Author: Tim Minshall
_Tim Minshall_
Reading time: 25 minutes
Synopsis
Your Life Is Manufactured (2025) looks at the hidden ways things are made. It follows how products travel from factories to when we use them. It shows how making things has greatly changed our society and the environment. We often don’t think about these changes. When we understand these hidden systems, we can make better choices for the planet and for fairness.
What’s in it for me? Find out how manufacturing creates your world.
We live in a world full of things that are made. But most of us don’t know how these everyday things are actually made. Think about that coffee mug on your desk. It started as clay or porcelain powder, mixed with exact amounts of different minerals. Then it was poured into molds as liquid clay, dried, covered with glaze, and heated in an oven at over 1,200 degrees Celsius. Or what about your laptop? It’s made of many different materials, like special metals, plastics, and glass. Each part is made very carefully to exact, tiny measurements. Then it is put together very carefully by robots and people.
300 years ago, you would have known the people who made your local products, like the potter or the tailor. Now manufacturing happens far away, and we can’t see it. This distance makes it easy to ignore the real problems with how things are made today: electronic parts that use minerals from war zones, cheap, trendy clothes that quickly fill up rubbish dumps, and huge amounts of carbon pollution. When we don’t see how things are made, no one is truly responsible. Understanding these hidden processes can turn you into a smarter and more careful buyer.
This Blink will show you how things are made and change how you see the things around you.
Blink 1 – Simple things are made in complex ways
Madonna was right: we live in a world of things. We’re surrounded by things that are made. Yet most of us don’t think much about everyday items. At least not until we suddenly can’t get them. Remember March 2020? When toilet paper became more important than gold?
That time when everyone bought a lot of things quickly showed something interesting: the very complex system behind even the most ordinary products. Next time you’re in the bathroom, take a square of toilet paper and really look at it. That 10.12 centimeter square, with its edges with small holes and a raised pattern, shows a complex system that works all over the world.
Your toilet roll’s journey starts in special forests where certain trees are cut down in a planned order. Logs get transported to factories that make pulp. There, logs are cut into small pieces. Then they are cooked with chemicals to remove a substance called lignin. They are washed many times and made white. This turns the wood into a thick, watery mix. That pulp gets pressed onto very big, hot rollers that press out the water and dry the material with high heat. Then it is rolled onto huge main rolls, each weighing many tons.
These main rolls ship to other factories. These special factories change the paper into its final form. Big machines unroll the giant rolls. They pass them through special rollers that add texture and make them thicker. They make small holes at exact places. Then, they roll everything into the smaller rolls we buy. Different products need different setups: to make quilted patterns, they need special shaping rollers. Softer versions use less pulling force. Recycled paper needs different chemicals.
Getting the rolls to stores adds more steps. Finished rolls get packed, put onto pallets, and sent to local storage places. From there, they’re sent to different types of shops – big supermarkets, small local shops, and shops that sell large amounts. Each has its own ways of ordering, delivery times, and storage needs. Shops guess how much people will buy by looking at past sales. They work with many different suppliers and arrange deliveries to arrive just when needed, to save money on storing things.
The COVID-19 pandemic broke this well-planned system very quickly. Toilet paper for businesses (those thin, giant rolls in office bathrooms) and toilet paper for homes work like two completely separate businesses. They have different makers, different machines, different packing lines, different delivery systems, and different buying agreements. When everyone suddenly worked from home, people suddenly needed much more toilet paper for homes, and less for offices. But you can’t just send a big roll made for office bathrooms to a supermarket. The machines, trucks, warehouses, and even the people who order them are all different for each type.
Manufacturers couldn’t just change things instantly. Changing factory machines takes weeks. Changing how things are delivered means making new agreements. New ways of packing need different materials and machines. Meanwhile, people buying too much made the problem worse: people were buying and keeping lots of toilet paper for homes, while office toilet paper sat in empty offices, not used.
Manufacturing is not as simple or steady as we think. Every product around us depends on connected systems that include forests, chemicals, machines, transport, and shops. Each part is made to work very well, but can easily be broken by sudden problems. So, when you think about it, that simple roll of toilet paper is actually quite amazing.
Blink 2 – How much you make changes how you make it.
Imagine a chocolate chip cookie. Whether it’s homemade or bought from the supermarket, the basic way of making it is the same, right? Flour, butter, sugar, chocolate, bake. Well, not exactly. That cookie could be the result of very different ways of making things, each with its own reasons, things you gain and lose, and how complex it is.
Every factory, no matter what it makes, does mostly the same thing. It takes inputs – raw materials, energy, and workers – and uses special ways of working, with people, methods, machines, and materials. This creates outputs – the final product. But how this happens changes a lot depending on how much is made.
Start in a home kitchen. Ingredients get measured by hand, mixed in a bowl, scooped onto a tray, baked for 12 minutes, one group at a time. With this approach, there’s complete control and can be changed in many ways, but not many cookies are made. It needs a lot of work and is slow.
Step up to an independent bakery using batch production, which means making things in groups. Now we’re talking about big machines that mix 20 kilograms of dough, and smart ovens that bake many trays at the same time. Each group is still different, so they can make different kinds – cranberry orange one hour, double chocolate the next. More cookies are made than at home, but there’s still a lot of manual work between each group.
Scale up further to a large factory that makes many things. Here, assembly lines that never stop are used most. Machines push out the dough. It drops onto moving belts at exact times. Then it goes through long ovens that keep perfect temperatures in different areas. Thousands of identical cookies are baked per hour, with very little work needed for each cookie. What’s the downside? Less freedom to change things. To change a recipe, they have to stop the lines, change the machines, and reset the systems.
Finally, consider the sugar factory that sends sugar to the cookie factory – this is an example of continuous flow production, which means making things without stopping. Raw sugar cane enters one end, refined sugar exits the other, 24 hours daily. It would be too expensive to stop and start, so these plants run constantly. They are made to work perfectly the same way and make the most amount of sugar possible.
It’s important to understand these differences. When we see how making more or less changes production, we better understand pricing, why certain products exist, and the real complex ways behind everyday things. Manufacturing isn’t magic: it’s a complex set of careful choices that balance how well things work, how many types there are, and how much is made.
Blink 3 – Complex products need complex systems
Remember how many steps were needed to make one square of toilet paper? Now consider something more complex: your phone.
That phone in your pocket has parts from many countries. The processor? Designed in California, made in Taiwan. Its screen comes from South Korea, its battery minerals from Congo, its camera lenses from Germany. It is put together in China. Each part has its own journey of being made before they all come together in one factory.
Still seems manageable? Try an airplane. Airbus makes parts in many different countries across Europe. The main factory where everything is put together is in Toulouse, Southern France. Engines arrive from GE in America or Rolls-Royce in Britain. Wings – some over 35 meters long – get built in Wales. Then they are loaded onto special planes called Belugas and flown to Bremen, Germany, where the special parts for the wings are added. From there, they fly to Toulouse for final putting together with body parts from Hamburg, tail parts from Spain, and landing parts from France.
A modern commercial aircraft contains roughly 2.5 million parts. If one part stops working, engineers can’t just change the broken part. They need to look back through the whole supply chain. This is the group of companies that provide materials, make parts, and transport them. They need to find where the problem started. Was it the company that provided the raw materials? The company that made the part? Or did something happen during transport?
Very, very complex, isn’t it? Let’s look at something simpler: ice cream.
Except ice cream has its own hidden problems. From the moment ice cream is made, it must stay very cold, below -18°C, at every step. The risky times are when it moves from one place to another: factory to truck, truck to warehouse, warehouse to store. If ice cream gets a little warm and then freezes again, it will get icy and feel rough. Trucks are cooled before ice cream is put in. Warehouses stay freezing cold. Sensors check the temperature all the time. One mistake at any point can spoil the ice cream.
These systems work very well. Until something goes wrong. When one supplier stops, a shipping road is closed, or many people suddenly want something, the whole chain can be affected. Your phone stops being made because a factory in Taiwan floods. Ice cream spoils because a cold warehouse loses electricity for three hours. An airplane sits grounded because a special company that makes bolts cannot deliver them.
Understanding how easily things can break is important. It tells us why there are suddenly not enough products, why being eco-friendly is hard, and why efforts to be more eco-friendly face real problems, not just whether companies want to help.
Next time you see that there are not enough products or prices go up quickly, you’ll recognize what’s really happening: not failure, but the complex system of global manufacturing trying hard under pressure it was not made for.
Blink 4 – Customers never act in expected ways.
Manufacturing works best when everything is logical, organized, and expected. But customers are none of those things. They change their minds easily, are surprising, and very hard to guess.
It is one of the hardest things for makers to guess what people want, when they want it, and how much they will buy. Get it wrong and the problems are real. Nokia famously did not guess how many smartphones people would want. They kept making old-style phones for too long. Meanwhile, Nintendo’s Wii was not made enough. So, there were not enough products for years. Nintendo lost billions in sales they could have made.
Sure, companies use information to guess future sales. Cadbury knows exactly how many Creme Eggs sold over the past decades and can make good guesses about how many to produce each Easter. But there are no certainties. Which is why manufacturers have developed some smart plans to protect against our customer behavior that doesn’t always make sense.
Products that go against the seasons cleverly use the fact that we want different things at different times of the year. Lawn mower factories make snow blowers in summer. This keeps machines and workers busy all year, while customers naturally want different things as the seasons change.
Steady production works when customers always like the same things, but don’t buy them constantly. Pasta makers and pen manufacturers keep their factories working at the same speed all the time. They make more products to store during quiet times – because we’ll always need pens eventually, just not necessarily this week.
Following demand means accepting that some customer behavior is truly hard to guess. Fashion retailers like Zara live this way. They hire extra workers for a short time and work extra hours to react to new trends very quickly. This is because they’ve learned you cannot guess what people will suddenly like.
Having built-in flexibility means knowing that customers might want different things later. Volkswagen’s plan uses the same parts for many different car models. This means the same factory line can switch from making Golfs to Audis, depending on which car sells more that month.
In the end, manufacturing might love predictability, but it’s customers’ unexpected actions that keep the whole system going.
Blink 5 – Small changes need a lot of effort.
That satisfying click when your electric kettle switches itself off? That tiny sound represents a real big step forward in making things safer and easier to use every day.
Before 1970, kettles were metal – either kettles heated on a stove from below, or electric kettles that stood alone, with parts that got hot inside. By the 1920s, the hot part was covered by water, but nothing told the kettle to stop. If no one watched it, the water would boil away, and the hot part would break. Annoying, but you could deal with it.
Then came plastic electric kettles in the 1970s. If left on after boiling dry, these didn’t just break, they melted, which could easily cause fires.
Enter Dr. John C. Taylor, who invented the switch that turned off by itself, using a special two-metal heat sensor. Here’s how it works: two metal discs are at the bottom of the kettle. They expand at different speeds when heated. When water boils, steam goes through a tube to these discs. As they heat, one disc gets bigger faster than the other. This makes them bend. At a certain heat, they suddenly bend more – that’s the click – which pushes a switch, and the electricity turns off right away.
That’s improving one object. But what about a change in manufacturing that could change the world? The move from petrol or diesel engines to electric cars.
Electric cars aren’t new: they actually sold more than petrol cars in 1900. But problems with batteries made them disappear. Now they’re back, and they’re far better for the planet. But changing to make electric cars will not be easy.
Changing an old petrol car to electric might seem easy – just change the engine for a motor and add batteries. But making new electric cars from the start means completely rethinking how a car is built. Battery packs must be part of the car’s main frame, not just added later. Keeping them cool is very important – batteries need cooling systems to stop them from getting too hot, but these systems must not use up too much power. Brakes that create energy need complex electronic parts to work. How the weight is spread changes completely when you have 500 kilograms of batteries on the floor. Even the suspension, how the steering feels, and the parts that protect in a crash all need to be designed again.
Manufacturers face hard choices: update old factories – which means new ways to put cars together, different tools, and teaching thousands of workers again – or build new factories just for electric cars. Both options cost billions. Making batteries needs completely new supply chains by itself. This includes digging for lithium in Australia, getting cobalt from Congo, processing special metals in China, and making battery cells in huge new factories that need to be built before cars can be sold. Then there’s places to charge cars: millions of charging points are needed before people feel sure about buying electric cars.
What’s important? Transport creates about one-fourth of all CO2 pollution in the world. A full change to electric cars using green energy could cut that pollution a lot. It would not only slow climate change but also make city air cleaner, reduce our need for oil, and completely change how people travel. Dr. Taylor’s kettle switch changed how we make tea. This change in manufacturing could decide if we can solve the climate crisis.
Blink 6 – Towards making things in a truly eco-friendly way.
Maslow’s idea of needs says that basic survival things are most important: food, water, shelter, clothing. But here’s the strange thing – how we make these basic things is harming our ability to live on Earth. And as the weather changes, living becomes harder and uses more resources. This is happening when resources are becoming harder to find.
Think about the basics. Building things causes almost 40 percent of the world’s carbon pollution – just concrete causes 8 percent, which is more than airplanes. Large-scale farming creates 14.5 percent of warming gases, and one-third of all food made is simply thrown away. The fashion industry creates 10 percent of world pollution and uses huge amounts of water. It makes cheap clothes that people wear for a short time and then throw away.
The important message is clear: make things in a less harmful way, and make things that are less harmful.
Lean manufacturing shows one way to improve. Toyota started this idea in the 1950s. The main idea was new: most work in manufacturing is waste. This means not just leftover materials, but any step that doesn’t make the product better. For example, workers waiting, too many products stored, useless transport, or making too much. Lean methods carefully remove these wasteful things. Less wasted material means fewer raw materials dug up, less energy used, and less pollution created.
Modern examples show this working. British Sugar factories process eight million tons of beet every year. They create less than 200 grams of waste for every ton. Stones are used to build roads. Soil becomes good soil for gardens. Leftover beet pulp makes gas for electricity. Lime turns into plant food. Extra heat warms special plant houses. CO2 helps plants grow. Nothing is wasted.
Jeanologia in Spain changed how denim is made. Normally, finishing jeans used 100 liters of water for each pair – big washing machines spun for hours with stones and chemicals. Jeanologia’s laser technology removes color by turning it into gas, creating worn-out looks in seconds. Their ozone washing saves 95 percent of water. It reduces chemicals by up to 100 percent and uses 80 percent less energy. More than one-third of the world’s five billion pairs of jeans now use these methods.
Making things created this problem. But new ideas in manufacturing – smarter ways of working, systems that reuse things, and true efficiency – could also give us answers. The challenge is not to stop making things. It is to change how we make them.
Final summary
The main idea from this Blink about Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall is that manufacturing changes raw materials into finished products. It does this through linked global systems that are very complex. This complex system makes things very efficient, but it can also break easily. Special supply chains work best when things are expected. But they can fall apart when there are problems.
Understanding these hidden ways of working is important. It tells us why there are suddenly not enough products, why being eco-friendly is hard, and why the everyday things we don’t think much about show both great organization and how easily things can depend on each other and break.
So, that’s the end of this Blink. We hope you enjoyed it. If you can, please take the time to leave us a rating – we always like to hear what you think. See you next time.
Source: https://www.blinkist.com/https://www.blinkist.com/en/books/your-life-is-manufactured-en