Have Taken Up Farming

>The tech industry will always be there.

Reminds me when I was a young consultant and couldn't decide whether to take the long planned vacations or start a new high-urgency project. One of my mentors wisely said to me: "Go, there will be always another exciting project." So I went.

Sometimes it's good to step out and see the bigger picture.

How can you afford playing farmer after "no success at all"? Asking for a friend

Ahoj! Also consider keeping a few chickens for fresh supply of eggs, and incredible soup base down the road. Avoid cattle, it's tedious.

It's honestly quite interesting to me how this presents. I mean: Yes, people should ultimately pursue some form of happiness, but for me that happiness is genuinely doing software engineering work, and I do not think we should demonize the 9-5 office-job. In my opinion it gets too much flack, and the "move to a farm"-dream becomes some kinds of utopic ideal, which I really do not believe it is. I have worked much heavier, more manual jobs in my life and they do not provide more happiness. If anything, they provide less comfort.

For some, the benefits for society are not as immediately visible as a farmer producing potatoes or corn which he/she can touch with their own hands, but in my personal view my job positions me as a not insignificant cog in a gigantic machine which has genuine benefits for society (and some negative influences, yes).

Some red flags in the linked article. Spirituality and barefoot running, which I do not believe is very evidence based to recommend. My opinion is that anyone working a software engineering office 9-5 should also always be doing strength resistance training and some cardio every single week. This should provide the health benefits needed to survive in what is a sedentary job.

There's a story about Diocletian, the emperor who guided Rome through one of the most turbulent periods of its history, and later voluntarily abdicated and retired to his villa. When they begged him back to resolve some conflicts that had arisen he stated:

"If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you surely would never have thought to request this."

Farming could very well be trading one solo activity for another. With Building community and social groups seems the better option to have grown.

Every son of a farmer I ever met, _never_ want to go back to that crappy life of sleepless nights and hard toil.

Every Web 3.0, leftist, tech bro I ever met, idolize the farmin lifestyle and see before them a hippy commune where free love is practiced.

I never ever seen that, or heard about the leftist tech bro who actually did it.

Note that the quote was "involves doing evil". This is important and different than a declaration of a career as evil.

The meaningless thing is more of an absolute statement however.

A career can do (and even mostly do) good and sometimes unavoidably do evil.

Likewise a career can be (and even mostly be) meaningful and sometimes unavoidably be meaningless at times!

Is farming not helping people to produce the food they need? Can you categorize jobs and the actions involved in them into the path of “farmer” (those who do standard work to produce for many) or “artisan” (those who do unique work to solve problems for few/many)?

Maybe it’s overreaching, but I like to see it as the writer saying unless your job provides a “good” to world and doesn’t just move bits from one database to another then its a good path.

Theres flaws with that approach too, but one I would give them benefit for.

At least for me it was the realization that I didn't really know why I was doing what I was doing.

I wanted to change the world and make it better, and it felt good to pursue a career with a high salary and prestige, but after years of working in software I was not seeing my work actually make the world better. In fact it was making me feel sick, tired, and depressed.

There was a short period of time in the 2000s when it did feel like tech was beginning to transform peoples lives and society for the better, but after the algorithms and rougher edges of our collective human nature took it over, it all seems to have drastically changed course.

My 2 cents:

- You now likely have the money/time to pursue passions you didn't know you have, or would have developed if you didn't pursue software development as intensely.

- Even if you had/have passion for computers, being paid to do something you wouldn't do otherwise can quickly drain that passion.

- We're built for sunlight and exercise, not LED light and sitting, so you may have felt increasing physical discomfort that only the former can alleviate.

- Woodworking and farming were never lucrative enough (or as lucrative as computer work) to convince you to make the switch for money.

It's that we make enough money to not be trapped in it for life.

Jobs are, by definition, things you get paid to do, because you wouldn't do them for free. Therefore, by definition, everyone hates their job to some degree. We just have the luxury of leaving.

For me, it's a mix of factors:

- Our work feels very abstract and removed from real people in the real world. Sometimes I did not even understand what our product did, or it got axed after a year. Marx's theory of alienation felt very real.

- We can afford to consider other options. It actually feels achievable. Few people have that luxury.

- Many of us had a relatively easy career start, and underestimate how hard other fields are to get into.

- The material world just feels better. Making digital art does not feel as good as watercolours. Carving wood is a much more complex sensation than drawing in autocad. Even paper books feel better. I can't explain why, it's just how it is.

Yep, I think that's it for me too.

That's why I realised that I really enjoy embedded systems, as they often include a good level of physical world in their architecture. Using ES in a farming setting is even more satisfying because the code could be extremely simple but still make a huge real impact to people. Love that!

I thought about this a lot, which is why I greatly value doing the occasional electronics project, home renovation or even cooking. There is just something about working with something I can touch.

I wonder if writers feel the same.

> I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it.

By and large those who end up in the software industry are engineers at heart, and therefore want to be engineers, not just software developers.

That's why farming is the oft dreamed of escape. In farming you get to be (and have to be, if you want to remain competitive) a software engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, structural engineer... and on and on. You get to actually solve problems for what they are instead of trying to force arbitrarily selected tools into searching for a problem.

I have the feeling, they do not make a profit out of it.

This blogpost might generate more profits, but I doubt they are even close to being profitable and have other income/savings.

I guess, these things are long somewhere in the mind, before people execute.

People change countries, partners, careers not because of one book. This is usually the last drop. They were long-term unhappy, yearning for something else.

And as this guy wrote, he was sick, he was burned out. I suppose, he wasn't able to limit his screen time, it was all or nothing. Sometimes, those big changes work better than incremental steps. 20 years ago, I went from a pack of cigarettes a day to zero. If I went to 19, then 18, then 17, I might still smoke to this day.

Reading the description of his previous life, I think there is some background issue/reason that should have been addressed, rather than just go farming. I hope he is and will be happy for a long time now though.

I have an acquaintance - not into IT at all - that did something similar, went to work in a solo eco-farming project (no fertilizers, just let the soil rest, no pesticides obviously, I'm not sure if he went as far as no artificial irrigation either though) and now after a few years he decided he wanted to come back to civilization and he is now working in a factory, in an assembly line.

Not sure about mid-life, he is still in his early twenties. He was a gifted programmer with very popular open source projects early on.

I disagree, it is not significant at all if you think about the implications here for more than a couple of seconds.

A poet needs his pen and paper. Someone needs to man the paper-mills and ink-factories, someone needs to work on logistics and planning issues related to that, infrastructure etc.

It's a completely meaningless statement.

Teachers, Doctors, Nurses, Fire fighters... I can think of an endless list of service based career paths that involve no evil, and are immensely meaningful.

Weird how different people can look at things. For me, since my teenage years, statements like this feel fake and almost evil.

Why I feel this? Because it is a way for people to convince themselves they are pure and kind. People reason that the big bad evil world with evil things and professions can go to hell, and "I won't participate in this". Nice way to lie to yourself.

If you think deeper, you inevitably get a conclusion that if you have talents, you can do real good at a scale. It might be not as fulfilling, and it includes compromises, but amount of good you can do is tenfold or even several orders of magnitude.

In our modern complex world, you can try and see far consequences of your actions or inaction. For example, you can earn western SDE salary, and donate 80% to good causes. It might not be as nice as quiet country life, but it would help a lot of people or animals. That's what my friend is doing. He overdid it, sure, and burned out, but you can always find a balance.

What bothers me is that thing people who downshift into some traditional lifestyle easily do. They somehow feel like 8 billion people can live like that or close to it.

But that will cause insane downgrade of quality of life where it does matter. I'm not talking about consumerism or even experiental consumerism like travel.

Healthcare, child mortality ratez, food safety, and personal safety will be in a downfall without modern institutions, hierarchies and professions. It might be hard and often not fulfilling to be a doctor, or even a programmer. But even programmer can help create things that allow others to connect one with other (internet and phone networks), to get entertainment where options are very limited (games, movies for old people or people with disabilities). For example, my mom uses her smart speaker to provide her music and really enjoys it.

Without it, she barely used CDs because of the friction of buying, storing and inserting it. Same with movies, she now gets to the point where she watches movies on a streaming platform. She eat he'd nothing except TV when we had VCR and DVDs because of the friction of using it.

All this is possible because of some programmers and other IT people. She also enjoys social networks to some extent, and reads stuff in web. Sure, books also do, but she is limited be ause she lives in an area with not many books available in her native language.

Modern civilization has many issues, but still a lot of benefits that are not possible if everybody would be a farmer or an artisan. Also, artisan stuff is too expensive. And same for eco farming.

It strikes me as an over-simplification. What about doctors, therapists, firefighters, teachers, bricklayers, scientists etc... ?

We do need art but do people need to choose that as their career path? Traditionally perhaps, was an artist part time, was art made communally as leisure?

Some had rich patrons and there were travelling bands of entertainers...

What about the people that developed and maintained the tech needed to deliver this message?

i take artisan to mean the same as your meaning

I sell onions on the Internet [0] is a well known example I've seen, whose author sells Vidalia onions direct to consumers. Another one I know are Miami Fruit [1]. There are no doubt countless examples, but more than software engineering, you need good marketing. If you made an ecommerce site via Shopify (do not code this yourself, it's a waste of time) or wrote a similar article, and posted about them, I'm sure people would find you and order. Personally I'd be interested in buying directly from your farm, let me know how that is possible even if it's a low tech solution for now.

Something you might be able to code is plugins for these ecommerce sites, if it makes sense for your business. I also used to run a loose leaf tea ecommerce store via Shopify but I imported from producers like your family as you describe, and I wrote one for dynamic pricing for buying from various countries due to their purchasing power being less. It'd calculate their power as well as my thresholds and figure out optimal prices where more people could buy it but wasn't screwing me over too.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46385308, https://www.vidaliaonions.com/

[1] https://miamifruit.org/

Most likely not, this is more of a way to retire with money earned from software development and spend time "on business" that isn't really financially viable.

Kudos to author for going this path, but it takes a lot of resources to be able to make a move like this, which is not really an option for a large majority of population.

I always get my olive oil from a farm in Italy that only sells direct to customer. Or my coffee from a shop that gets the beans directly from the farmer (direct trade > fair trade).

It's possible, the market is kind of small I guess but you need to have a product where the customer is happy to pay a premium.

And being a software developer helps because you might have the money to invest?! :)

At that point it becomes an exercise in marketing more than anything else, because the whole business model depends on finding rich customers that are willing to pay a suitable markup to make the extra effort feasabile. And then you have to also be constantly trying to retain those customers....etc

Yea csa are boring and normal

Same here. Starting to automate my homestead. Good luck!

Sure! My mother is preparing a book detailing recipes, ingredients, foraging, how to eat, when to eat and so on which will be released this year. Basically, we follow the seasons and there are 4-5 "dishes" each season with some overlap.

The "dishes" are templates filled in with whatever is available at the time. For instance, when chestnuts are in season they enter soups, casseroles, roasts, salads and on their own drizzled with olive oil and salt. When they finish, something else is in season and the dishes change again.

There's a very brief period of overlap where the staple summer vegetables (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, zucchini) and chestnuts are available at the same time. These vegetables stuffed with a mix of brown rice and chestnuts and baked in the oven is heavenly.

Instead of thinking about recipes and then obtaining ingredients to make them, start with the ingredients and make it up as you go. Things that are in season together typically go together. We base everything on olive oil, alliums, some sort of legume or grain and seasonal greens, nuts, fruits and vegetables.

My great grandparents didn't follow recipes per se. When they made a soup they used what they had and due to lack of refrigeration and ultra-processing everything they ate was local, seasonal and fresh.

Sure, waste a decade or two and then live your real life.

FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there.

The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.

It sounds more like a depression and stress brained reduction to me. Tends to put you in a very binary and extreme thinking mode in my lived experience.

Also I inherently disagree with the idea of meaninglessness the author presents there. Meaning is relative to man, man makes meaning. There is no objective meaning and so you have to choose it for yourself.

For many, software engineering is an artisan endeavor (hence why many are freaking out over AI, it removes their enjoyment of the process even as others, who are solution oriented, like the final output and what problems it can solve without giving a shit about the code, two different types of people).

You can apply software development skills to public good. It's just not the most common path, nor the best-paid one. I should also highlight that SWE has one of the most prolific gift economies out there.

The author also forgot another path: teacher.

Well, "essentially meaningless" does away with basically anything that isn't water and food, so lets be measured. Working on video games could be done in an ethical, sustainable and non-evil way, but also one can argue is "essentially meaningless" together with everything else too, including "artisan".

> specifically what about the Bible they found resonant

A valid point.

I'm not interested, myself, but this is an interesting question.

My upbringing was very vaguely Church of England Protestant. I read very fast and read a large chunk of the bible as a child. I decided when I was 11 that religion was a fairy story, just a work of fiction and nothing more, and that I didn't believe in it.

I have read much of the Christian bible, and I was top of the class in religious studies at school. I am confident that I know much more about Christianity than 99% of Christians, and most ex-Christian atheists I know are the same.

For most intelligent adults, actually reading the bible is a leading cause of atheism. This is a meme among atheists.

I have never heard of anyone getting religion from the bible before.

Agreed, I'd like to know more about this also.

As someone raised in the Jewish faith, and having spent time also learning about the New Testament and the Quran (though without having read the texts directly), I'm inclined to think Christianity on paper is "the best" of the Abrahamic religions, in that the core messages of Jesus are about forgiveness, nonviolence, and helping one another. These messages are in the Torah and the Quran too, to be clear, but specifically with matters of sexuality, gender, and gender roles, Christianity is the most "forgiving" of people who are non-normative or opposed to those norms in the first place.

I say this as someone who doesn't believe in any religion fwiw, not as a born-again Christian or whatever.

And I also want to be clear that there are progressive interpretations of all religious texts, people of all religious practices can be LGBTQ, poly, drug users. And religion can also be used to justify incredible acts of evil. Christianity was the justification for the Inquisition and the Crusades after all, despite the violence of both certainly going against the teachings of Jesus.

I think he was referencing Ted Kaszinski (sp?).

Maybe if he had read a better bible translation he would've reached a more moderate spiritual enlightenment =P