alt Hacker News> quit tech and live in the woods
I'm so curious about this; it is nearly universal that software engineers threaten this. I constantly tell my colleagues that I am quitting to start woodworking in a cabin in British Columbia.
My theory is that we are comprised of people who love building and making things, yet at the end of the day we don't have anything tangible to show. Like, my parents (nearing 80 years old) barely understand what I do or how software engineering works, though they are computer-literate. Going back 2 generations and it is incomprehensible magic. But, if I built a cabin or a cabinet or a wooden spoon, I could have a meaningful conversation about it with someone from the last Ice Age (language barriers aside). Maybe it is just staring at a screen 8 hours+ per day leaves the ancient part of the brain wanting.
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I make this very same joke; I think a lot of it is that the bearded old man hermit in the rugged forests idea has a lot of precedence in fiction and expresses a bunch of concepts very succinctly. Not just the rejection of modern technology, but also the bitterness felt toward it, the distance to be sought from fellow humans and their artifice, the peace found in the new life, independence, and so on. There's also an appealing masculinity to it, for those of us of that persuasion.
One of these days I'll do it! I'll never open another JIRA ticket again!
The "leave tech and find some pastoral life" is a very tempting dream.
I know a lot of technologists who do something physical with their hobby time. Woodworking is top of the list... I know a blacksmith. There are quite a few who do painting (and the entire subset of spending that excess disposable income on plastic to paint).
Its to have something that has permanence when the lights are turned off.
I think also it is the mythos of the individual hacker. You never see anyone threatening to quit and join a furniture factory. And most dissatisfaction comes from the compromises you have to make for business reasons; everyone has the tech debt they don’t like that they were forced to walk away from.
The world we work with is entirely artificial and ephemeral. Anything is redoable, ctrl-z-able. You can "create" and explore a luscious forest, but there's no smell, no permanence. It's a simulation we create for ourselves, created for self-satisfaction.
Software engineers get lost and subsumed into the virtual world, so I don't think it's surprising we look for and pine for ways to exit.