Item — HN Reader

Having spent my youth on a dryland wheat farm in Montana, I would just say no.

Why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops?

My flip answer to that is that they haven't spent their youth on a farm, worrying about a hailstorm that wipes out the entire wheat crop for the year, or you lose 25% of your cattle herd to a recently diagnosed virus diarrhea. My grandparents were homesteaders who at some point in their life lived in houses with dirt floors.

The fact of life was that due to technology, the productivity of the American farm increased by almost two orders of magnitude during my Grandfather's lifetime. This meant that a tractor that my dad purchased when I was about 3 for the equivalent of 1500 bushels of wheat cost about 9000 by the time I went to college.

Thus, the economics of a family farm, or sole dude wanting to get away from the computer and grow something is painful.

A couple of kids that do an excellent job of building a homestead are the couple behind the youtube channel Ambition Strikes. They call at an off-grid homestead, but through their unbounded energy and creativity have created their own substantial mini-grid. I have a lot of respect for them and what they have done.

The article notes It is difficult to think of any field more forcibly disentangled from any sort of understanding of the impact of your labor than the majority of positions in tech. This is discussed in some detail in the book "Stiffed" by Susan Faludi. She discusses the community nature of the naval shipyards, in which everyone apparently was connected meaningfully to their work and the workers around them. She contrasts that with the workers in aerospace whose work is so abstract that it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day.

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> it was hard for a professional working there to describe to their kids what exactly they do all day

I work remotely, and my four year old daughter asked me this morning “How does you being upstairs all day give us food?” At dinner time she always asks me “What did you do at work today?”

It’s a very odd experience trying to describe (justify?) the purpose of Zoom meetings and typing on a computer all day to a little person, and the more I attempted to come up with a coherent and reasonable explanation, the less defensible it sounded to myself as I spoke out loud. Tech is quite a strange industry to be in.

IMHO this breaks down into one of two answers: 1) I'm building something that makes a difference (if you think it does). 2) I'm building something that someone thinks makes a difference, and that person pays me (it's a paycheck).

To my mind currently some tech jobs just get caught up in the whirlwind of self-justification, while others you could argue provide real value to people. Which side of that a particular role is on is, I think, largely subjective.

So...someone thinks it's worth it to pay you. Maybe you care too; at the least, it puts food on the table because it matters to someone enough to swap money for.

That's my 2 cents, but I invite a disagreeing perspective.

I think alienation is more of a bottom-up emotional experience than anything that a top-down argument can really impact.

I assume said YouTube channel is funded by the revenue they get from said YouTube channel. An individual trying to replicate their efforts would likely have a different experience.

It's the ol' "person selling you X didn't get rich from X, they got rich selling people X".

For examples of Real Modern Farming™ documented on youtube that's bringing in a bit of extra cash and sponsership but is very much riding on a pre existing lifestyle .. see (say) Merrett Contracting

For similar, but documenting tree farming life in NZ there's Marty T .. which is almost 100% field fixing and shed restoring old tractors, bulldozers, excavators, and any bit of machinery related activity that might be useful in a rural setting - power from hydro, building rafts to move machinery, etc.

So far as I can tell, yes. Plus they do have occasional sponsors, plus a bit of swag.

Few of us can replicate their energy and resourcefulness.

>community nature of naval shipyards

I'm guessing from the other thread, this was way back in Rickover's youth as well? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43450884

I believe it was so.

Operationally, there's still some of that

https://youtu.be/R6-0_VEl978?t=4m14s

That's exactly it. If you have to actually do this for survival or to make functional products at the pace of making a profit it's no longer "wistful and whimsical". These fetishes come from living in a time where industry and automation has dealt with most of our problems and we can romanticize hand work, etc.