Foreword

Everything here is from a personal experience and I’m a human being in constant change, so maybe by the time you’re reading this I won’t even have the same thoughts as I do while writing this article.

Take all with a grain of salt.

Every and each one of us have different ways of looking at things because (surprise, surprise): we are all DIFFERENT.

That said, I still love programming and will probably do it until the end of times - or the end of my time, whichever comes first.

“I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

– Elizabeth Beatrice Hall

Intro

It’s been a long time since I last wrote anything. I’m feeling like I’m consuming a lot of information and not producing. This makes me not like myself. I think we, as humans, we need to create. We are all CREATORS, but society somehow manage to make us every and each year more and more CONSUMERS. I don’t think that’s the good way of living.

People may like it superficially, but I guess deep down they feel some emptiness - at least I do.

There’s always that feeling whenever we are alone, without anyone to talk to, without Internet (or no desire to use it anyhow), that weird, creeping feeling that we are empty, that there’s something missing. We don’t know WHAT, but we feel it anyway.

Well, as this is a personal blog I don’t have to keep repeating “in my opinion”, but…in my opinion, I think this is related to how much CONSUMPTION a person is doing.

To try to fill that void, lemme act as a PRODUCER and create this article.

The move

There’s a meme in the tech world that every programmer dreams of becoming a goose farmer. Why is that?

👉 Being a farmer is not something easy - is actually pretty HARD (just watch Clarkson’s Farm on Prime Video and you will see that even being a millionaire, that thing is pretty hard to do).

👉 Being a farmer is not something shinny - probably most of the time you will be in darkness (metaphorically and in reality).

👉 It isn’t something that gets you a lot of money - you will probably LOSE money, or at best be at break-even.

So why? Why would anyone want to be a farmer? Why would a programmer - someone that sits chill at a desk, most of the time working from home, just looking at a computer screen and earning the big bucks (well, not everyone, but it’s a good paying profession overall) - want to be a farmer?

It boils down to one word: meaning.

Meaning

Programming feels too abstract. You spend a lot of time in front of the computer. You do a lot of brain work, have lots of meetings, talk to a bunch of people, write shitloads of code and all of that, have eventful deadlines that you would almost want to be YOUR DEADline ☠️.

You do all of this, get stressed and everything bad that comes with that. At the end of the day you close your computer.

  • You don’t see anything changing.
  • You are on the same place you were +8h ago.
  • The world looks the same.
  • Your surroundings looks the same.
  • Nobody comes and say “whoa, look at how much work you did here. NICE!”.
  • Nothing. It almost feels meaningless - and most of the time IT IS.

Then the next day you wake up, turn on the computer and there it is: a bunch of work that looks the same you did the day before, as if nothing changed.

There’s a new crazy deadline ahead. A bunch of meetings that drain your soul. You feel overwhelmed. Your eyelids start blinking in an automatic way. Starts almost unnoticeable, and then it turns into something that makes you crazy.

You have a tired feeling in your face.

You see people working in jobs that would be considered “low grade jobs” looking much more alive than you. Happier than you.

“What is happening? I’m not supposed to feel this way. I have a nice job. I work from the comfort of my home. I don’t have to be under the sun the whole day or lifting weights down the stairs. I don’t get dirt or oil on my shirts. I’m clean most of the time. Why am I feeling this way?” - you question yourself.

You feel terrible. You feel ungrateful. You feel ashamed.

“YOU DON’T DESERVE WHAT YOU HAVE” - a voice echoes inside your head.

You slowly fade into a dark corner of your own soul. You try to put up with everything. You try to present yourself as you would think someone in your position should present themselves, but it’s a mask. You are pretending.

You smile, but you are dead inside.

Reason

Of course I’m being a bit overdramatic in some of the situations here - or am I? - but it happens. It happens more commonly than we’re happy to admit.

And the reason this happens is that this is not normal. This is not what we’re made to do. We CAN do it, but we’re not MADE to do it. At least not for such a long time. At least not without something to balance, something to compensate.

Deep down we yearn for creation, we yearn for new experiences. It’s what makes us alive.

“Nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and so there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon”.

– Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild

The abstractness of programming leaves our brains in a weird state. We yearn for REAL experiences, something that the act of programming doesn’t give us.

No matter how much you work, how many hours you clock in, it’s as if you brain can’t compute it.

The balance

They like to say that everything in life is about balance - if you don’t drink water, you die; if you drink too much, you also die; the nice line is in between, it’s the balance.

I agree with that.

In the tech world, the balance would be to NOT do anything that we’re currently doing. In other words, we need to touch grass.

Touching grass is basically a meme at the moment, but it does hold a truth. We need to get outside. We need to do something with our hands. We need to UNPLUG.

Boy, even rock bands do unplugged sessions sometimes, why wouldn’t you?

Jokes aside, the contact with nature is super important. Beside some healthy benefits that I’m not gonna pinpoint here (maybe in another time), it makes us feel connected to everything else.

It reminds us that WE DO EXIST. We are not the personnas in the Slack threads or the talking head in the Teams© meetings (just hearing the term makes my stomach churn). We are humans. We are extremely complex creatures. We are not defined by one small little thing.

Our jobs do not define us. We are not our jobs. A job is just a part of your life, and it is a part that you can relatively easily change to be something else. You are not bound to be a programmer for the rest of your life, much less to be defined as “John the programmer”.

You are a human named “John” that HAPPENS to be working at the moment in a profession which people that work in the area are commonly called “programmers”. It’s not a “BEING” as in “who you are”, but a “BEING” in “what you are doing”.

It’s a transitory state rather than a permanent one.

You are different nodes in different networks that sometimes “cross-path”. The person that you are is unique. Everyone is part of a global system, but everyone is different. Everyone has their own characteristics.

We are much more than we think. Don’t make less of yourself.

“You are not your job, you’re not how much money you have in the bank. You are not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You are not your fucking khakis."

– Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club

License

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