There’s a moment in almost every project where the sensible thing to do is stop.
It usually arrives around the point where you realize the thing you’ve committed to involves cutting out ninety-six individual paper leaves, and that each one needs a name on it, and that the names have to be legible from four feet away in a dim room, and that two of the guests have the same first name and will need telling apart without either of them feeling like a footnote.
A printed seating chart takes eleven minutes. It’s fine. Nobody has ever been upset by one.
We cut the leaves.
Worth being careful here, because there’s a version of this argument that’s insufferable: the one where handmade things are morally superior, mass-produced things are spiritually empty, and anybody who buys a printed sign is complicit in something. That’s not it. Printed signs are great. We’ve made printed signs. The paper leaves weren’t better in any measurable way. They took eleven hours instead of eleven minutes, and half of them ended up in a trash bag at the end of the night.
But here’s what actually happened. People took photographs of the leaves. Not of the room, not of the tables. Of the wall of leaves, and then of their own leaf, and then of their leaf next to somebody else’s. One person put theirs in their pocket.
That’s the whole return on eleven hours. Somebody put a piece of paper in their pocket.
We think it works like this: a handmade thing is legible as a decision. You can see that somebody chose the shape and cut it and wrote on it, that the choosing took time, and that the time was spent on you specifically. A printed sign is also a decision, but the decision is invisible. The evidence has been sanded off.
Handmade work is slightly unreasonable on purpose, then. The unreasonableness is the message. If it were efficient it wouldn’t say anything.
Which isn’t an argument for doing everything the hard way. Most things should be done the easy way, and we do them the easy way, and we sleep fine. It’s an argument for picking one thing per occasion and being genuinely stupid about it.
Ninety-six leaves. One pocket. Worth it.