The romantic fallback plan of being a farmer or shepherd. I wonder, do farmers and shepherds also romantize about becoming programmers or accountants when they feel down?
Just comes to show how the grass is always greener when you look on the other side.
That said, I also plan to retire up in the mountains soon, rather than keep feeding the machine.
If you have demons they will be there on the farm as well. How you see life is much more important to happiness than which job you have.
Many farmers struggle with alcoholism, beat their wives and hate their life. And many farmers are happy and at peace. Same with the programmers.
A farm is just such a system that you can spend a lifetime working on and optimizing. The life you are supporting is "automated", but the process of farming involves an incredible amount of system level thinking. I get tremendous amounts of satisfaction from the technical process of composting, and improving the soil, and optimizing plant layouts and lifecycles to make the perfect syntropic farming setup. That's not even getting into the scientific aspects of balancing soil mixtures and moisture, and acidity, and nutrient levels, and cross pollinating, and seed collecting to find stronger variants with improved yields, etc. Of course the physical labor sucks, but I need the exercise. It's better than sitting at a desk all day long.
Anyway, maybe the farmers and shepherds also want to become software engineers. I just know I'm already well on the way to becoming a farmer (with a homelab setup as an added nerdy SWE bonus).
That said there probably are folks who did do that and left to go be in an office, and I don't know them.
Actually I do know one sort of, but he was doing industrial farm work driving and fixing big tractors before the office, which is a different world altogether. Anyway I get the sense he's depressed.