Hacker News Reader

Comment by fnayr | Hacker News Reader

Anecdotally, I just came back from New Zealand and was staying at a farm house rented out on Airbnb. The owner was previously an actuary in Sydney, and hated his job so switched mid career to farmer. Pretty large change.

View on HN

But was he an actual farmer, or just semi-retired to a farm house and got to play farmer? Quite a difference.

It's not all that surprising when you think about this, the whole actuary field is basically taking people who love doing something, and trimming it down to a factory job for money making companies. As far as I've heard, there is no joy, no creativity and no sense of accomplishment; yet for people who rank salary and perceived status derived from a job title higher than those things, it's the perfect place to be.

(ironically, the people with the capabilities and the people that actually enjoy the lifestyle inside an insurer, bank, or other hypercommercial/hypercapitalistic instance don't overlap that much)

That's pretty cool! Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer - the sun, the frequent breeze, sweating, etc. It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major I'm pursing along with computer science - makes think about something other than computers and it gets me off the computer, even if it's for a tad bit.

"Manual labor, personally, is appealing after a week of desk work in front of a computer"

"It's one of the reasons I added philosophy as another major"

Couldn't help but LOL at that juxtaposition, sorry :)

No worries! It's a foolish mistake. I often don't know what I'm saying.

I suppose what I was trying to say is that by manual labor, I like being outside, and by adding a philosophy major, I get to do work that doesn't always require using the computer so I can do work under a tree and I get to think about something else. If I didn't add a philosophy major, I would just be inside and engulfed in front of the computer, thinking about computers. If any of that makes any sense and has any correlation to each other whatsoever.

Yes, I even understood the feeling you were conveying the first time around, because I think every last one of us reading this has it - but it also felt so familiar to read your 'solution' to the dilemma. 'Hmm I hate sitting down behind a computer all day, I'd love to do something physical, hey you know what - I'll just start doing that one thing besides programming that requires no physical effort at all!' (that's what it reads like, I know it's not actually like that). Not mocking you, it's funny because it's so relatable :)

recently i lost my developer job and took a temp position in a warehouse after difficulty finding a new dev position. i think it is easy to romanticize manual labor when you're sitting at a desk. when you actually have to do it to survive, there really is nothing romantic about it. not fun!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com