One more magical power of trade, that I didn’t see in other comments:
Planning and logistics. It takes about a week and a dozen steps to make a pencil. (Ok, probably not all dozen of those steps need human intervention, but some probably do.) That’s not too bad; I can set a Calendar reminder to ping me when various steps are done so I can move the materials to the next one. But to use reminder software I need a laptop. How long and how many steps does that take to build? I would guess years of time and tens of thousands of steps. So even if I technically could perform all the required steps individually, doesn’t mean I could feasibly deal with the sheer complexity of the task, or with the timescales involved.
One more magical power of trade, that I didn’t see in other comments:
Planning and logistics. It takes about a week and a dozen steps to make a pencil. (Ok, probably not all dozen of those steps need human intervention, but some probably do.) That’s not too bad; I can set a Calendar reminder to ping me when various steps are done so I can move the materials to the next one. But to use reminder software I need a laptop. How long and how many steps does that take to build? I would guess years of time and tens of thousands of steps. So even if I technically could perform all the required steps individually, doesn’t mean I could feasibly deal with the sheer complexity of the task, or with the timescales involved.