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Have Taken Up Farming

dylan.gr

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Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#31

Post by NoBeardMarch »

reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #24
NoBeardMarch wrote: post #16

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…

If I can give you any advice as a likely older man to a younger man, no bias intended, happiness is fleeting. Look for fulfillment. I personally find religious apologies to be empty but if they get you to a good place, fuck it, I can't argue with everyone over methods. If your job is fulfilling, or enables you to do fulfilling things in your other time, there is no shame in that. There is a visceral spiritualism to w…

I generally do not pursue happiness, I try to pursue purpose. Life is peaks and valleys, the only permanence being that nothing really persists.

Writing code is also working with your hands. It produces real world effects which even if you cannot observe them directly still provide societal benefit: The "impact" of this can in many cases be much larger than a manual job.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#32

Post by 6LLvveMx2koXfwn »

apsurd wrote: post #14
Nition wrote: 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…

i take artisan to mean the same as your meaning

indeed, an artist is just a middle class artisan!

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#33

Post by cole-k »

> 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!

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#34

Post by satvikpendem »

mentalgear wrote: post #13

> All that remained was to decide what to do with my life. 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. Seems shocking at first, but the more you think about what our SWE works does, for whom, and who benefits the most of it ... IMO it makes sense.

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).

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#35

Post by wolvesechoes »

NoBeardMarch wrote: post #23
Nition wrote: 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…

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.

> A poet needs his pen and paper

They doesn't. People did poetry for a long time.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#36

Post by baxtr »

dejv wrote: 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…

>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.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#37

Post by Nition »

apsurd wrote: post #14
Nition wrote: 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…

i take artisan to mean the same as your meaning

I wondered that, but many definitions of Artisan have a utilitarian slant.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#38

Post by moron4hire »

Tade0 wrote: post #12
tonnydourado wrote: post #5

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 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 momentum. Once I deprogrammed myself far enough to start being able to ask questions, I realized Christianity's construction is indistinguishable from a scam. If you don't start with the cult programming, how do you get far enough down the religion rabbit hole without first running head-first into the obvious self-protective indoctrination designed specifically to avoid scrutiny?

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#39

Post by JuniperMesos »

> 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 believed or didn't believe in the existence of God, in truth, I had simply never thought about it. In place of an answer was lack of the preceding question.

> I finished reading the Bible. It resonated with me in a way nothing else had before. A mirror was put in front of me and I saw myself clearly for the first time. Finding God, I realized how far I had drifted from the straight and narrow. Weak of mind, steeped in sin, ruled by bodily desires and whims of fancy, the life I led could only lead to one place: the broad road alongside the liars, thieves, fornicators, murderers and cheats, for I was one of them.

I'd like to see this person write in detail about specifically what about the Bible they found resonant, and specifically resonant in a way that lead them towards something like a Judeo-Christian understanding of God and sinfulness. I note that they do not mention Jesus Christ, who is the most important figure in the second part of the Bible, and (arguably) entirely absent from the first half - and indeed the schism between Jews who only take the first half of the Bible seriously and Christians who take the second half seriously as well is a pretty important one!

This isn't a troll post on my part, although I admit that I'm somewhat skeptical that this person read the King James Version of the Bible and was specifically convinced by the various writings in that long and complex text that some kind of Judeo-Christian understanding of the nature of God is the correct one. I think it's more likely that they were in some kind of personal spiritual crisis, read the foundational scripture of one of the major world religions, and were moved in a kind of a general way. I suspect that if they were reading books that made more references to the Quran or to Buddhist sutras, they might've found themselves reading the Quran or Buddhist sutras and ended up in a similar mental state. But I'm not sure of that, which is why I'm genuinely curious to hear more about what specifically in the text of the Bible they found meaningful.

Re: Have Taken Up Farming

#40

Post by lukan »

NoBeardMarch wrote: post #16
reincarnate0x14 wrote: post #6

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…

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…

"Spirituality and barefoot running, which I do not believe is very evidence based to recommend."

I highly recommend both.

But as just as there are lots of cults and scams in the spirituality world, just starting to run barefeet will likely hurt you very quickly.

No ideas about studies here, but they would need to include a lot of factors to be meaningful for generalisation. For example if you did not do running around barefeet as a kid at all, your bones might not be strong enough if you start as a adult. And then you have to be extra careful to develope more muscles there.

Also where you run matters a lot. Basically, anything soft is nice. Gras, a sandy beach, forest tracks. Running on snow is also nice (for some time). But once your skin is stronger, also gravel roads can be fun. Just not flat asphalt.

I can just say running barefoot gives me immense joy and helps my body be in good shape. Strong flexible feet act like a shock absorbers for all the other joints in your body btw.

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