Have Taken Up Farming
dylan.gr
dylan.gr
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 up late, went for walk where I probably met friend or two who had nothing much to do, so we drink a coffee and talked a bit. Waiting for summer heat to be over, then work in the vineyard till the sun went down and then go to the local pub for beer or four.
I guess it sounds like it was vacation or playing farmer. And that is what it was, really. I did that for couple of years and then moved back to the nearby city and rejoined the startup grind. What I got from this experience is that there are seasons in life and it is great to have an optionality to play with different modes of life. The tech industry will always be there.
I am in my 40s now. Found a wife, got a mortgage and couple of kids. I kept the farm and treated it as a weekend hobby, rented out most of the land and I am slowly building the infrastructure I missed when I started. One day the kids will be old enough and tech will no longer excite me. The season will change, I move back, wake up late, meet with local friends who have nothing much to do during summer heat, work the vineyards and then hit pub when the sun went down.
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.
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 things.
Civilization is when men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.
For some, the benefits for society are not as immediately visible as a farmer producing potatoes or corn which he/she can touch with their own hands, but in my personal view my job positions me as a not insignificant cog in a gigantic machine which has genuine benefits for society (and some negative influences, yes).
Some red flags in the linked article. Spirituality and barefoot running, which I do not believe is very evidence based to recommend. My opinion is that anyone working a software engineering office 9-5 should also always be doing strength resistance training and some cardio every single week. This should provide the health benefits needed to survive in what is a sedentary job.
There is a visceral spiritualism to working with your hands, but if you can achieve that with coding, great! Live a life you would want if money didn't matter.
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.
Sure, correcting "pursuit of happiness" to "pursuit of contentment/fulfillment/purpose" is pedantic, but it makes me happy ;p
It's also a connotative reminder to ourselves & others to seek rewards with longer time horizons
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.
For me, my joy has come from strength resistance training and my discovery of the stairmaster. The latter was a very fun find! It's a really strenuous exercise which makes you strong for hiking in the wilderness and I feel like I do not need to do it for as long as the treadmill which I hate.
Yeah, but wikipedia for example says this, which matches my experience:
"Scientific research into the practice of running barefoot or with minimalist shoes is increasingly suggesting that it increases intrinsic foot muscle size and strength, but it has been limited to healthy individuals and further research is required to reach definite conclusions."
If you are healthy and do it right, it seems beneficial.
So it is smart to not recommend it in general for everyone as most ain't healthy, nor do take the time to do things right.
And same with spirituality, it is just such a broad term. I believe there are quite some studies that show positive effects of mindful meditation for example. But sure, you won't find positive studies about health benefits of astrology or homeopathy if that is what spirituality means to you.
But more on the matter, I am not so much a advocate of running barefoot, but doing anything barefeet if possible. Dancing is so much more enjoyable for me like this, so many more moves possible without shoe restrictions, but it depends of course on the setting and place.
(Now I will go out and do some rock climbing barefeet)
"If you could see the cabbages I have planted here with my own hands, you surely would never have thought to request this."
Every Web 3.0, leftist, tech bro I ever met, idolize the farmin lifestyle and see before them a hippy commune where free love is practiced.
I never ever seen that, or heard about the leftist tech bro who actually did it.
I agree that farming is definitely romanticized in some tech circles, and it is not for everyone. Of course my tech experience wasn't universal, but even if ZIRP free money comes back to tech, I'll still be here tending my field :)
With the way the industry is moving, this seems much harder now than in the past.
People on the Right fantasize about the farming lifestyle, too.
I went back. Sleepless nights in the tractor is my favourite time of year.
But you're still ultimately just siting there staring at a screen — albeit a screen on wheels. Same as software development (minus the wheels).
If that's hard toil, I'm not sure what you think is easy?
What alwas struck me about dylan araps's software was that the minimalism didnt come from a lack of scope or complexity, but rather the approach to use as much of the tools that were "already there" (at least thats my way to interpret this - i might be wrong). The pure bash bible is describing how to do common tasks in pure bash. Tasks that usually were done with external tools like sed an awk etc. Then later came the pure sh bible, doing the same for POSIX sh and therefore shedding the dependency on bash-isms. This represented to me a chase to go "deeper".
And this part clearly seems to still be a driving force to this day. Farming and producing olive oil and wine by hand, no chemicals no bullshit - that sounds like dylan araps alright. Looking at the website you can also see this spirit everywhere. Go ahead and disable JS on https://wild.gr/wine - the image slider still works. It uses inputs and CSS transforms. Makes the markup ever so slightly more complicated, and future changes ever so slightly more involved (unless the code is generated). But lets not kid ourselves, how often are those kind of web elemts updated?
It is once again a project that excels in "using whats already there" and I personally really like that, and even though I am not rocking KISS linux and DWM anymore, this way of thinking is still with me to this day, and I believe it was taught to me by dylan araps. For that I am thankful!
I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season."
— from "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder
Helping people for example is neither farming, nor artisanal, and is quite arguably the least evil and most selfless things one can do. The world needs caregivers, health workers, etc.
I'm not saying that to be mean, not at all. I just find it odd that for someone who has gone through such a spiritual journey/awakening, become a devout Christian even, to then declare all other careers as evil or meaningless. For every ex-white collar professional now LARPing as a micro-farmer, there are tenfold more people not receiving adequate care.
Maybe it’s overreaching, but I like to see it as the writer saying unless your job provides a “good” to world and doesn’t just move bits from one database to another then its a good path.
Theres flaws with that approach too, but one I would give them benefit for.
The meaningless thing is more of an absolute statement however.
A career can do (and even mostly do) good and sometimes unavoidably do evil.
Likewise a career can be (and even mostly be) meaningful and sometimes unavoidably be meaningless at times!
But given that we're on a tech forum, I think most people should reflect deeply on the companies they work for and the systems they exist in. If those companies are not already mostly doing evil (as the companies which employ a majority or near-majority of tech workers are), then they're probably venture-capital funded or owned by investors, which means their goal is to maximize profitability over any real metric of doing good. So they will be doing evil in the future, if they're not already, because doing evil is necessary for competing with other companies also doing evil.
Reflecting on a top-level comment from another user about OP using the basic technologies to do things people would often use other tools for, I noticed wild.gr doesn't even use google fonts or other tracking scripts. Its fancy text effects in the hero ("Wild & alive" "& raw" etc) are done entirely with SVG!
Most would certainly provide more data to Google for convenience
I believe it must be something about dedicating oneself to creating something that "does not exist" in a material sense.
My 'farming' has been woodworking: completing the simplest wooden furniture has given me a satisfaction that I do not remember any app or software product ever getting close to causing, despite the fact that I love the work.
I wonder if writers feel the same.
That's why I realised that I really enjoy embedded systems, as they often include a good level of physical world in their architecture. Using ES in a farming setting is even more satisfying because the code could be extremely simple but still make a huge real impact to people. Love that!
I wanted to change the world and make it better, and it felt good to pursue a career with a high salary and prestige, but after years of working in software I was not seeing my work actually make the world better. In fact it was making me feel sick, tired, and depressed.
There was a short period of time in the 2000s when it did feel like tech was beginning to transform peoples lives and society for the better, but after the algorithms and rougher edges of our collective human nature took it over, it all seems to have drastically changed course.
I quit my SWE job more than a year ago and have been trying out a solo/indie thing for a few months. It has been hard, as it really forces me to face how much I really suck at things, but the motivation and the joy of learning are slowly coming back.
I am wondering if indie webdev might become a thing, given how it is going in the game development space, how enshittification is slowly becoming a mainstream term, and how the industry seem to lean right now in terms of jobs.
At the same time, I began reducing my living costs. I sold my townhome and rented a room in a siblings house. I was able to bring my total core expenses down to around $25k-$30k/year.
Last year I started a nonprofit related to art (fieldsofcolor.org). I found a lot of joy and meaning in this endeavor. We recently received 501(c)(3) exemption, and I am planning to begin fundraising soon. I hope to someday make my living doing this. If not, my lifestyle is frugal enough I can manage via small consulting gigs here and there, or through a side job.
Jobs are, by definition, things you get paid to do, because you wouldn't do them for free. Therefore, by definition, everyone hates their job to some degree. We just have the luxury of leaving.
- Our work feels very abstract and removed from real people in the real world. Sometimes I did not even understand what our product did, or it got axed after a year. Marx's theory of alienation felt very real.
- We can afford to consider other options. It actually feels achievable. Few people have that luxury.
- Many of us had a relatively easy career start, and underestimate how hard other fields are to get into.
- The material world just feels better. Making digital art does not feel as good as watercolours. Carving wood is a much more complex sensation than drawing in autocad. Even paper books feel better. I can't explain why, it's just how it is.
By and large those who end up in the software industry are engineers at heart, and therefore want to be engineers, not just software developers.
That's why farming is the oft dreamed of escape. In farming you get to be (and have to be, if you want to remain competitive) a software engineer, mechanical engineer, electrical engineer, structural engineer... and on and on. You get to actually solve problems for what they are instead of trying to force arbitrarily selected tools into searching for a problem.
I live on a small dairy farm. We milk the cows, make cheese, raise most of the forage for the cows, do our own plumbing, electrical, and the majority of the mechanical repairs. We do most of the repairs ourselves on our milking robot.
Sometimes it's hard to remember I have such an amazing opportunity to do a little bit of everything.
- You now likely have the money/time to pursue passions you didn't know you have, or would have developed if you didn't pursue software development as intensely.
- Even if you had/have passion for computers, being paid to do something you wouldn't do otherwise can quickly drain that passion.
- We're built for sunlight and exercise, not LED light and sitting, so you may have felt increasing physical discomfort that only the former can alleviate.
- Woodworking and farming were never lucrative enough (or as lucrative as computer work) to convince you to make the switch for money.
Do you think this is true if you have your own apps/products or similar ?
There's a common trope that monetizing your hobby is a good way to start hating that hobby. But it doesn't have to be that way; a lot of people love what they do.
At least with software I can go back and edit my past transgressions.
This blogpost might generate more profits, but I doubt they are even close to being profitable and have other income/savings.
Emigrating halfway across the world is not cheap in the first place.
Greece is also not cheap for where it stands on the economic level compared to the average income, especially back in 2018 when Dylan did it, and especially for property even outside of urban areas. Euboea is not super remote either, it's about an hour or two's drive from Athens depending where you go.
So sure, the farm might not make money, but I would wager he had a good amount saved up between him and his family to make the transition possible.
Money may not buy happiness buy money buys you all the freedom you could possibly need to do anything that fits your whimsy.
People change countries, partners, careers not because of one book. This is usually the last drop. They were long-term unhappy, yearning for something else.
And as this guy wrote, he was sick, he was burned out. I suppose, he wasn't able to limit his screen time, it was all or nothing. Sometimes, those big changes work better than incremental steps. 20 years ago, I went from a pack of cigarettes a day to zero. If I went to 19, then 18, then 17, I might still smoke to this day.
I have an acquaintance - not into IT at all - that did something similar, went to work in a solo eco-farming project (no fertilizers, just let the soil rest, no pesticides obviously, I'm not sure if he went as far as no artificial irrigation either though) and now after a few years he decided he wanted to come back to civilization and he is now working in a factory, in an assembly line.
As other commenters have pointed out, this does seem like going from one extreme to another - especially once religion gets involved.
I wish Dylan well, though I do hope some deeper, more moderate self reflection takes place at some point.
As an IC, you're basically geriatric as soon as you hit your 30s.
/s
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 others have reminded me below, service work like doctor, firefighter, teacher must qualify as well.
Some had rich patrons and there were travelling bands of entertainers...
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.
Bet you ten bucks he spent a few solid months playing Stardew Valley before this grand moral awakening.
They doesn't. People did poetry for a long time.
In that case the whole labor division and economic incentives kinda disappear, right?
Why I feel this? Because it is a way for people to convince themselves they are pure and kind. People reason that the big bad evil world with evil things and professions can go to hell, and "I won't participate in this". Nice way to lie to yourself.
If you think deeper, you inevitably get a conclusion that if you have talents, you can do real good at a scale. It might be not as fulfilling, and it includes compromises, but amount of good you can do is tenfold or even several orders of magnitude.
In our modern complex world, you can try and see far consequences of your actions or inaction. For example, you can earn western SDE salary, and donate 80% to good causes. It might not be as nice as quiet country life, but it would help a lot of people or animals. That's what my friend is doing. He overdid it, sure, and burned out, but you can always find a balance.
What bothers me is that thing people who downshift into some traditional lifestyle easily do. They somehow feel like 8 billion people can live like that or close to it.
But that will cause insane downgrade of quality of life where it does matter. I'm not talking about consumerism or even experiental consumerism like travel.
Healthcare, child mortality ratez, food safety, and personal safety will be in a downfall without modern institutions, hierarchies and professions. It might be hard and often not fulfilling to be a doctor, or even a programmer. But even programmer can help create things that allow others to connect one with other (internet and phone networks), to get entertainment where options are very limited (games, movies for old people or people with disabilities). For example, my mom uses her smart speaker to provide her music and really enjoys it.
Without it, she barely used CDs because of the friction of buying, storing and inserting it. Same with movies, she now gets to the point where she watches movies on a streaming platform. She eat he'd nothing except TV when we had VCR and DVDs because of the friction of using it.
All this is possible because of some programmers and other IT people. She also enjoys social networks to some extent, and reads stuff in web. Sure, books also do, but she is limited be ause she lives in an area with not many books available in her native language.
Modern civilization has many issues, but still a lot of benefits that are not possible if everybody would be a farmer or an artisan. Also, artisan stuff is too expensive. And same for eco farming.
But then it goes on, the guy is mostly healthier from quitting bad and not-so-bad habits, doing eco-friendly stuff in Greece with his family. It sounds like it worked for him.
This dont-do-evil kind of Christianity is all right.
It's not completely obvious from the post though whether this man embraces the love-thy-neighbor aspect of Christianity. He seems to have this idealistic good-vs-bad view of the world that's typically protestant. And his condescending tone make it sound like whoever doesn't do like he does can rot in hell, cause they deserve it.
The thing is that we always sell the product in intermediates that would pack it up and sell it in a much higher price. I don't know of any small producer that sells the product directly to the consumer. This seems like a very big investment and not really sustainable. Are there other people that are doing it?
Could my knowledge as a software engineer help that family business in any way to be more profitable ?
It's possible, the market is kind of small I guess but you need to have a product where the customer is happy to pay a premium.
And being a software developer helps because you might have the money to invest?! :)
Something you might be able to code is plugins for these ecommerce sites, if it makes sense for your business. I also used to run a loose leaf tea ecommerce store via Shopify but I imported from producers like your family as you describe, and I wrote one for dynamic pricing for buying from various countries due to their purchasing power being less. It'd calculate their power as well as my thresholds and figure out optimal prices where more people could buy it but wasn't screwing me over too.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46385308, https://www.vidaliaonions.com/
Kudos to author for going this path, but it takes a lot of resources to be able to make a move like this, which is not really an option for a large majority of population.
In Silicon Valley fashion: raise VC money to acquire Dylan's farm and either bring him and his family on as acquihires or pay them out.
I'm on a similar path myself, hoping to marry open source and open hardware with farming. Heartfelt congrats to Dylan on finding WILD and the clarity to change course.
Wishing you all the best for the future, may the Greek weather keep you happy!
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!
The "dishes" are templates filled in with whatever is available at the time. For instance, when chestnuts are in season they enter soups, casseroles, roasts, salads and on their own drizzled with olive oil and salt. When they finish, something else is in season and the dishes change again.
There's a very brief period of overlap where the staple summer vegetables (tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, zucchini) and chestnuts are available at the same time. These vegetables stuffed with a mix of brown rice and chestnuts and baked in the oven is heavenly.
Instead of thinking about recipes and then obtaining ingredients to make them, start with the ingredients and make it up as you go. Things that are in season together typically go together. We base everything on olive oil, alliums, some sort of legume or grain and seasonal greens, nuts, fruits and vegetables.
My great grandparents didn't follow recipes per se. When they made a soup they used what they had and due to lack of refrigeration and ultra-processing everything they ate was local, seasonal and fresh.
LMK if there's a mailing list or something I can get on for your mom's book!
overall I don't believe neither extreme is healthy; doing A, then doing 2x the opposite of A because you realize A was not really good for you in the long term
but I'm glad it so far worked out for the author
Wishing you good luck!
FIRE is a nice idea, but in the pure sense it is really just the idea of deferring the life you really want to live. You might die before you get there.
The fisherman and businessman story come to mind here.
2. High earning SV engineers can easily build a substantial corpus in under 10 years.
3. Most people don't know what they want to do. That means experimenting till you find it.
4. Its the safest way of figuring out and following your dreams I can think of. Of course you may die before 30 but thats statistically less probable. I am optimising for the case where I do live to the median age. Optimising for the worse case scenario seems too pessimistic.
Not on this timeline. Layoffs abound and jobs are becoming scarce.
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.
The author also forgot another path: teacher.
Also I inherently disagree with the idea of meaninglessness the author presents there. Meaning is relative to man, man makes meaning. There is no objective meaning and so you have to choose it for yourself.
Interesting.
Reading the bible did nothing for me.
Understanding the bible is what turned me into a hard atheist.
I have yet to find anything more irredeemably evil than the god of the Abrahamic religions.
This is a pattern that keeps popping up in tech circles.
After brain damage happens, it is too late. Reason is compromised, and religion easily takes root.
We need to focus on stopping burn out before it causes brain damage.
> 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.
As someone raised in the Jewish faith, and having spent time also learning about the New Testament and the Quran (though without having read the texts directly), I'm inclined to think Christianity on paper is "the best" of the Abrahamic religions, in that the core messages of Jesus are about forgiveness, nonviolence, and helping one another. These messages are in the Torah and the Quran too, to be clear, but specifically with matters of sexuality, gender, and gender roles, Christianity is the most "forgiving" of people who are non-normative or opposed to those norms in the first place.
I say this as someone who doesn't believe in any religion fwiw, not as a born-again Christian or whatever.
And I also want to be clear that there are progressive interpretations of all religious texts, people of all religious practices can be LGBTQ, poly, drug users. And religion can also be used to justify incredible acts of evil. Christianity was the justification for the Inquisition and the Crusades after all, despite the violence of both certainly going against the teachings of Jesus.
Abrahamic? Maybe. I have studied comparative religion somewhat -- more than the vast majority of religious people -- and the least unpleasant "religion" by far is old-school Buddhism.
The original has been widely corrupted and turned into a forest of competing rival faiths, most of which have become religions, but the original seems to me to have been designed by someone very smart, who studied, subjected themselves to various allegedly spiritually-improving practices... and then wrote down a sort of vaccination to inculcate into people carefully designed to protect them from religion.
Religions are contagious memetic infections. Virtually nobody that calls themselves Christian actually follows what little is known of the teachings of Yeshweh. In practice, "being Christian" is not so much a recommendation as a warning.
In my 58 years, I have so far met one (1) person who was a true Yeshweh follower.
Original Buddhism was an inoculation to protect lesser minds from memetic infection.
But it itself has been corrupted by viral influences, to paraphrase Neal Stephenson, and turned into what it sought to protect people from.
Any sect of Christianity that has a name should be avoided. Ditto Islam, Judaism, all the big ones.
For a good overview of world religions, I recommend this excellent book:
https://thebookshop.ie/moncrieff-sean-god-a-users-guide-larg...
Very accessible, funny, and gives you a great "big picture" view.
A valid point.
I'm not interested, myself, but this is an interesting question.
My upbringing was very vaguely Church of England Protestant. I read very fast and read a large chunk of the bible as a child. I decided when I was 11 that religion was a fairy story, just a work of fiction and nothing more, and that I didn't believe in it.
I have read much of the Christian bible, and I was top of the class in religious studies at school. I am confident that I know much more about Christianity than 99% of Christians, and most ex-Christian atheists I know are the same.
For most intelligent adults, actually reading the bible is a leading cause of atheism. This is a meme among atheists.
I have never heard of anyone getting religion from the bible before.
> and no, there's no manifesto decrying the system written from a cabin in the woods
Is a bit unjustified considering you've just written an entire blog post decrying your old "meaningless" existence vs the fulfilment you have in your new life. It comes across a bit holier than thou. As if to imply you're "quietly just getting on with it", which is evidently not the case, as you still feel the need to write about it
Remarkably similar to the author's, following a massive burnout from work in mid 2020 from which I became a new^Wdifferent person, with a new perspective on life. Three years of therapy later, jailbroken Kindle filled not with the Bible but philosophers and other role models [1]
The eyes of friends and family gloss over when I describe my new goal in life, of finding the tight path between being a computer wiz and finding a life as close to Nature as possible; of finding a community of like-minded people that exist in real life, for someone that grew up and lived all his adult life on the Internet. An Internet of people that keep telling me that urban living and modern technology isn't so bad, that I should stop complaining and schedule another interview that modern tech is "so much fun and comfortable, look at all this money." I do believe we have gone wrong somewhere, I do believe there is a third path between totalitarian techno-optimism and complete rejection of modernity, and perhaps this is the best time in history to explore it, by returning to our roots. Remembering our natural ecosystem which is our home and sustenance. We earn our living in front of a square piece of glass connected to the ether, why the hell would one live packed like a sardine in impersonal and smelly cities? I truly, desperately need to believe in a return to the countryside; to more humane rhythms of living.
My favourite quote is from George Bernard Shaw: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man"
We don't have to abandon all our comforts. And for once the technologists like us can use their brains for the good of humanity and their neighbours, rather than making people click on ads. Go wire solar panels. Build hydroponic farms. Fix and refurbish electronics. Make art. Share your labour with your neighbour. Invite them over to talk about life. Leave the modern Internet behind.
---
1: Martijn Doolaard, and the Emacs philosopher Protesilaos Stavrou have had the greatest influence on me.
that maybe in the future it will be more common to have a split career of, in the 40 hrs work week tradition, manual labor / trade for ~20 hrs/week and a "cognitive" job at like ~20 hrs/week (or however many hours)
This would allow workers to exercise both mind and body
> For reasons of spirituality, morality and health, I stopped eating all animal products (meat, fish, dairy, eggs, etc) adopting instead, the diet of my great grandparents: Plants; local, seasonal and whole.
Loosely related : this documentary brings new and interesting points regarding Jesus’s animals consumption. It stands that todays bible traduction inherits past’s conflicts of interests of monks, but none of the originals clearly depict Jesus encouraging fish, meat or milk consumption - quite the opposite in fact, with a brillant relecture of the cleansing of the Temple.
Christspiracy: https://m.imdb.com/fr/title/tt29630794/
I think that this path is best; one where you recognize the problem and solve it. He knew he was lost in an occupation that was not good, so he dropped that and found his purpose.
Not everyone can pack up their family and be a farmer in Greece, and even if you can, this path is still not easy. Many others may assume you’ve become lost. Life may seem great like this post and later be difficult.
But it’s great that this person found their purpose and know who they are.
I associate being stuck in the Level 5 or 6 trough that Richard Rohr describes. There is purpose waiting, but I don’t have the guts to do anything more than pretend I’m a good servant while being miserable with what I feel I must do.
It doesn’t matter if I attempt to be stoic and sometimes pull off looking that way, I’m self-obsessed since I wallow in self pity while having a martyr complex, and I can hate myself and diminuate myself as much as I want, to believe that I’m nothing and only God exists, but I couldn’t be more lost than I am and am only fooling myself to believe otherwise.
JK I think he means it ;)
ahahahahahahahah
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 language the work was written in on top of everything else.
> 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?
It's a cult. If God were real, he'd be a sociopath.
Rather than eternal torment (and heaven) it was originally a bit more vague and esotheric. Not a place of fire and demons and a place in the clouds with golden gates and all things nice which the catholic church declines to support regardless of what some church frescos depict.
Supposedly hell is/was more more like eternal absence of god. Eternal nothingness which supposedly is horrifying to some rather than eternally being with god or becoming one with him.
The ancient Israelites originally believed in Sheol[0,1], an afterlife where everyone went, regardless of their morality. The modern concept of Hell is a political construct meant to answer the problem of evil and the absence of God's justice in times of persecution[2..4].
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheol
[1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUCW-PMBvKE
[2]https://old.reddit.com/r/AcademicBiblical/comments/1fsatrp/o...
However people read it and find connection to their past/present and somehow brings them peace. No different than any other old philosophical old book.
When I hear these rants against people deciding to choose a reglion, I hear projection. I hear people struggling to come up with their own belief system (maybe a little here as well)
My decisive moment was pretty silly in hindsight, but I stopped going to church after that. I was ten and me and my friend spent the better part of an afternoon after school collecting buckeyes (aka conkers, horse chestnuts). We were headed home with our spoils but when we were passing a church, my friend recalled that there was some kind of holiday that day and he had to attend mass. He gave me everything he had collected and joined the crowd standing there in the cold.
Exodus 20:5
As an atheist myself, it took me a long to to realize that a lot of modern conflict between rationality and Christianity stems from the rationalists not understanding that the belief is often beyond the literal, especially when the Christian is of a more intellectual bent. A lot of times the believers don't even realize they only believe symbolically, or can't articulate it. I won't do the ideas justice, so I won't try to explain them.
It’s probably not a great thing for a modern English speaker to read if they want to actually understand it; in particular the meaning of certain English words has changed enough that they can give a false impression.
OP specifically indicates he wanted to read it because of its high valency with other texts he had read, so his choice makes sense.
What's a Bible translation?
I’ve had some relatable discoveries about the meaning of life but it’s very different than this back-to-primitive-existence as utopia. Mostly because I have creative talents. I can write and play music. I write a fuck ton better than this guy. He belongs in a field…as do most people on social media, or otherwise “influencing” discourse.
That’s why I muted my socials for quite a while. Doing is better than posting. I’m posting here at 3 am because my sleep cycle is still fuckdd up from jail this is when they woke us in solitary for breakfast. I only was in for a year and not quite out yet for a year. I wonder if this guy will still be of the same perspective 10 years from now. Might want a smoke just for the sake of it…