Don’t Commoditize My Craft

For most of my professional life, I believed growth had one obvious direction.

Up.

Up meant scale.
Up meant volume.
Up meant more distribution, more visibility, more units moving outward.

I was trained inside an industry where scale is the organizing principle. In corporate food, growth is measured in tonnage and territory. You standardize. You engineer consistency. You design systems that produce the same outcome again and again.

It is an extraordinary machine.

But machines depend on sameness.

When something becomes a commodity, it becomes interchangeable. That is the definition. A commodity is valued for its reliability and replaceability. One unit must be indistinguishable from the next. Predictable. Frictionless.

Commodification is the process of sanding down particularity until it fits smoothly into a larger system.

Efficient? Absolutely.

Neutral? Not quite.

Philosophically, commodification asks us to detach the object from the person who made it. Marx called this alienation — the separation between maker and made. The product becomes abstract. It is no longer an extension of someone’s lived energy; it is an entry on a spreadsheet.

You do not need to read theory to feel the difference between something made and something produced at scale. The difference is tactile. It is atmospheric.

Craft resists interchangeability. It carries variability. Mood. Constraint. Attention. The mark of a specific human at a specific moment.

I do call what I do “production.” I am not pretending otherwise. I formulate, I batch, I standardize where necessary. But my production is dialed down just enough to allow flow to happen naturally rather than being forced into throughput targets.

There is a difference between rhythm and pressure.

Pressure demands uniformity.

Rhythm allows presence.

And presence matters more than we admit.

In Medical Qigong, there is an understanding that energy — qi — moves through intention and attention. When a practitioner places their hands on someone, the exchange is subtle. It is not theatrical. It is not dramatic. It is directed awareness. Care embodied.

Across cultures, many healing traditions circle this same idea: health is not only chemistry, it is movement. In acupuncture, Ayurveda, Reiki, even in the language of modern somatics, there is an emphasis on flow — of qi, prana, bioelectric signals, circulation, nervous system regulation. Different vocabularies, same intuition: when energy stagnates, we feel it; when it moves cleanly, we feel that too. You can interpret that metaphorically or physiologically. Either way, the principle holds. Attention influences state. State influences output. And whatever state we bring into what we create does not simply vanish — it travels with it, subtly, quietly, into the hands of the person who receives it.

The principle is simple: where attention goes, energy follows.

When I make product, I am not mechanically assembling parts. I am paying attention. My nervous system is involved. My breath is involved. My hands are involved. There is love in that process — not sentimental love, but focused, deliberate care.

Energy is transferred in small ways. Through touch. Through intention. Through the state of the person doing the work.

You do not have to believe in mystical frameworks to understand this. Think about food made by someone who is rushed and resentful versus food made by someone who is grounded and attentive. The ingredients may be identical. The experience is not.

That difference — subtle, abstract, impossible to quantify — is a form of energy healing.

Even in the smallest way.

When craft is pushed toward mass scale, that layer thins. Not because scaled products are evil, but because attention gets redistributed. It moves from the object to the system. From the tactile to the logistical.

You can scale a process.

You cannot scale embodied presence without changing its nature.

Living with fibromyalgia sharpened this understanding for me. Energy is not metaphorical in my life. It is finite and measurable in very real ways. There are days when my body sets the terms. No negotiation.

For a long time, I thought choosing health before wealth meant sacrificing ambition. That if I was not driving outward expansion, I was somehow opting out of seriousness.

But seriousness does not require self-abandonment.

Choosing health over wealth is not a rejection of prosperity. It is a recalibration of what prosperity means.

We can have both health and wealth. But wealth is not exclusively monetary. Wealth can be time. Capacity. Nervous system stability. The ability to wake up and not feel like your own business is consuming you.

When I stopped responding to the pressure to scale, something surprising happened.

The work improved.

Not because it got bigger. Because it got truer. There was more space for refinement. More room for attention. More coherence between what I say and what I make.

I stopped trying to turn something particular into something universally palatable.

Commodification flattens difference. Craft preserves it.

Some businesses are built to dominate shelf space. Some are built to serve millions. That path is legitimate.

Mine is built to remain human-sized.

Not small. Human.

Human-sized means the pace respects the body doing the work. It means production without frenzy. It means systems that support flow rather than override it. It means allowing the product to carry the imprint of attention.

In a culture that equates growth with expansion, restraint can look unimpressive.

But clarity rarely shouts.

I chose health before wealth.

And here is the quiet surprise: we can have both. Wealth is not only money. Wealth is capacity. It is steadiness. It is being able to wake up and not feel hunted by your own ambition. It is work that does not fracture you.

Because of that, I feel wealthy.

Not because I optimized for mass appeal.
Not because I chased volume.
But because I built something that does not require me to abandon my body or dilute my craft in order to survive.

And there is something else.

The world right now is loud. Abstract. Algorithmic. Much of it feels detached from texture, from consequence, from place. Narratives spin. Values blur. Everything is content. Everything is optimized.

Making something with my hands — slowly, deliberately — is one of the last things that makes unambiguous sense to me.

Oil, heat, time, attention. Cause and effect. Material responding to touch. A formula behaving according to chemistry. A bar curing because water evaporates. Reality asserting itself.

My craft is the last bit of sense I have in a world that often makes no sense.

It is honest. It does not lie to me. It does not scale beyond what is possible. It obeys physics. It responds to care.

I will not turn that into something interchangeable.

Not because I am anti-growth.
Not because scale is immoral.
But because this — this coherence between body, material, and intention — is worth protecting.

And protecting what makes sense in a senseless world feels like the most rational choice of all.