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Have Taken Up Farming

dylan.gr

131–140 of 166 posts

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#131

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.

> crappy life of sleepless nights and hard toil.

I went back. Sleepless nights in the tractor is my favourite time of year.

But you're still ultimately just siting there staring at a screen — albeit a screen on wheels. Same as software development (minus the wheels).

If that's hard toil, I'm not sure what you think is easy?

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#132
post #28

I also taken up farming in 2013 after 10 years of working on startups (as founder and early engineer, with no success at all). I was about to move back to village I was born at and escaped as fast as I could at the age 15. I started natural winery at the ripe time when it first started to be popular and managed to miss the wave. It was a great first year after many years of tech grind in big tech hubs. I was waking u…

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

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#133

Also, the statement "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." is just so wrong that it's hard to take rest of the blogpost seriously. Helping people for example is neither farming, nor artisanal, and is quite arguably the least evil and most selfless things one can do. The world needs ca…

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!

The counterexamples given above were caregivers, health workers, and those are ones which I think are easy to see as mostly doing good.

But given that we're on a tech forum, I think most people should reflect deeply on the companies they work for and the systems they exist in. If those companies are not already mostly doing evil (as the companies which employ a majority or near-majority of tech workers are), then they're probably venture-capital funded or owned by investors, which means their goal is to maximize profitability over any real metric of doing good. So they will be doing evil in the future, if they're not already, because doing evil is necessary for competing with other companies also doing evil.

Reflecting on a top-level comment from another user about OP using the basic technologies to do things people would often use other tools for, I noticed wild.gr doesn't even use google fonts or other tracking scripts. Its fancy text effects in the hero ("Wild & alive" "& raw" etc) are done entirely with SVG!

Most would certainly provide more data to Google for convenience

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#134

> Everything I read made reference to the Bible, something I had never read nor was in any way acquainted with. The references kept appearing and eventually I decided to dive in head first and read it. Putting the King James Version of the Bible on my kindle, over many months I read it cover to cover. > At the time, I wouldn't have called myself an Atheist. Agnostic is not the right word to use either. Not that I bel…

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.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 belie…

I think a lot of conflict comes from Christians who claim to literally believe the Bible and then try to use that as justification to pass legislation telling people how to live.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#136
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hea…

The "move to a farm" dream seems like it would be nice if one didn't have any financial stress. So, more like retire to a farm.

You can retire there but just don't buy the farm before you do!

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#137
post #132
post #28

I also taken up farming in 2013 after 10 years of working on startups (as founder and early engineer, with no success at all). I was about to move back to village I was born at and escaped as fast as I could at the age 15. I started natural winery at the ripe time when it first started to be popular and managed to miss the wave. It was a great first year after many years of tech grind in big tech hubs. I was waking u…

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

Have you had any experience with smaller animals similar to cattle? Sheep, goats and the like?

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#138

It takes courage to step away from what you were known for, and even more to return and explain why. The journey from burnout to renewal resonates deeply with me, and I suspect many of us recognize the slow decay you're describing. I'm on a similar path myself, hoping to marry open source and open hardware with farming. Heartfelt congrats to Dylan on finding WILD and the clarity to change course.

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

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#139
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Have you had any experience with smaller animals similar to cattle? Sheep, goats and the like?

None, sorry.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#140

> Everything I read made reference to the Bible, something I had never read nor was in any way acquainted with. The references kept appearing and eventually I decided to dive in head first and read it. Putting the King James Version of the Bible on my kindle, over many months I read it cover to cover. > At the time, I wouldn't have called myself an Atheist. Agnostic is not the right word to use either. Not that I bel…

> 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.

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