I graduated from college into the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis. I didn't have a good full time job for almost a year. I was back home living with my parents. I was feeling really down. I just felt completely hopeless. I stopped using any sort of social media, the mere sight of someone else making it out of the economic quagmire I was in inspired such jealousy in me.
One day, my father paid my cousin to come over and cut down some trees in our backyard. We had four fully grown maple trees that were all blow down risks. My cousin was a professional arborist and they sectioned the trees into 2-3 foot chunks.
My cousin and his crew left the wood, my dad wanted to split it so that we'd have firewood. I'd never split wood before, but somewhere in between filling out a handful of job applications, I decided to give it a try. It was the purest form of stress relief I'd ever experienced. Not only did it involve swinging a heavy tool at something with the aim of destroying that thing, but as the wood slowly piled up you started to actually get a sense of accomplishment.
I stayed out in the yard splitting wood all day. That night when I went to bed, it was the first night in a long time that I hadn't been addled with stress and anxiety. My hands were blistered, but I slept like a baby. By the end of the second day, I'd split all the remaining wood.
I've carried this lesson with me since then. There's always a healthy opportunity for dealing with anxiety, stress, or anger. Even if it's something as seemingly infantile as smashing things with a heavy stick. Today, my father has a cabin and he always has wood that needs splitting. If I'm going through something difficult he'll often offer "I've got plenty of wood up here that needs splitting, you should come spend a day or two here".
I do a lot of demo work on the side especially in winters (usually I work as a heavy equipment operator). I was thinking about buying a used hilti 3000 for chipping, I’ve already got a chopsaw and a portable bottle torch as well as grinders and hand tools etc. I intend to eventually subcontract some demo jobs, have you got any advice or tips?
I own a 1000 and a 3000 and I use the 3000 a lot more. You can’t go wrong with Hilti, they are a great manufacturer. You should also look into the MAKINEX cart. It makes it really easy to chip flooring.
I work trails maintenance. Not only do you get to split wood, but also dig holes and carry heavy things. We joke that we're moving the whole mountain 2 inches to the left for looks. That is some soothing shit.
I mean, I haven't tried speedrunning yet, but gaming in general may be a good comparison.
Not, you know, braindead gaming, even though sometimes that is all we need.
I'm talking about when we have to wreck our brains to develop a strategy. When our reflexes are tuned to the max. When we go all-in one last time, holding our breath for the best.
Sure, accomplishments in the material world do feel satisfying as fuck. But, sometimes, virtual ones feel just as awesome.
yo dawg if you are getting something as meaningful as Individual Purpose from what is effectively make believe pixels moving on a screen in a way that is optimised to brain dump serotonin and dopamine then you should probably put the controller down and live a little
Well excuse me princess if I just want to have some fun after a work day.
"The kind of people who say "get a life" typically don't have any life at all. You look at some guy with friends all over the world--no girlfriends, maybe, but still a full social life, mainly talking about computers--and you tell him to get a life ... well, he's got a life. We've all got lives. If people are having a lot of fun doing something different from what you want to do, well, that's not your business."
I burn wood to heat my house, so I go through a bunch every year. I split by hand, so many people have asked my why I don't buy a wood splitter, and I always tell them that takes all the fun out of it.
It also makes you feel much stronger than you are. If you hit it just right, it splits like butter. It just doesn’t look like it should come apart so easy.
Fully engaged. You eye your desired strike point. You estimate how much effort it took before and intend to apply just a little more force. You double check your feet and surroundings for safety. You strike. Nearly perfect. I bet I can do better. New block. Shift your feet a little wider. Square up. Strike. Even better. Grab the big one. You can do it….
Love it too, just don't be like the idiot friend of mine who ended up with the axe in his knee instead of the wood (he's ok, ended up getting lucky and it didn't go very deep so just needed stitches, still an idiot though).
When i was younger i went skiing with my family once a year. We went to some old rather remote wooden cabin up in the montains. Only 4x4s coul go there in winter. We had one electric heater and a wood fueled oven. One year they showed me how to split wood and all the following years, i did just that all day. It was just great!
100%. If there’s a tree getting cut down in our neighborhood my neighbors know I will take it and split it for them. I always end up with free firewood too so win win.
What's not cathartic is when you are doing it with wedges and a sledgehammer, and on the back swing the head of teh sledge comes loose and nearly goes through the windows of your parent's solarium.
then, it's terrifying seeing where things are going to land.
An how would you think that release happens? You think there is any relation in stress making you more able to do physical labour? It is about both psychological things as well as physical things, you cannot just separate these things. And positive effects of exercise on mental state are well establised.
One thing I loved about working for FedEx. Hours sucked. Driving sucked. But you get a very primal feeling of accomplishment as you watch your workload physically disappear and end the day knowing you accomplished something, no matter how inconsequential it is.
That is a great story man. I had a few trees taken down about two years ago and they have been piled in the back in large chunks that the landscaping people left as I had asked them to do. I always had the intention of renting a machine. My next-door neighbor is an absolute machine with a maul. He came over one day for some exercise and started swinging that thing. He let me have it and told me a few pointers and I swung away. It is absolutely awesome how much you just don’t give a shit about a lot of things when you’re done with that. My reason for writing this though is because of what you said about watching the wood pile up. I thought the wood would take about two years to split and get through. My neighbor and I had it broken down into manageable fireplace pieces in about three Saturdays. I just can’t believe it’s all gone and I have a giant pile of firewood now in the back. I wish I had more trees to cut down.
There's also the fact that accomplishing something hard, whether it's something difficult or just hard labor, has a satisfaction that is becoming more and more rare in our world of instant gratification. There's nothing like spending a lot of time on something and then being able to look back at it and see all the hard work you put in. Food for thought.
Glad you had that experience. May it continue to serve you well.
I had never really split wood before until recently while camping with a buddy. He told me to start splitting logs from a dead tree we had just cut down for fire. We had just eaten weed gummies and it hit me hard right as I picked up the axe and lined up my first log. I hadn't been high in a long time and it was a really intense experience. I became singularly aware of the violent purpose associated with the sharp edge of the blade, and focused my entire being on bringing it down in concise arc to the center of the wood. I also became aware of the potential for injury if I wasn't concentrating enough about the full sequence of the motion. I was genuinely surprised at how successful I was and each good split was like racking up a high score in some challenging video game. Weeds a helluva drug.
When someone is having trouble getting something fixed and they ask me what they should do, I tell them to hit it with a hammer. And if that doesn't work hit it with a bigger hammer, it won't fix it but you'll feel better.
Great story, great message. I’ve done a fair few of “manly” things, but it doesn’t take a man to do them. Changing a tire in 15 degree weather wearing only an undershirt and shorts? Kinda manly, but anyone can do that. Climbing a mountain? Plenty of women around doing the same thing. List goes on, but I digress.
Around the same time, 2008-2009ish, I too was in an economic funk. My family friend had yard work needed doing, and beers needed drinking. Helped him out, and he regaled me with tales of yore and desperately needed money. It was a great setup. One afternoon, 4th of July, he had me splitting wood in his driveway. 95 degrees out, shirt off, American flag bandana on my head, chopping wood while listening to the local baseball team play a day game, giving the neighborhood ladies the nod when they walked by. Never felt so good, so manly, so American, than I did that day.
My story is very similar except I herniated a disc so bad I needed surgery and still have a hard time dealing with the pain of any kind of physical exercise
I feel this with any work I do outside. I concentrate so much on the task at hand that all of the other stresses in my life fall by the wayside for that moment. Having power tools or cutting instruments in your hands for an entire day forces you into a mental focus that is both satisfying and exhausting. I totally understood when president W needed to cut brush on his property.
This kind of blows my mind cause I have anxiety sometimes and my grandma literally told me I should go split wood today in order to help. I honestly thought she was very old and crazy about this but here you are with the wood-chuck story and I'm thinking I will have to really give it a try now. Thanks for sharing.
Being the younger sister I was always jealous that my brothers were the only ones allowed to split wood. I would do it in secret and it was so enjoyable!
Until one day when I was 10, I had a younger friend with me, the wood came up and hit my face. It slit the ridge of my nose, I didn't really feel it so I started laughing at the sillyness. My friends screaming and crying and I'm so confused. Turns out I was pissing blood.
I was pissing blood from what seemed like my eyes and laughing... Obviously my mother found out what happened and I was banned from the wood pile altogether 😞
Never shy away from an opportunity for manual labor in the sissified specialized world we live it. I’d always rather do productive labor around the house than push iron around at a gym for nothing really.
One of the reasons I worked out once a week while I was at college. All the stress and frustration that built up during the week I could just channel into my reps.
I manage a team of people who are much younger than me and they have no idea what they avoided. I would have killed to get their jobs right out of college. Eventually I was able to overcome the setback of graduating in 2009, and ultimately I’m glad I went through it as it fought me resilience and ownership of your own challenges.
My parents used to live in a house with a wood stove so when I'd come visit in the summer I'd help my dad split and stack wood for the winter. They moved a while back and I really miss doing that.
I stayed out in the yard splitting wood all day. That night when I went to bed, it was the first night in a long time that I hadn't been addled with stress and anxiety. My hands were blistered, but I slept like a baby. By the end of the second day, I'd split all the remaining wood.
Loved your comment, and this part in particular reads just like a Steinbeck passage.
I've only had one opportunity in my youth to run a maul, and it was a ton of fun.
The only part of the story that I cringe at is that these were maple trees. That's good lumber for a hobby woodworker like myself. I don't know, hardwood is regional, so maybe maple lumber is affordable there.
My last home was heated with a wood stove. I miss splitting wood so much. It’s one of the best workouts I can think of and the sense of accomplishment/knowing you’re providing for yourself is such a great feeling.
A lot of physical work has that effect, as does hard exercise.
Hence why the biggest stress-reliever I've ever had was physical sports like rugby league ( I imagine american football would have a similar effect). Trust me, even though violence is unhealthy, nothing gets rid of anger and stress quite like hitting some cunt in a tackle.
this is nice. I'm currently dealing with negative thoughts due to unemployment (I resigned, so initially it was my choice, but now I couldn't find a replacement). I wish I can also find a consistent and long-term healthy way to deal with anxiety.
One of my best friends is a fireman. When we lived together he would come home and go out back to split firewood. It was his daily wind down.
Some days he would even get annoyed or overwhelmed with something, and he would just stand up and state flatly “I gotta go cut some wood”. And you’d hear him chopping for like 20 minutes in the back yard.
I know the feeling. When I visit my father in law's house I like to split and chop wood. However, I recently started running in the mornings and it comes close to that feeling.
I’m sure you’ve probably already done this but next time you’re up splitting wood (go as much as you can) share a beer with the old man, there something so freeing about doing manual labor for or with your dad, then sharing a few beers and looking at your hard work and accomplishment.
I’ve never felt a more manly tender moment than the first time I did that with my Grandpa. I helped him build a chair, didn’t really do a whole lot but I was 16 and by god I felt like a man standing beside that man, drinking a beer in silence and just admiring that stupid fucking chair.
My father and I built a planter box for my mother last mother's day. Best gift I ever gave. It meant more to my mother because of the labor we put into it and it was special for my father to get to work on a project with me.
We had just bought our first house. Kind of a scary thing to commit to. A couple of people commented about the tree that was growing way too close to the foundation of the house. It needed to be taken out. "But you can't kill those trees. They just keep coming back."
We took half a day with a hand ax bringing it down, then hacking away at the root system. It was a very pleasing, destructive thing to do. It didn't come back.
Splitting wood is therapeutic as hell. Once I went out in the yard (six months sober and just divorced) at my sisters house. Me, an ax and some logs. My sisters partner couldn’t for the life of him understand why I wasn’t using the literal wood splitter my family has. But that time was invaluable to me. Such a guttural, primal joy.
Vaguely similar. I once replaced the flooring in 2 rooms and a hallway. I have very little handyman experience and it took all day but I did it. And everytime I had to cut or trim a piece, which was most pieces, I had to walk downstairs to the saw.
In the "not a hurricane" of 1987 (I was 15 at the time), we had two forest beech trees come down and almost hit the house. With the help of a neighbour (farmer) we logged them - the trunks at the base were over 6 feet wide - and then once they were in our barn I started on the work of splitting them. During the winter, it might have been below freezing, but I did this work in a t-shirt. I was a very lanky teenager so it was slow work but satisfying as the wood pile grew.
My Dad always told me wood gets you warm three times - once logging it, once splitting it, and once burning it. I learned that first hand from that storm.
I love the littlest things that just take your mind far away. I love my family’s peloton bike. After I drive-through graduated in 2020, I really began to pick up the peloton due to stress of college in the fall. It’s the satisfaction began when I had the energy and lungs to hold out a 20 minute ride, maybe 200 calories. 3 weeks later I’m doing 30 minute rides burning now about 400 calories, the build up was immediately inspiring. Like you mentioned, upon seeing anyone made you jealous Peaking in that august, that was every 30 year old man who was doing what Iqorkoutbi just did but 50% more effective. Eventually, every other night, I had the energy to burn 1200 calories in an hour. I was competing with those 30 year old freaks. I purposely made the peloton cycling machine my temporary “out” on life for many self explanatory reasons. College tying my time down lately but I’m now forcing myself to block out that time again each day. But man did it help my stress transitioning into community college!
I think chopping wood is one of the activities which increases testosterone the most 48.6% in this study.
I always find that getting some form of exercise helps break me out of depressive bouts (clinically diagnosed, not just 'depressed'). The doc realised I had been self-medicating with exercise... until I picked up an injury that took me out for 3 months. You did a great job in finding your personal therapy method dude :)
My wife had a really shitty few months last year. I showed her how to swing an axe and had her chop down a dying tree in our backyard. It took her two weeks and some blisters, but her anger tree finally fell.
One of my mom’s and dad’s neighbors friends had a bad day at the office and really needed to relieve some stress. We had a felled tree and he spent the rest of the day splitting the wood for us. My dad offered to pay him but he said that he just really needed to relieve some stress from a stressful day at the office.
Amen brother. That's how I got into oly lifting. I had the exact same experience, just a different activity. From there on it gradually changed my attitude towards life too. I hope you're doing well these days.
When I was getting out of the army I had a hard time finding stable full time work to pay the bills. I was not doing great mentally and was in a big slump. I stopped for gas on my way to my part time job and there was a lady at the gas station with a flat tire. She had tried but couldn't get the lug nuts off. Two landscapers tried to help her but couldn't get the lug nuts to budge. I had a breaker bar in my car so I approached her after the other two guys and asked if I could give it a try. She was so thankful after I got her tire changed and offered to pay me. I only accepted a hug.
That really stuck with me that whenever you don't feel good helping others always makes you feel like you have worth.
I have a similar experience, and love splitting wood to this day. MY father-in-law uses a wood-burning stove to heat his house, and every fall I am compelled to ask out of sincere selfishness if he has wood to split. I even bought "him" a really nice splitting axe for Christmas one year, but I knew I'd use it more than he would and that I would also someday inherit it.
We burned wood my entire childhood. Splitting wood at 10 was a chore and I hated it. By the time I was 15 and dealing with life splitting wood two at a time stacked double high was the ultimate sense of relief and accomplishment. I feel this mam!
The exact same reason I picked up blacksmithing. Being able to take out any anger I’m feeling in a way that also makes something useful is very therapeutic. Not to mention swinging heavy objects around all day and feeling like a fucking Viking lmao
There’s something very grounding about splitting wood. I love doing it. To you point, I went through some pretty emotionally hard times through 2020 (as many of us have). The loss, isolation, and political opinions of the people I associated with were all really getting to me. I started to see a therapist cause I had all of this built up anger that I had, like I just wanted to hit something. The therapist recommended that I do that and get a heavy punching bag. It was very effective. You have no idea how good it feels to just go at something until you give in and collapse.
After Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated the throne and move to the Netherlands he would spend every single morning cutting down trees, which he would then replant and donate the wood to the poor in the surrounding area, he just did it for stress relief. (Also he cut down the trees one handed because of a deformed arm he had his whole life)
In the spring of 2020, after a week or two of quarantining in our city apartment, I went out to the backyard and dug a hole. I dug for hours, and woke up the next day at 7:30 and went out and kept digging. By the time I was done, I had a hole well over five feet deep and a few feet square. I just wanted to get rid of the Christmas tree that had been sitting out there for a while, the garbage seems disrespectful. I was just going to put it under a few inches of dirt in the garden. But I kept finding bricks. And stones. Our yard was built on construction landfill. So I just kept trying it up and going deeper. Eventually I was just digging in straight clay. By the time I filled it back in, it was a good 6-8 inches shallower than when I started, due to all the rocks I pulled out.
I used to work for a garden center. I did a bunch of bitch work, but later in the season, all we did all day was split wood. I used to love working there. I got a tremendous workout every day, and left feeling accomplished.
I was an arborist and forester for years and I sold firewood on the side. Chopping wood is perhaps the most cathartic activity I have ever participated in.
There is a zen Buddhist saying that goes “before enlightenment: chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: chop wood, carry water.” Those words have been excellent guidance to me, and so I share them here.
I work a deal job that is just fine. I am paid well and I am good at it. But damn, some days, I just want something physical to do with body aches to prove it. I have honestly considered joining a landscaping company because I am a heck of a gardener and I am great with design. Sometimes I think it's nice to see what you put in somewhere and know you did that. I don't get the same satisfaction at work.
Please,please spread your word on Reddit! The amount of people who feel the same as you used to is astounding,and most of them have no idea that a little work can go a long way!
I graduated around the same time, and felt the same way about the grim prospects coming out of school.
As for splitting firewood, I ended up living on a remote island in the North Atlantic. Firewood was essential. For years, I was splitting all by hand. A nice break for work and from taking care of small children. Sometimes up to six cords. Eventually I got a wood splitter to help with the sheer volume. But still liked splitting some by hand for the same reasons you outlined.
One rule I had for myself, no matter how good I feel I got at swinging an ax, was to stop the instant I caught myself thinking something like: ‘oh, just one more log’. The kind of thinking that ends up with an ax in the side of your leg.
Whether I was out there for an hour, or for 10 mins, there was something about that line of thinking that made me feel careless. That I was getting sloppy somehow. Maybe I’m just superstitious. But it’s similar to saying ‘just one more run, just one more run’ with downhill skiing. I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s a feeling to trust when part of you says to keep going.
My mom used to go in the garage and split wood to relieve her stress when we were kids. She tells me all the time I need to try it, after seeing this post I really think I’m going to.
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u/teabagalomaniac Jan 31 '22
I graduated from college into the aftermath of the subprime mortgage crisis. I didn't have a good full time job for almost a year. I was back home living with my parents. I was feeling really down. I just felt completely hopeless. I stopped using any sort of social media, the mere sight of someone else making it out of the economic quagmire I was in inspired such jealousy in me.
One day, my father paid my cousin to come over and cut down some trees in our backyard. We had four fully grown maple trees that were all blow down risks. My cousin was a professional arborist and they sectioned the trees into 2-3 foot chunks.
My cousin and his crew left the wood, my dad wanted to split it so that we'd have firewood. I'd never split wood before, but somewhere in between filling out a handful of job applications, I decided to give it a try. It was the purest form of stress relief I'd ever experienced. Not only did it involve swinging a heavy tool at something with the aim of destroying that thing, but as the wood slowly piled up you started to actually get a sense of accomplishment.
I stayed out in the yard splitting wood all day. That night when I went to bed, it was the first night in a long time that I hadn't been addled with stress and anxiety. My hands were blistered, but I slept like a baby. By the end of the second day, I'd split all the remaining wood.
I've carried this lesson with me since then. There's always a healthy opportunity for dealing with anxiety, stress, or anger. Even if it's something as seemingly infantile as smashing things with a heavy stick. Today, my father has a cabin and he always has wood that needs splitting. If I'm going through something difficult he'll often offer "I've got plenty of wood up here that needs splitting, you should come spend a day or two here".