The Mundane Philosopher
Philosophy, Travel Photography and Independent Lifestyle for common people like you and me
Master of Puppets – creation, involvement and attachment
Master of Puppets – Geppetto and Pinnochio
Creation, involvement and attachment
Visiting Geppetto and Pinnochio at the Miniature Museum of Taipei made me reflect about the act of creation and the deep attachment to those things we are involved in creating.
Wood-carver Geppetto is creator. Having created Pinnocchio out of a wood block with his own hands he becomes literally the father of his own creation. He loves his prodigy son, as imperfect as Pinnocchio may be.
This often happens when we create, no matter if it is writing a song, setting up a business, writing a computer program, taking photos and many other things. As soon as we become active doing things, we take ownership of the things we create. Even if the result is flawed like Pinocchio, we still love it, because we did it by own hands. We prefer it to things others people created.
Remember the last IKEA furniture you bought and built? Surely not the high-end product by itself and even less when we have finished it according the less-then-perfect instructions coming with those pieces. After we succeeded in building that piece of functional furniture we feel good about ourselves and the product we made. We could have bought the table, the infamously famous Billy bookshelves, the “you name it”, ready-made with better workmanships than ours, even at a cheaper economic cost if we factor in the time we invest into building it and the opportunity cost coming with it. Still – that piece of pre-produced, finished-by-me product is our own creation.
Of course this irrational perception of goods made by our own hand has interesting results like ownership bias, not-invented-here syndromes – as found in many corporate environments and even between nations – and others less positive sides. And of course this human trait can be exploited in product marketing when you just change a product into something where the buyer is more involved into the creation process like ready-made-cakes where you just add the egg instead of having a whole cake out of the box, or the selection of the colour, equipment and accessories of your new car. On a positive note of course we all feel more attached to those things we buy or half-create.
There is another side to it: Life is – among others – the choice between a more active versus a more passive one. In a more active life you tend to create things whereas in a more passive one you consume things other people created. I will delve into this distinction in later blogs as it is a very wide and deep topic, as well as the question of a good balance between creation and consumption.
So much for today. I may edit this post a bit more later or create completely new posts. But as you can see, there is so much to the topic of life, creation in this case, that it may fill up an entire blog which I intend to extend more and more with time. Later then, I will try to summarize those posts into more condensed forms.
The Mundane Philosopher(still in Taipei, where it is raining today)
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