đŸ’¾ Archived View for gemini.sensorstation.co › ~winduptoy › journal.unsettling.gmi captured on 2024-07-08 at 23:45:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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2024-06-20
I just finished reading The Unsettling of America by Wendell Berry, which may be the most important book I've ever read. It has left me with a renewed sense of purpose and direction. This conveniently coincides with me and my wife purchasing some farmland to build a house and scale up our postage-stamp urban lot into something more substantial. We are very excited.
This also coincides with me receiving a bunch of web development work; something I could not be less excited about. It is tedious, vapid, and for companies that do more harm than good. I dread this upcoming dev work for all the same reasons many others have experienced with tech burnout/disillusionment. I'm tired of sitting at a desk and staring at a screen when it's nice outside, I'm tired of wrestling with Okta Verify in a VM, and I'm tired of having my hand forced to build new user-hostile junk when I could be herding sheep, swinging a scythe, and teaching my niece in nephew how to graft fruit trees. For the first time, I now have the resources and a direction for changing the course of my life to something substantially more fulfilling.
But there's another more important factor besides burnout that makes me feel like I need to accelerate my life in this new direction: I can feel the lie of money unraveling in a very real and direct way. Society has taught me to save money and invest for retirement: when I'm old and can't work, the money will be there to take care of me. Supposedly, if I have enough of it, I will be able to buy whatever I need. This is no longer true.
For example, finding a soil scientist and septic installer who will come to our new farm has been challenging. Many refuse to answer their phone and the few that do are happy to explain that they won't drive out that far (it's not far) even though we are willing to pay any price. Multiple independent anecdotal experiences from friends and family have proven how difficult it is to find trustworthy handyman help for smaller construction projects in my part of the world; all of the local companies are interested only in big construction contracts or whole houses, not small one-off jobs. There are not enough independent contractors without a drug problem to go around. There are also effectively no materials manufactured locally that are of any use to the layman, and thus we import everything.
I suspect this situation will become more dire in the near future. Simply having money will not enable you to purchase what you want, as it might simply not be for sale. If it was unclear, I'm talking about practical things like home construction, not something ephemeral like fun or happiness (and who knows how wild things will get with bizarre industries like medicine). Therefore, a retirement account is no longer the golden ticket it used to be and is becoming worth a lot less than the dollar amount on it.
This local lack of skill and availability makes complete sense to anyone paying attention, as I come from an entire generation encouraged to be a doctor or a lawyer and at the very least a white-collar office worker. Blue-collar work is part of an undesirable caste, and so no one my age is filling the roles of septic installer, roofer, plumber, or electrician.
In my last year of high school I was questioned about my chosen university, to which I indicated I would be attending the local community college. The administration made a point to single me out and remind me that "there's nothing to be ashamed of" with regards to community college. I think this experience speaks for itself.
The next two decades will be very interesting as the older generations die out and us "kids" are running the show. It's becoming clear to me that skills and community are all we can count on. Should I sacrifice another decade to the screen and hope that the money is worth it? Or:
If you're paying attention and want some answers, read The Unsettling of America.