Title: Why I Don't Have the Patience for Scale Models Anymore
There's an almost archaeological pleasure in rummaging through the shelves of old model kits in a small hobby shop. My home is piled with these boxes, and they all have one thing in common: they're almost never opened.
The problem isn't desire. The desire is there, peaking the moment you pay. The problem is patience—or rather, how we redefine "patience" as adults. People often say it's because we're "busy" or "lazy." That's a superficial take. The real reason goes deeper, into the underlying logic of how we manage our time, projects, and mental energy.
Our "free time" is an illusion. A modern person's schedule is like a heavily fragmented disk. You have 15 minutes here, half an hour there, but none of it is contiguous.
Building a moderately complex model is like launching a process that requires a large, contiguous block of memory. It demands that you load a huge amount of context into your "mental RAM" and run it for 5-8 hours straight. If you only have fragmented time, you'll spend most of your energy on constant "context switching": trying to remember where you left off, getting back into the zone, and just as you do, a "high-priority interrupt" from your boss or family arrives.
The cost of this switching is extremely high. So our brain, like an efficient resource manager, makes a rational decision: if it can't foresee a large enough block of cont...