There is something to be said for handicraft and the time and effort that goes into it. I really enjoy doing HTML by hand. The tags and the Notepad document might look like one hell of a mess, but turn it into a Firefox/Internet Explorer/etc. page and you've got yourself a pretty nifty website. It reminds me of those decoder markers I used as a kid to reveal pictures in something that looked like a black hole on paper.
But once I really get into it, stare at the screen, and sweat it out for several hours, I think, "Wow...as fun as this is, it's taking way too long. And this is probably the seventeenth time I've changed my font." Then I go off on a tangent and think of all the other things we do that are unnecessary because someone/something else will do it for you. There are some things I will let slide into that realm (i.e. not laundering everything by hand, hot water, light bulbs), but come on... there are still those things we tough out the hard way because it's more fun, rewarding, masochistic (hey, to each his own), or tasty (refer to my previous entry).
Again, coming back around to my main point, there is a threshold after which point the costs outweigh the benefits when you're doing something with your own two hands. Why sit and rub two sticks together when you can turn on the stove top (camping trips excluded)? Our day-to-day existence doesn't permit this kind of hard work with its slower-paced, blood, sweat, and tears mentality. We want efficiency because there's always something else that needs to get done. We want to see where any of our effort is getting us, and we want to see it now. Results have always been important, but it seems like now we want results to come before everything else. Hey, when it comes to homework, I don't argue that point so much, but it does make one wonder about the state of humanity's input/output... what we want, where we're going, and how much effort we're willing to put in to see it all happen.
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