Recipes are required for industrialization, for repeating processes in a stable and consistent way.
Something done for the first time doesn’t have a recipe. Recipes can only be built looking backwards.
Naval Ravikant would call these new recipe-less activities “Specific Knowledge”.
Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you.
Creating new recipes is expensive, but using recipes once they’re created is cheap. The First Pill Costs a Billion Dollars, The Second Pill Costs Four Cents.
For some people, Figuring Out How To Do Something Is More Fun Than Doing It - and they love making new recipes. They gravitate to new things specifically because it gives them the opportunity to make new recipes. I am one of those people.