Building Meaning

Purpose emerges through engagement with the world. We may have been taught that thinking happens in our heads, in essays and arguments, but there's another way of coming to know yourself and what matters to you: through your hands, through materials, through the focused attention required to make something real.

This semester-long program combines intensive carpentry training with philosophical inquiry into purpose, intelligence, and meaningful work. Through reflecting on what it means to make something, both as a cognitive achievement and as a choice about how to spend your life in the modern era, you'll gain insights into who you are and what you are meant to do.

You'll spend your mornings in the workshop learning from master craftspeople, with afternoons and evenings devoted to philosophical reflection on what you're discovering: about wood, about tools, about perception, and about the way you relate to the world around you. By the end of the semester, you'll have discovered something essential about human capability and purpose, and you'll have a beautiful piece of hand-built furniture to show for it.

Why It Matters

Most approaches to finding purpose treat it as a question to be answered through reflection: What do I value? What matters to me? But purpose isn't primarily a cognitive puzzle. It's discovered through engagement, through learning what it feels like to meet the world in different ways.

This program offers access to a mode of human intelligence and capability that our culture normally overlooks. Craftwork requires sophisticated perceptual and cognitive abilities that can't be learned from books or lectures.

By developing these capacities, you discover something fundamental about what it means to be fully present and engaged, about what constitutes meaningful work in a human life. These insights extend far beyond questions of career or vocation. They shape how you understand yourself, what you're capable of, and what kind of life feels worth living.

What You'll Experience

Workshop Practice

Learn fundamental carpentry skills and progress to designing and building your own furniture piece. Master craftspeople will guide you through joinery, tool use, and the process of bringing a design into physical reality.

Philosophical Inquiry

Evening seminars explore what your workshop experience reveals about intelligence, skill, attention, and meaning. Read works on craft cognition and embodied knowledge. Discuss what it means to work well in the modern economy and what kinds of engagement create genuine purpose.

Individual Reflection

Weekly one-on-one mentorship helps you articulate what you're discovering about yourself, your capacities, and what kind of life calls to you.

The Integration

Physical work awakens your senses and teaches you to perceive in new ways. You discover what achievement feels like when it's tangible, what it means to be fully absorbed in something real. Philosophical inquiry gives you language for what you're experiencing and connects it to fundamental questions about human capability, attention, and what makes a life meaningful.