The Tyranny of the "Unique": When Did DIY Become de Rigueur?

There’s a certain type of Instagram post that makes me want to hurl my phone (a vintage Nokia brick, naturally) across the room. You know the one: a sun-drenched still life featuring a meticulously arranged sourdough boule, misshapen and dusted with flour, beside a hand-stitched linen tea towel and a sprig of something foraged. The caption, inevitably, will contain some variation on “homemade with love” or “embracing imperfection.”

Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate a good loaf of bread as much as the next person. And I’m all for a bit of domesticity. But this relentless pursuit of the “unique,” this fetishization of the handmade, has begun to feel, well, tyrannical.

When did it become de rigueur to churn our own butter and knit our own socks? Was there a memo I missed? One minute we were ordering takeout and scrolling through Seamless, the next we were all knee-deep in sourdough starter and frantically Googling “how to build a chicken coop.”

Perhaps it’s the pandemic’s fault. Locked down and starved for something, anything, to occupy our time, we turned to the internet for solace. And the internet, in its infinite wisdom, offered us sourdough. And knitting. And macrame. And a whole host of other activities that seemed designed to convince us that we weren’t creative enough, productive enough, or frankly, just enough.

Suddenly, everyone was an artisan. Social media became a curated gallery of everyone else’s seemingly perfect lives, filled with homemade pasta and hand-thrown pottery. The pressure to keep up, to prove our own domestic goddess (or god) credentials, became immense.

I confess, I fell prey to it too. I, who can barely sew a button, found myself attempting to crochet a scarf. (It ended up looking more like a deformed tea cozy.) I, who once considered boiling water a culinary achievement, tried my hand at sourdough. (The results were…dense.)

But here’s the thing: the pursuit of the “unique,” this obsession with all things handmade, often feels less about genuine creativity and more about performative authenticity. It’s about crafting an image of ourselves as resourceful, self-sufficient, and yes, a little bit smug.

And the irony, of course, is that in our quest for individuality, we’ve all become remarkably similar. We’ve traded in mass-produced uniformity for a kind of artisanal homogeneity. We’re all wearing the same hand-knitted beanies, baking the same rustic loaves, and posting the same carefully staged photos on Instagram.

So, what’s the solution? Should we all just give up and embrace the mediocrity of store-bought bread and machine-knitted socks? Of course not. There’s nothing wrong with finding joy in making things, in mastering a new skill, or in simply enjoying the process of creation.

But perhaps it’s time to take a step back from the pressure to be “unique,” to reject the tyranny of the handmade. Let’s embrace the beauty of imperfection, yes, but let’s also remember that it’s okay to buy the damn bread sometimes. Let’s celebrate the joy of creation without turning it into another source of competition or anxiety.

After all, life is too short to spend it agonizing over the perfect sourdough crust. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a date with a pint of artisanal ice cream. (Store-bought, of course.)

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