Three old chairs arrived from my mother-in-law. They were worn and tired, but the moment I sat in one I understood why they'd survived decades. They were built with intention.

I took one to a friend who works with furniture. He walked me through rebuilding the springs, adding padding, and refreshing the fabric. When I sat in it again, it felt different. Not just comfortable. Solid. Like something real had passed through real hands.

My partner tried it and asked for one too. Same frame, same work. When hers was done she sat in it every evening as if she'd never given it away. Something that had felt disposable suddenly felt permanent.

A year later IKEA released a chair with almost the same design. At first glance it looked close enough. But once you touched it the whole illusion fell apart. Half the weight, hollow frame, and somehow more expensive than restoring all three of ours combined. It might last a few years. Maybe. The restored ones will outlive all of us.

One had been built to stay. The other had been built to be replaced.

Here's the mechanism I didn't expect from a chair project. Convenience and capability look like they're on the same spectrum, but they're opposites. Convenience removes friction. You order the IKEA chair, assemble it in twenty minutes, sit in it tonight. Capability is built from friction. You strip the old frame, learn how springs work, fail at the padding twice, and sit in something that carries the weight of what you put into it.

The difference isn't quality, though quality follows. The difference is what happens to you in the process. Convenience leaves you exactly where you were. You have a chair but you haven't changed. Capability changes you. You know something you didn't know before. You can do something you couldn't do before. And that competence doesn't disappear when the project is finished. It stays.

That's why convenience is so easy to choose and so hard to build a life on. Every shortcut skipped is also a lesson skipped. Every friction removed is also a chance to grow removed. You end up with a life full of things that work and a self that hasn't been tested. Everything around you is smooth and functional and replaceable, including your relationship to it.

Working on the chair slowed me down enough to see how something was actually made. The balance, the small failures, the way time had shaped it. Instead of rushing to get rid of things the moment they asked something of me, I got more willing to work with them. Instead of assuming new is better, I started noticing what could be preserved, rebuilt, or improved.

None of this came from rejecting technology. Digital tools make life quick and smooth. They're great at that. They just don't give the kind of lessons that happen when you have to work through something with your hands.

The move I took from this is small but it changed how I make decisions. When I'm about to choose the convenient option, I ask: "What would I learn from the harder version?" Sometimes the answer is nothing, and convenience is the right call. But sometimes the answer is something real. A skill, an understanding, a competence that outlasts the project. When that's the case, I take the slower path. Not out of principle. Because the thing I gain from the friction is worth more than the time I save by avoiding it.

My partner still sits in her chair every evening. The IKEA version would've been in a skip by now.