe 44 years.

That’s the core of it, isn’t it? The friction. The unbearable, modern demand that every single movement, every precise application of effort, must ultimately lead to a transaction. Why waste 4 minutes making a 234-year-old tool marginally sharper than it needs to be when you could be logging into an app, generating content, or refining that “side hustle” pitch?

I catch myself doing it all the time. The pressure is insidious. It whispers that if you’re good at something, you are morally obligated to sell it. If you spend 44 hours perfecting a skill, those hours are wasted unless they yield at least $474. We’ve collectively internalized this algorithmic valuation of human existence, judging the integrity of a pursuit solely by its ability to generate passive income.

The Currency of Truth: River E.

My old friend, River E., deals with this kind of non-monetary value assessment constantly, though her currency is truth, not dollars. River is a fire cause investigator. Her job isn’t to tally the cost of the damage-the insurance adjusters handle that brutal column of numbers. Her job is to understand the origin, the exact, precise reason a fire started.

She studies the ghosts of heat signatures, the precise angle of a collapse, the way metal warps. It’s highly technical, incredibly demanding work, rooted in detailed observation. She told me once, staring into a burned-out basement, that the most important evidence often exists in the least valuable places-a micro-fracture on a discarded cigarette lighter, the specific char pattern beneath a cheap carpet. Things that cost maybe $4 to replace hold the entire story.

She has to resist the urge to jump to the easy, expensive conclusion (faulty wiring, big payoff). She has to pursue the tiny, ugly truth. That’s what pure effort is: pursuing truth without regard for the financial payoff.

Structure for Fragile Passions

This is where the capitalist mindset betrays us. We think organization is only necessary for scalable businesses, for maximizing profit channels. But the passions that demand the most structure are often the ones that yield zero financial return. They need that framework precisely because they are fragile, personal, and easily neglected in the face of “real work.”

If you have a vast collection of non-sellable antique buttons, or if you meticulously track the genealogy of obscure South American orchids-if you don’t organize it, you lose the mastery. For managing all those intricate details, the endless cataloging of things that only matter to you, tools that provide rigorous structure without demanding commercialization are lifelines.

I remember her showing me how she cataloged all the findings from that notorious warehouse fire-the one they called the “4-alarm headache”-using something specifically designed for micro-inventory. If you’re serious about protecting the integrity of your personal, non-commercial pursuit, you have to be just as rigorous as someone running a major enterprise. You need a dedicated system. And frankly, after trying a dozen messy spreadsheet solutions, I finally realized that sometimes you need the right digital tool for the job of protecting your analog passions. Something like the Closet Assistant. It’s about creating a personal expertise archive, not an e-commerce site.

The Contradiction of Effort

This tension is exactly where we live. We crave the ephemeral, the digital, the easily scalable, but we secretly understand that the deepest meaning resides in the highly specific, hard-won, analog effort. We criticize the hyper-focus on profit, arguing passionately that hobbies must remain unsullied, yet I still track the time I spend writing articles like this, worried about whether the effort justifies the attention. That’s the contradiction. We hate the metric, but we desperately need the measurement to feel validated.

And here is the difficult truth: Sometimes, the only way to genuinely honor the effort you put into something-the 1,234 hours of practice, the 4 years spent collecting the materials-is to accept that it will never pay the rent.

Some things must remain sacredly unprofitable.

This isn’t about being inefficient. It’s about defining efficiency differently. River isn’t trying to be inefficient when she painstakingly photographs every minute detail of a scene, knowing 99% of those photos will be irrelevant. She is maximizing the probability of truth. Her efficiency is measured by precision, not speed or capital gain.

If you are pursuing mastery, you must accept wasted effort, because the wasted effort is the purification process. The 234 failures that precede the single, elegant success aren’t mistakes; they are tuition.

The Failure that Becomes Success

The relevance of this contrarian angle feels urgent right now, especially as burnout rates spike. People are exhausted not just because they work long hours, but because their *leisure* has been co-opted. The moment relaxation becomes preparation for the next income stream, it ceases to be restorative.

I remember once trying to teach myself wood carving specifically to sell the resulting spoons and bowls online. I got reasonably good-good enough to sell them for maybe $44 apiece. But the pressure to batch produce, to standardize, meant I stopped experimenting with the bizarre, fractal shapes I actually wanted to make. I replaced the quiet joy of discovery with the anxiety of inventory tracking and customer service. I failed spectacularly at scaling, which was the greatest success of the whole ordeal. It taught me that my personal threshold for monetization is incredibly low; that I prefer being good at something useless than mediocre at something profitable.

The Perfect Edge and Ultimate Freedom

Think back to the mortising slick, resting now on the felt. Its edge is perfect. It will likely sit in the tool chest for another 4 years before it’s needed for a complex tenon, and when that time comes, I’ll spend another 4 minutes re-polishing it. It is effort deployed purely for the sake of quality, for the inherent satisfaction of having reached the limit of what is possible with hand and steel.

That, ultimately, is the deeper meaning. It’s about maintaining a sacred space where the metrics of Wall Street are irrelevant, where the value of an object is determined by the effort required to master its care, and the story it holds. River doesn’t investigate fires for profit; she investigates them to honor the truth. We should approach our passions with the same devotion. Find something that demands 1,444 hours of focused, painstaking effort, and then fight tooth and nail to keep the price tag off of it.

Conclusion: Redefining Efficiency

This isn’t about being inefficient. It’s about accepting that true mastery requires resources (time, focus, effort) that the market cannot or will not repay. The devotion to the polish of the mortising slick, the meticulous archival of unrelated data, the preservation of a handwritten recipe-these are acts of defining value internally, rather than externally.

Protect that space. It is the last frontier of uncoerced human attention.