You should 100% buy a cardboard table from Ikea if you just need a table that sorta does the job for 5 years, but if you want something made of solid wood that's a certain shape and style, you might be better off building your own depending on your product & price requirements.
Similarly there are just little things that I know can be built but there's no real demand for the product because my specific requirements are niche. For example, I have chickens and sometimes we get foxes snooping around their coop at night. I have an alerting system for this, but I'd quite like to be able to trigger gun shot noises and my sprinkler if there's indeed a fox in my garden to try to deter them from coming back.
No one's going to sell stuff like this, but I can make it. I'm also an AI doomer, so feel I need to learn basic skills like this which might help if things start getting bad and I'm somehow still around.
I was told that I should make music for myself, but I guess I don't really understand that perspective? It's like with code – I used to enjoy writing code in the past, but these days if I want to build something I'll just generate it with AI because most the time it will be quicker and better than me hand cranking it. I used to enjoy it but coding just seems pointless now.
I don't really get why the average musician would bother recording there own stuff anymore either. If you want to create music then the AI is really good and you should just use that. It took decades to get half decent at playing instruments and producing my own songs, but today a kid can put out a song that sounds far better than what I can do in just 10 minutes with AI.
For the last two decades of my life all my free time was basically spent coding or write music. I can do neither now. I'm trying to learn more practical skills like wood work because that's the only way I've found I can still get that feeling of accomplishment which I got with coding and music, but it doesn't come as naturally to me unfortunately.
Definitely lost a big part of myself over the last year or two which I'm trying to come to terms with.