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Comment by xandrius | Hacker News Reader

For me, it's that homesteading has lots of problem solving but in the physical realm.

It's not that it has strictly to do with being outside or away from the computer (that's nice though) but for me it's that you still get to build and be proud of what you've done.

When I do work away from the computer and more in farm/homestead situations, I'm still drawn to using technology to solve problems (e.g. Automating certain tasks with microcontrollers), so it's not a rejection of my $job.

I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.

Have to disagree with the article though, I don't think it has anything to do with a mythos.

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> I think it's that I'm a builder and a problem solver at heart, I love finding issues, fixing them and being glad. Homestead is often that 100x.

Are you saying this from experience homesteading? Or from imagining what homesteading is like?

Once you get past the storybook fantasy version of homesteading, a lot of it is drudgery and unwelcome surprises. You may love finding and fixing problems now, but when the problems are coming faster than you can fix them, each one requires a lot of labor (or cash) to fix, and you haven't touched your fun project for months because you're too busy putting out critical fires, it doesn't seem so fun any more.

I think this is the biggest thing - anything will be much more enjoyable when you can choose how much to engage in, and you do not depend on its completion for income or survival.

Of course farming and carpentry will be more fun to a software engineer who is doing it as a hobby or in retirement, than the work they did in their job. Even if you “switch” to it as a source of income, it is far different to have another career and set of skills to fall back on, than to be doing it out of necessity.

Back when I was in school and choosing what university course to apply for, I was torn between computer science and law, both of which interested me a lot. One of the several factors that swayed my decision was that if I did law as a career I could still practise programming in my spare time, whereas if I did programming as a career, I was highly unlikely to practise law in my spare time. So (for that and other reasons) I went into law and became a lawyer.

Now, every now and again, when I am stuck working late on a deal and all I want to do is go home and hack on my latest project, I wonder if I made the right choice. But ultimately I know I wouldn't be so excited to fire up an IDE if I relied on it for my livelihood.

As for farming, I grew up in a rural area so never had any illusions about it. I do admire the resourcefulness and ingenuity of many farmers, but I know it's not for me. Most of the retirees I know like to do "a spot of gardening" in their retirement, and honestly I think the kind of micro-scale "farming" a lot of office workers dream of is not that distinguishable from gardening, so many of them will probably get their wish eventually.

I'm in the opposite lane, I have recently gained an interest in law although I just started my career in software development. Not sure if its too late to go to school now ;)

I've wondered: if I could switch my main and side jobs, making farming my primary career and doing some programming and sysadmin work on the side, would I be happier? Or would I get as tired of the main job as I am now, and wish I could spend more time on the side work? Hard to say, since I need to keep it this way to make a good living.

>Hard to say, since I need to keep it this way to make a good living.

Golden handcuffs. I hate em too.

I guess there is homesteading and homesteading.

I'm sure doing homesteading at the fringes of Canada is different than doing it in the middle of Europe.

yeah, there's subsistence farming and cosplaying as a subsistence farmer. one's a lot more fun than the other :P

That's fair, I think there are some people (like that initial hn post I reference) who such as yourself really are just people who really enjoy that sort of lifestyle. But I also think that societally we put a lot of value and for lack of a better word, "coolness factor" on manual labor. You could imagine in certain time periods and cultures that something like working in a field wouldn't be viewed positively at all, and maybe something like writing poetry is seen as a very masculine and rugged endeavor.

I think that for certain individuals that sort of mythological status ascribed to being a frontiersman or a person who can do everything themselves definitely influences how they perceive a potential job or method of living.

Thanks for reading though!!

There is too much of a tie between being satisfied with that type of work and being successful as a pre-civilization human animal for me to agree with you completely, I think.

Yeah it seems like everyone's definition of homesteading is on a bit of a spectrum. Don't get me wrong - throwing a bunch of arduinos/microcontrollers together to automate stuff is very fun but when I personally think of homesteading it's about self-sufficiency through agriculture.

In conversations with the IT world, I have definitely found a pretty high level of romanticism" often associated with the idea of leaving the modern world behind, going off-grid and running a farm.

It dovetails with the same kind of naive transcendentalism that espouses that natural = good, a simpler kind of living, etc.

a friend recently described bouldering - which I understand is also fairly popular with engineers - as something to the effect of "solving problems in a physical space with your body". this seems not dissimilar

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