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Have Taken Up Farming

dylan.gr

121–130 of 166 posts

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#121

I'm happy this person found a way to live that's meaningful to him, but I grew up as a farmer. You're coming back to something we've known a long time. If a god is what let's you get there, then good, let god keep you whole. But this is what the classics of stoicism (in the literal sense of both) have been telling us the whole time. We make our own meaning, and money isn't it. Go and grow things. Raise things. Build…

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.

> Every ... leftist

People on the Right fantasize about the farming lifestyle, too.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#122
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Farming is "easy" when you have your tech savings and the option to plunge back into a high earning career when shit goes sideways (with wise sage aura, cause you took care of some goats). Farming is harder when your entire family depends on you working hard and you have very little capital.

> the option to plunge back into a high earning career

With the way the industry is moving, this seems much harder now than in the past.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#123
post #8

> From a spiritual perspective, there are only two career paths one can take: farmer or artisan. Anything else unavoidably involves doing evil or is essentially meaningless. I thought this was a beautiful statement; something to really help us think about what we're trying to do here on Earth. But personally I would add Artist to this. Painter, sculptor, musician, writer, poet, and so on. We need those too. Edit: As…

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.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#124
post #120
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lived for next to nothing and I had a gig maintaining a system that paid something like 1500 euros a month and it required few hours a month. Did that gig for 12 years, saved me many times when I tried to launch other projects.

What system required more than a decade of maintenance? Were you the only person working on it?

It was custom SW created by construction company: things like quotations, warehouse management, controlling, some accounting integrations, time tracking and what not. At the end it was sold to about 60 other companies. It was about 30 years old when the development stopped: it was slowly being eaten by more modern software, but I am sure it is still used somewhere. I was single dev working on it since my day 1.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#125
post #33

> adopting instead, the diet of my great grandparents: Plants; local, seasonal and whole. I saw some mention of the same on the website for the farm. Care to share any recipes? Or even just names of dishes? I quite enjoy foods from the Mediterranean and I'm interested in trying more!

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 d…

Cool stuff! I'm not as lucky to be surrounded by (affordable) fresh, seasonal produce, but I'll keep your seasonality tip in mind. We do have farmers' markets where I am, although their prices are unfortunately at a bit of a premium. Maybe I'll just buy some quantity of whatever's freshest one of these days and try to improvise as you do.

LMK if there's a mailing list or something I can get on for your mom's book!

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#126
We bought a small homestead 20 months ago. The prior owners only used it for their horses, Nothing had been planted by them. We have slowly been planting fruit trees. We lost a lot due to our drought. I just put in another 20 fruit trees this past weekend. It is good for the soul.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#127

I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it. I believe it must be something about dedicating oneself to creating something that "does not exist" in a material sense. My 'farming' has been woodworking: completing the simplest wooden furniture has given me a satisfaction that I do not remember any app or software product ever getting close to causing, despite th…

> 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.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#128

I wonder about what in the software industry causes so many people to have similar "symptoms" from it. I believe it must be something about dedicating oneself to creating something that "does not exist" in a material sense. My 'farming' has been woodworking: completing the simplest wooden furniture has given me a satisfaction that I do not remember any app or software product ever getting close to causing, despite th…

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.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#129
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I didn't read the article, but a quick Ctrl+F confirmed my suspicions. I was raised Roman Catholic and to me it was always a head scratcher why would someone insist on a certain translation which is at least two languages away from the original. It's a whole field of study and there's broad agreement that as language evolves translations need to be updated, otherwise you'd have to become an expert in that old languag…

From a cultural / literary / symbolic perspective, reading the KJV makes the most sense. Most allusions and quotes are to this specific version. Shakespeare didn't use it, but almost everyone after him did. Getting the most precise original meaning is important for scholars and theologians, but for most people it's more important to read the text that will connect to the most nodes in their cultural canonical graph.

OP specifically indicates he wanted to read it because of its high valency with other texts he had read, so his choice makes sense.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#130
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the article, but a quick Ctrl+F confirmed my suspicions. I was raised Roman Catholic and to me it was always a head scratcher why would someone insist on a certain translation which is at least two languages away from the original. It's a whole field of study and there's broad agreement that as language evolves translations need to be updated, otherwise you'd have to become an expert in that old languag…

From the article: > I finished reading the Bible. It resonated with me in a way nothing else had before. Having been raised in a Christian tradition as well, I don't get this. I don't get how you can, as an educated, rational, thinking adult, go from 0 religion to learning about Christianity and saying, "yeah, that sounds plausible." The only reason I stuck to it so long was familial fear mongering and cultural momen…

I agree in that the literal interpretation is not believable. There are other ways to "believe" it or have it resonate, like symbolically. Maps of Meaning is a great book that touches on this, "We Who Wrestle with God" too, more directly.

As an atheist myself, it took me a long to to realize that a lot of modern conflict between rationality and Christianity stems from the rationalists not understanding that the belief is often beyond the literal, especially when the Christian is of a more intellectual bent. A lot of times the believers don't even realize they only believe symbolically, or can't articulate it. I won't do the ideas justice, so I won't try to explain them.

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