Not a programer but working in the tech industry, i have a growing sentiment that people lack the sentiment of creating something and not just feeling like a cog in the machine. Most of what people do is busywork lacking a sense of purpose or direction. Not being a programer, even i would drop everything and live a rural life it would guarantee a stable financial life.

Holy wall of text, Batman.

I’ve longed to work the fields with my hands and simple tools because the fields don’t fucking spit out meaningless gibberish when I’m just trying to get them to process a simple text field, and my hands don’t have documentation apparently written by a distracted seven year old.

And while the living off the land will certainly kill me due to my own incompetence, nature will have the decency to just eat my corpse and not gloat over my failure repeatedly in a hung CI/CD process for the rest of eternity.

I’ve longed to work the fields with my hands and simple tools because the fields don’t fucking spit out meaningless gibberish when I’m just trying to get them to process a simple text field, and my hands don’t have documentation apparently written by a distracted seven year old.

And while the living off the land will certainly kill me due to my own incompetence, nature will have the decency to just eat my corpse and not gloat over my failure repeatedly in a hung CI/CD process for the rest of eternity.

I made the jump in 2017. I bought a house and planted fruit trees before I unpacked a single box. I have chickens, ducks and geese.

I used to replace people with shell scripts.

Now I collect eggs in the rain and get attacked by geese. This is way cooler. But the pay sucks. Zero benefits.

i was out of the tech industry for a while being a bum. for a while i was working in restaurants (nothing high end), and while the work wasn’t anything remarkable i always called it “honest work”. sweat for money. making tangible things and handing it to a customer feels a lot less alienating than deploying an update for users.

Everyone wants to quit and start a homestead. It’s not a programmer issue, it’s a society issue.

They got into the profession for the money and not because they actually like the work.

I can understand it. I’m an introvert, I absolutely loathe neighbors, people are fine, but neighbors are the worst. I’m constantly creating and building things virtually and rarely get to make any significant decisions. I constantly want to do things differently, and I’m frequently proven right, but the pattern continues. I see the effects of a sedentary lifestyle on my body. I enjoy several hobbies working with my hands. I am sick of scheduled pointless daily meetings.

Truthfully my dream job is to be independantly wealthy, but I can’t afford that quite yet, nor retirement. So if you combine all that together I can see many programmers wanting to rage quit and become their own boss. Most stay in tech, but that’s a career path not a meme. So the farmer life is the perceived hermit life that pays.

I’d rather buy an established orchard myself. Hard work is done. Do the occasional spray, some pruning, mowing and fertalizing. Automate the watering. Hire some pickers. From the outside it seems easy (probably isn’t). But maybe easier than buying an apartment and being a landlord.