I. The Architecture of Ghosts
For years, I was a master of the weightless. My life's physical boundary was defined by the high-frequency hum of server racks and the cold, blue light of the "Machine." I was the Problem Solving Expert. My specific talent was a form of digital alchemy: I worked with a business automation platform, a complex web of logic that existed purely to eliminate human interaction. I could make that software dance, weaving invisible threads that connected databases to spreadsheets to bank accounts, ensuring that everything moved faster, leaner, and more invisibly.
I built digital cathedrals that occupied no space, and for a while, the Machine rewarded me bountifully. I was working 100-hour weeks fuelled by the easy mode money that flows when you are the only one who can fix the unfixable. But while my scripts were becoming more efficient, I was becoming a disaster. I had ballooned to 128kg, living in a body that had been forgotten by its owner, a physical shell that existed only to support a brain that solved abstract problems.
The stress wasn't just mental; it was an atmospheric pressure. It was a nebulous cloud of staff, wages, and the frantic, hollow urgency of a business that produced nothing you could actually hold. I had "friends" who were like the code I wrote: high-performance in the right conditions, but ultimately without substance. Our relationships were built on the "up-time" of my bank account. When the signal was strong, the room was full.
But digital signals are fragile. When the money began to dry up and the business shifted from "easy mode" to a grinding, impossible "difficult mode," the signal began to vanish. I watched as years of supposed connection dissolved into the ether. There was no physical anchor to hold them. It was a realization that hit with the force of a physical blow: I had built a life not on pillars of salt and sand, but pillars of nothing at all.
II. The Lunacy and the Red Dust
The end did not come with a whimper; it came with a total, manic fracturing of the self. In a state of lunacy I am not proud of I tried to delete my life as if it were a corrupted script. I fired everyone. I tore down the structures I had built with a frantic, desperate energy. It was a meltdown born of a deep-seated hunger for something—anything—that had a consequence that couldn't be erased with a keystroke.
In Bright, where I was living at the time, there's a clearing at a summit where the paragliders launch — a wide, astro-turfed drop off with a view that plummets into the valley. I walked up there that night with nothing but the lint in my pockets and sat in the cold winter air until the sun came up. I wasn't thinking. I'd gone past thinking into something worse — a silence that wasn't peace but emptiness, the kind where your mind has broken the circuit and there's nothing left to process. When the light came I walked back to the house, took my laptop, and left for Melbourne. I lived there for a few months, hated every minute, and eventually ran further — from the blue light to the red dust of the Australian desert.
I traveled into the remote scrub, moving deeper into locations where the map becomes a suggestion and the cellular signal finally dies. It was here, in the vast open space and under the relentless, unblinking eye of the sun, that the transition began. In the city silence is a lack of noise; in the desert, silence is a physical weight. It is an absolute. Paul Kingsnorth wrote that "The silence of a small church in England had a quality that couldn’t be found anywhere else." Clearly he hasn't been to outback Australia.
I remember a specific moment on a trip, sitting in an extremely remote location where the wind was the only moving thing for a hundred kilometres. It was so drastically quiet that I could hear my own pulse. A peace settled on me that felt alien. It was the stripping back. The desert doesn't care about your problem-solving reputation or your ability to automate a workflow. It only cares about the heat, the water, and the ground. For the first time in a decade I wasn't an expert. I was just a body in a landscape. The weight of the world shifted from the nebulous to the concrete.
III. The Resistance of Wood
This peace followed me back, but it was fragile. After a period of lazy freelancing and travel—a purgatory of sorts—Covid shuttered the world. The travel stopped, the freelancing contracts vanished, and the Machine finally went quiet. In that stillness I met the woman who is now my wife.
I didn't have the strength to return to the weightless world of IT. I couldn't bear the thought of fixing another ghost in the machine. When one day my wife asked for me to acquire a bookcase, I didn't reach for a keyboard; I reached for a saw.
The first time a chisel bit into a piece of timber the lie of the digital world was exposed. In my old life, if a joint didn't fit, I could change a line of code and the problem was "solved." In the workshop, if you cut the shoulder of a tenon too deep, that wood is gone. It is a physical truth. Wood has life, it has history, and it has a stubborn, beautiful resistance.
I discovered that I was still a problem solver, but the context had changed from the synthetic to the organic. My IT-brain began to see the workshop not as a place of labour, but as a place of stewardship. The jigs I build now aren't for scaling a business for profit; they are for ensuring that a hand-cut joint will hold for a century. I transitioned from making things happen to making things be.
IV. The Theology of the Jig
This transition from the weightless to the concrete was not merely a career change; it was a conversion. As I began to work with my hands, I found myself reading—truly reading—for the first time. I found the voices of C.S. Lewis and Wendell Berry, and the uncompromising clarity of Paul Kingsnorth. They spoke of "The Machine"—that encroaching layer of technology that seeks to mediate every human experience, thinning our lives until we are nothing but consumers of data and creators of content.
I realised that my IT career hadn't just been a job, it had been a service to that weightless, formless Machine. But the hands that had served it were now occupied with timber and tools, and the mind they freed drifted to creation itself — what it means to make something, why we have the compulsion, how a thing exists in the mind before it exists in the world. That thread kept pulling. Before existence, before the nothing that preceded it, there must be an origin. I followed the logic as far as it would take me, and it took me to God. C.S. Lewis gave me the rest: Christ is either mad, bad, or who He says He is. I didn't want to be a Christian. I came to the conclusion that I had no choice. But the logic only got me to the door. The first time I walked into a church I felt Him there — not as an argument, but as a presence. No one gave me a reason to believe. I already had the reasons. What I hadn't expected was to feel it.
And so my problem-solving itch underwent a sanctification. In the garden, this is easy to see. Most people I imagine would think of garden automation as Wi-Fi-controlled taps and automatic moisture sensors. But I see the automation God put there for us to find: the chickens turning leftovers into eggs, the worms transforming scraps into black gold, the seeds that carry the code of their own multiplication. This is the ultimate efficiency. My role is not to program the garden, but to build the jigs — the fences, the compost bins, the seasonal rhythms — that allow that pre-existing grace to flourish.
V. The Modernist Steward
But what would life be if not full of contradiction. Guests at my table see the Benchfoods Dehydrator, the Chamber Vacuum Sealer and the Anova Sous Vide, and they wonder how this fits with a man who refuses to use a smartphone (and won't shut up about it).
I see it through the Parable of the Talents.
If the garden is a gift, then wasting that gift is a failure of stewardship. In the weightless years, technology was a way to escape reality—to work 100 hours without ever touching the earth. Now, technology is a way to deepen my engagement with reality. The Sous-Vide is a practical liturgy; it allows me to take a tough chuck roast—a humble cut—and through the precision of a 36-hour cook at precisely the right temperature, transform it into something magnificent. It allows me to start cooking that meat on a Friday at breakfast and walk away to the workshop or the daycare run, take the kids to swim lessons on Saturday morning, and still be able to serve a feast to friends for Saturday Lunch.
The Chamber Vacuum isn’t a gadget; it is a transformation chamber. It allows us to capture the abundance of a harvest and hold it for the scarcity of winter. It is the "IT-brain" applied to the mandate of the provider. I am not "hacking" my life to make it faster; I am using precision to make it slower, more deliberate, and more beautiful (and, if I may trumpet my own horn, very tasty indeed).
VI. The Post-Race Blues and the Transferred Touch
Yet, even with the best tools and the finest timber, there is a recurring shadow.
I have never been entirely happy with anything I have ever made. This is the ex-athlete in me, the competitor who still remembers the feeling of crossing the line in second place. During the planning and the build I am fuelled by a perfect hope. But as the last coat of oil is applied to a cabinet a feeling of deflation sets in. I see every flaw. I see the gap where the wood resisted me and won. I often fall into a quiet, brief depression—the post-race blues of the maker.
But there is a cure, and it is the reason I do this for others.
D.H. Lawrence wrote about the "transferred touch" of the craftsman—the idea that the "pulse of the life" of the maker stays in the things they have made. When I deliver a piece and see the delight in someone’s eyes, my heart is filled. There would be no point in making furniture just for myself. The value is in the weight of the connection. By binding myself to the needs of others—by making their bookcases, their tables, and their bread—I am finally anchored.
By binding myself to the needs of others—by making their bookcases, their tables, and their bread—I am finally anchored.