I'm definitely not the smartest guy in the room by any stretch, ever, but as a decade+ practicing attorney myself and everyone I know have this same mindset. I even love my job much more than most of my peers. But the bureaucracy, nitpicking, bad attitudes that flow over from peoples' personal lives in to work, petty vindictiveness over perceived slights, frequent unpreparedness of peers and judges and outright hatred people have for one side or the other have me hellbent on extracting myself from the work force as soon as possible. And, again, I really like work. But if everyone is going to be cantankerous asses I would rather just be self-sustaining and live a solitary life with books and dogs. So many people just make professional work environments insufferable far too often.
Not a new thing by any stretch, though maybe more widespread these days as more people have the money to quit work and don't need to actually earn money as farmers. Back in the pre-Obama era, one of my girlfriends moved to California for grad school from the Pennsylvania Amish country, where her dad was a former electrical engineer who decided he hated it and would rather be a farmer. His was the only non-Amish farm in the county, but he used his engineering skills to run the entire operation on waste vegetable oil, disconnected from the grid, and he obtained all of his fuel for free from the Philadelphia restaurants he sold his vegetables to. I still remember and envy staying there for a week, the way he threw away no food, instead collecting all waste and giving it to his chickens, and they in turn gave him fresh eggs every day. Having that kind of symbiotic relationship with animals seemed almost magical. I love my cats, but all they do is consume and make messes for me to clean up. He had cats too, but they spent all day in the woods, slept in his barn, and killed all of the mice for him!
A common mistake around that kind of statement is that people infer that it means actually going to an agricultural lifestyle and just any other farmer and hanging the keyboard for good.<p>In practice, they'll start automating/building/designing new things after a few weeks. It's not a mindset that you can easily escape. They'll build a greenhouse and think about how cool it would be to setup automated watering, controlled airflow, autofeeders, etc... These things are doable for cheap. They absolutely won't stop being engineers, they'll just be engineers working on a different set of problems.
i "retired" (read, burned out) after 15 years and a failed startup attempt. loafed around and partied for 3 or 4 years.<p>Bought the farm. Wanted a house but not enough money, so i got a job framing. within 6 months i hired a guy i was working with and started a business framing houses just this january.<p>Its a lot of kinesthetic learning (and i was never in good shape let alone an athlete) which was a total 180 from what ive done my whole life.<p>And im now in the best shape of my life, went from hypertensive 130/80 and 80-90 pulse to 121/71 with a resting bp in the high 50s. and i started doing strength training, which is necessary to excel.<p>i guess it was time for a change of pace. and to round myself out. im going for the whole Renaissance man thing. Ive picked up so many skills and hobbies since i left the industry.<p>i still code for fun, and looking to automate some processes on the farm one day soon. namely watering.
I'm 55 now and I'm working on a side gig that's 'skillful manual labor' and I get a lot of satisfaction from the work and from becoming (let's hope) one of the best in the world at the thing.<p>cf, "Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work" by M. Crawford
The deeper I get into software engineering the more I want to cut myself off from the internet entirely when I retire. Realistically, I doubt you can do it 100%, but I wonder how far you can go without using any internet.
It's Zoom. I'm convinced. Sure there are some people that have always been remote, but I think two years of isolation has caused a cultural infection that is difficult to isolate but absolutely present.<p>Humans need to be around other humans, and not just their family. At my work we are trying to get team meetups scheduled for roughly April/May. I was worried people aren't ready, but turns out they are actually hungry for it.
> <i>He went away from the basement and left this note on his terminal: "I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."</i><p>From <i>Soul of A New Machine</i> (1981). Personal opinion, but would that we have a little (lot) more collectivism, find more ways to work together towards ends, versus saving up enough to fuck off & start our own gardens.
When my mother died I went out that day to walk, eat lunch, and keep my head straight.<p>It was surreal. It was like everyone was walking around in a dreamstate, unaware they would die, of the mortality of life. I'll never forget that sensation, how everyday life and consumption and entertainment and routine lull you, distract you, from the inevitabilities of life.<p>COVID was a fundamental disruption to life. ALmost a million Americans are dead. Not a lot by historical standards of plague, but still... a threat. And now the cold war rears its head and nuclear armageddon.<p>As I offhanded remarked once in a bathroom in bar that for some reason had an attendant who was discussing moving apartments, "Ah, moving is a time for reflection".<p>And that has been what the last couple years has been: times for reflection. A collective illusion shattered, or at least disrupted.
After Diocletian abdicated he grew cabbages. Maybe high pressure jobs just make people want to be outside and watch something grow. Instead of you know, spending a bunch of energy for little meaningful return in the end. Farming is the acceptance of nihilism without hedonism i guess.
Very relatable. I've started to put more of my tech related side projects on the back burner and got into working on restoring / upgrading a old truck I got at the beginning of the pandemic.
The key problem is people pushing themselves too hard. Or working for companies that exploit them. It is OK for a while but psychologically damaging long term.
Apparently the founder of Heroku went into Olive farming. <a href="https://www.wired.com/2012/09/heroku-2/" rel="nofollow">https://www.wired.com/2012/09/heroku-2/</a>
I had a friend in IT saying this this literally 20 years ago, although we didn't know the burnout word back then. I couldn't understand it at the time. But I learned, and am now retired. I occasionally get a twinge of something about not grabbing a huge FANG paycheck for a year or 5, but remind myself that money is a tool, not the goal.
The X are doing Y thing is always perpetuated by people doing Y who want to claim they’re X.<p>Personally, the smartest engineers I know are eating an Envy apple. They’re also a bit sleepy. They will wake up at seven tomorrow.