Making a simple sandwich from ingredients is a full-time job that takes roughly 6 months. You grow chickens, fetch sea water, make bread from ingredients, and so on. Unless you sell a lot of sandwiches you made from scratch, you will bleed a lot of money and time.

Only God can make sandwich instantly. If you try to make a simple pencil, it will probably take more than 6 months.

Now, consider security and privacy. Just constructing what seems to be a reasonably private and robust linux computer took at least a year of full-time effort. It is genuinely more difficult than making a simple sandwich from ingredients, and making a simple sandwich "from ingredients" is a full-time business by itself. The so-called system crafting is a full-time business that doesn't pay.

The cost of constructing a private linux computer with your "personal" labor is your business, your job, your health, your relationships, and everything else in your life. The cost of privacy is extremely high. You need to be okay with rough edges in your computing environment.

If you force yourself to make sandwich and pencil from ingredients, make your furniture, build a house, grow foods, run an e-commerce store, construct a private linux computer, and so on, then you will not be good at any one thing, and you won't be paid much. You are only paid as much as your best expertise. Only specialization can make you rich. If you try to scatter your energy into multiple things including security and privacy, you will remain poor. Even linus torvalds, a rich computer programmer, avoids fiddling with linux kernel options on his linux computers. He just uses fedora without modification. Linus torvalds doesn't care about the fact that his AMD CPU has hardware backdoor and certainly can't be bothered to "manually" construct a backdoor-free router that blocks AMD PSP and Intel ME behind the router. But, he may "buy" computers with Intel ME disabled by others.

If you want to become rich, you should have laser focus on your core business and sacrifice other things like excellent privacy.

Now, you know what it means to sacrifice. Sacrifice may even mean you use mac pro instead of a personally hardened linux desktop. The creator of linux can't be bothered to "manually" harden his own linux computers.

If you want to be rich and have a good life, you should be ready to buy everything outside your core business. Buying things takes infinitely less time than building things from scratch.

Spending time on things outside your core business is basically a financial suicide.