My grandfather would take me along and we'd go to the neighbour to fetch eggs. He had a plastic bucket that he put them in with some old newspapers scraps in the bottom. I heard that before the war they didn't even need money. He'd simply bring a bucket of milk, and he'd get a bucket of eggs in return. But it was of course a lot simpler to bring money. It was far cheaper than in the store too.
My grandfather knew what all the birds were singing. Every bit, plus their behaviour. He'd especially heed the magpie, because it's a smarter bird. If it warbled this way, it meant that the weather would stay warm. If they warbled in another way, it meant that it might become rainy. He said that the birds knew, because their lives depended on it.
Another more commonly known sign is dependent on where the magpie makes its nest. If it it's high in the tree, then it will most likely be a warm and sunny summer. But if it is tucked way down in the tree, the summer will be cold and wet. It makes sense. There's more protection from the elements further under the leaves, but it's also colder there. If I were a magpie, I'd want to make a warm and nice nest for the summer, but all that could be ruined if I didn't heed the weather.
One day, the grouse was seen perching atop the family house. When I told this to my grandmother, she went silent at first, and then she told me that it means someone will die in the family. This was of course terrifying news to me. But it also turned out to become true, because my grandfather also died that year. May he rest in peace.
I buy into a lot of the “bird” wisdom. Science is discovering dogs can smell disease.
Our modern world isn’t more complex, just more distracting with asinine theory chasing. It’s always been ridiculously complex in ways we can’t imagine, we’ve just started realizing it in detail.
Turns out animals with their “lesser” cognitive powers are tuned into the hidden complexity in ways we barely understand.
Yet we deem ourselves the more advanced species.
Humans will surely kill themselves off and the specifically evolved for their ecosystem “dumb” animals will remain.
Still, it’s hard to justify a grouse signaling a coming death by sitting on top of a house. That is magic to us at this point and such a tale would usually be met with skepticism. The things about the weather I don’t have much of a problem with.
Or could it be that since the farmer was no longer tending to his farm because he was too old, and since there was so little going on there anymore, that the grouse decided to reclaim a great perch with a view?
I once pitched a tent somewhere in the deep forests of Sweden, on a trip with my mother and my sister. I sat the tent up on some natural cushions of dry peat, so the ground was nice and soft to sleep on. As it became darker I suddenly heard a large CRACK about fifty metres away as a big twig was snapped in half. The sound was followed by the deep sniffing of air and loud stomping, so I popped my head out of the tent to take look.
Atop the closest hill was the King of the Forest (that would be a moose), looking like he was pondering some deep mystery while on his evening stroll, his mighty antlers brushing away big branches like they were toothpicks. He wasn't too worried about his surroundings until he noticed my scruffy old head. He stopped dead quiet and opened his eyes wide in surprise. Then he snorted heavily in disappointment, like he was muttering a curse, and then he shuffled his heavy body around and walked the other way.
I got the distinct sense that this proud being had a very sincere distaste for people...
Seems even more possible to me that a grandmother can use something that's fascinating a kid to tell them about bad things looming. That's somehow enchanting the situation.
But why would a grouse, a shy wild bird, go smell some dying person inside a house and then fly onto the roof of the house to mark it out? It has no reason to care, and even less to stick around.
Why would it have evolved a response to communicate to a predator species that one of the predators living in a dwelling is going to die in a fashion that would expose itself to a large chance of becoming prey.
Here is a far simpler explanation. Our brains are evolved to find patterns even when they aren't there. Look how weak the correlation is. His family simply discarded all the times the correlation failed to apply and remembered the one time the bird cried not on the day his grandfather died but merely that same year.
I think I confused which feature they were talking about.
It’s far fetched maybe but dogs can smell Parkinson’s and cancer before the person develops medically detectable symptoms. So maybe not so far fetched.
Doesn’t have to be a pet. Doesn’t detect when the person will DIE of cancer, yet it shows up later.
Birds have been shown to return to the same locations if they fit their needs. Perhaps it was indicating an illness.
Far fetched but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
Statistics are not science. Science requires real world evidence and other animals offer at least some evidence they can detect fatal illness in advance.
Dogs are established to have an acute sense of smell along with a lifestyle where they live in close proximity to human beings and communicate with them.
Most birds and pheasants in particular have don't have as well developed a sense of smell as you do and aren't liable to be within 100 yards of people for long.
Even if they could smell impending disease why would they particularly seek out a high place to announce this and how on earth would you distinguish this from a call which announced it's desire to mate or warning about predators including yourself.
Birds make noise all the time. They can't smell you from far away ergo they can't smell impending death. It's like an ink blot test any meaning you are finding is smuggled in by you.
> Turns out animals with their “lesser” cognitive powers are tuned into the hidden complexity in ways we barely understand.
I take this as another description of Moravec's Paradox.
Which I do not think of as a paradox, but as one domain knowledge set (information theory/computer science) not intertwingling (to use Ted Nelson's lingo) with another domain knowledge set (biology). The more we delve into the integration of the many biological layers, the more we appreciate how finely-tuned all that biological complexity is to reality's complexity. I bet the rabbit hole goes a lot deeper than we even believe in the common scientific narrative today, and we'll need every scrap of power we can bring to bear from quantum computing to help us understand it.
No humans won't kill themselves off. We're going to be around for a very long time. We are probably the most adaptable complex creatures on this planet. Whether civilization lasts as we know it is another thing.
You consider an animal having evolved a sense for certain properties of the natural world so they can survive more advanced the humanity? I seriously cannot comprehend how you can view that as more advanced then humanity going to space, manipulating matter on the atomic level and the most important: beating evolution for the most part.
Evolution is a property of reality itself and imbued humans with the abilities you highlight.
We’ve done absolutely nothing to “beat” reality.
Personally I’m leaning into the idea more and more that technology how we think of it, machines, will not be how we survive. I suspect some will be too useful, like nanotechnology and automated manufacturing, but consumer machines will become passé, maybe just too environmentally toxic to build at the scale we do. I doubt humans will make it “off world” for long if at all. There’s a scaling problem to the endeavor I doubt humans will maintain the momentum to overcome.
It took a very specific planet and millions of years of evolution to get here. We cannot possibly do better than reality itself.
Michael Levin’s bioelectrics, manipulation of electric fields to regrow limbs, could be an early peak at crazy future.
Why build VR if we can, for example, mix chemicals, drink it, effectively loading simulated experience like The Matrix, through fine grain manipulation of exotic properties of reality. Earth becomes a lot more sustainable if we’re not eating it up for phones and graphics cards.
How many people died in that town in your lifetime where no bird perched on a roof. How many birds perched on roofs that nobody noticed where nobody died.
Except Walden was either satire or hypocrisy. Thoreau was rich through inheritance. Emerson lent him the cabin and land. It was only a 20-minute walk from his mother’s house, where he went for dinner every night.
Both your story and the article seem quite controversial, and I'm not entirely sure why. For your story, I've noticed there us a certain sort of atheist that becomes offended of even a ghost story is told with too much sincerity. It reminds me of conservative Christians denouncing harry Potter for supporting witchcraft. So that might be it. But there is also the urban vs rural thing. People can't seem to accept that some people like living differently than they choose to.
I know you are referencing something, but in this case it's a very legit question, Eurasian magpies are corvidae (and remarkably clever ones at that), while the ones found in America or Australia aren't.
Now if I could find who decided to name them the same...
> One day, the grouse was seen perching atop the family house. When I told this to my grandmother, she went silent at first, and then she told me that it means someone will die in the family. This was of course terrifying news to me. But it also turned out to become true, because my grandfather also died that year.
Do you actually believe the grouse perching on house was foreshadowing??
Does it matter? This is an old belief told from one generation to another. And in the instance of my family, it certainly turned out to be true.
Later that summer, during an especially hot and bright night (it's midnight sun where I come from because it's above the Arctic Circle) I saw that grouse on the tractor road further down the fields of the farm. It silhouetted in the midnight sun. It surprised me to see it standing in the middle of the road like that, like it was mocking me, so I got angry and chased it off the property.
It went off into the property of my grandmother's sister. And later that year, also she died.
But look, there's probably a reasonable explanation for it. When farmers grow old and sick, they often move away from their cabin, and in with their younger family and children further away, who take care of them. So when the house becomes derelict, wild and otherwise shy animals dare to move closer. But of course, old people would only move away from their farm if they were in a bad shape. And there's your omen and the logical explanation for it.
No need to surrender your beliefs to some egghead who's not imaginative enough to see the world with wonder. Who cares about someone else's logic that is too narrow to contain the wonder of the universe. No need to pander to their inability to believe. They sit on their high horse telling other people they are crazy, then the grouse sits above them and they drop dead. Good story. The end.
well, maybe so but they say a stray dog come howling around Johnny Miller's house, 'bout midnight, as much as two weeks ago; and a whippoorwill come in and lit on the banisters and sung, the very same evening; and there ain't anybody dead there yet.
Great Tom Sawyer ref. It continues, "Well, I know that. And suppose there ain't. Didn't Gracie Miller fall in the kitchen fire and burn herself terrible the very next Saturday?"
While Gracie Miller survives her terrible burns, who knows what happens to her after the novel? A ref I know you'll just love is:
It was written in 1885 by Holger Drachmann as a midsummer hymn (midsommervise) called 'Vi elsker vort land' with a melody composed by P.E. Lange-Müller. Singing this surrounded by people and in full view of a flaming witch on a bonfire can feel very surreal. Burn the witch. Love the land. Burn the witch. Love the land. Drink some beer.
During Sankthansaften/midsommer burning the witch spirits to rid the land of them is a cause for celebration, and along with keeping shoes pointing up at doorways and chanting 7-9-13 after boasting or saying something good (to prevent jinxing it), helps keep the good luck flowing and the harm away. We can respect these parts of cultural tradition and belief, as we respect the people to whom they mean something. :P ;) xx
Ok but I do not think I've ever met anyone who took Sankt Hans as anything serious - that is to say for them it is all tradition (see a thing burn, call it a witch, listen to some tunes, drink some beer, grill out yayyy) and none belief. Of course with my luck I'll end up having an Ari Aster Sankt Hans this year.
But if there's no belief to it, then why do it? If you stopped doing it, would you feel things were a little off, would other people? Would you sense your year might get worse, and if it did, kick yourself for missing Sankt Hans? Maybe not. Maybe it's just all tradition, no belief. But I think there's belief there, that although not fashionable these days to admit (not least because burning witches has gone out of style), operates as a motivation compelling people to do the same "meaningless" traditions year after year. They're not meaningless because people believe them, on some level.
But maybe Sankt Hans is an exception. But other things, like 7-9-13 why do that? It's not tradition. If you travel, you'll still catch yourself saying it, maybe under your breath if in another culture. But you'll feel weird if you don't do it. You'll feel you bring yourself some bad luck. Even if a person doesn't "believe" that it could be the case, on another level they do believe that, because they'll feel weird if they don't do it. It's a belief that it will affect things. It's not easy to admit in this context, I'm not asking you to "admit" it, I'm just saying it's part of who we are. We believe these things.
Have a happy (and safe!) Sankt Hans this year! :P ;) xx
Those kinds of beliefs are what lead to anti-vaxers, belief in homeopathy, astrology, etc... It has nothing to do with good or bad imagination. An egghead can imagine Star Wars or Lord of the Rings but that doesn't mean they aren't imaginative when someone tells them a grouse predicted a death as though they actually believed it.
I guess I'm just more open minded about those things. I think you can do that, as well as treat science with respect (I have a chemistry degree after all). I just think it's good not to think the sum of what we have in science is everything that is.
well it does mean they're not imaginative, in a certain way. but it doesn't mean they're not imaginative in other ways.
when I read your comment I was like, "wow coming to the defense of calling other people crazy and not seeing the universe with wonder." yeah, only what you know, or what you're told, can happen, nothing outside of that. all vaccines are safe. only conventional medicine works. there's nothing we don't understand. a little arrogant much? extraordinary conservatism leads to extraordinary ignorance. i believe in astrology, and i love it. i reckon homeopathy definitely works. i don't want to get vaccinated. i'm guessing you enjoy hating on people who don't share your opinions, and you're sure their stupider and you're smarter, but you can't admit that, because it's about "facts". thanks "asiachick"
"those kinds of beliefs", "those kinds of people", "those countries", sounds pretty high-horse judgemental and discriminatory. but also hypocritical. here's how i see it coming across...so beliefs like your mother really cares about you and doesn't resent you? beliefs like praying at the temple is going to help you? and grandma is not supid for doing so? beliefs like what dragged our ancestors out of the incomprehensible universe and gave them a bit of reassurance? oh, now we have a couple "facts" a bit of science, just throw all that away? Because we've become so sure? Beliefs like indigenous people have a spiritaul connection to a piece of land? who cares, log the fuck out of it. beliefs like that scrap of sweater you carry around form when you were a kid is somehow special or lucky for you? beliefs like your worthless life has any meaning beside being a collection of atoms? Oh, yes, science, please account me and sum up my worth and give meaning to my life? without beliefs "like those" we're rootless. maybe you hate that part of your humanness, but you can't "science" your way outta that. you'll face to face it, or be perpetually uncomfortable in your skin and in the thousands of years of human culture that died before you to bring you the privilege of where you are now.
but we can't add it up, and measure it, so chuck it all away right? i'm glad you have solved the riddle of truth in the universe. what's it like being god and knowing everything absolutely? please enlighten me in your infinite wisdom and rid my life of uncomfortable uncertainty and pesky ambiguity and unknowns, actually, nope, i'm comfortable in all that, and i think i prefer a mystery. plus, i could never understand anything significant. my feeble human mind is just not up to the task of grokking reality. i can just tell you what i see.
i'll make this space whatever i want. no one tells me what kind of space this is. i decide what space this is for me. you don't define what "this space is" for me or anyone else, I decide I make this place what I choose it to be for myself, and so does everyone else. seems you have a problem with that.
you dont think stories are interesting intellectually? they're the most effective way to convey meaning.
how intellectually curious is it to assume that you know everything, can dismiss all hidden connections and have contempt for the beliefs of others? that's not great, you're defending your contempt of someone's belief in the context of a story about their relatives passing. and now you try to define what this space is, and I suppose you live by that, do you? the irony is you don't even live by what you say it is.
you, dude, were already up on that high horse before i got up here to address you.
you want me to address you from the ground? yeah, i get that's where you'd like to see people...you just wnat to say your peice and have everyone silent... but if i see you push someone, i push back and now you don't like that, that's a big irony: you're the one up on the high horse. that's the irony, you don't like it if someone comes up there to address you. Ok for you, but not others? if you can't take it bro, don't dish it out yeah.
Humans are also great at seeing patterns in noise and we like to attribute various things to things we see. So its also likely that you remember these coincidences because of your loved ones deaths and don't remember the many other times these animals were around because nothing happened to make them memorable. Also, "later that year" is a very long period of time for something to happen.
apophenia : the tendency to perceive a connection or meaningful pattern between unrelated or random things (such as objects or ideas)
I learned the word on account of http://apophenia.info which is open source software used for the book "Modeling With Data" by Ben Klemens. His "21st Century C" is more commonly encountered.
I love how people will do anything to deny the lizard brain. We have a “spidey” sense just like all the other animals and for good reason. Ignore it at your peril should you ever have a brush with the side of nature that cares not for your “lack of studies”.
I’m a strong proponent for listening to your gut, but that’s very different from a bird landing on your home predicting death, especially when the correlation is weak (sometime later that year). It’s easy to attribute something to something else if there’s an indeterminate timeframe in between.
Remember that people see what they want to see in noise too. Clouds often look like something tangible, that doesn’t mean it’s a sign. If I squint, I can see shapes in pretty much any random pattern. And people tend to remember events that they attribute meaning too (in this case the old wives tale about the birds and then the family member dying) and forget the events that have no meaning to them (how many times did the person see said birds without anything happening and just forgetting about it?)
Nobody has yet managed to prove the existence of the supernatural, but many people have tried. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist, but it seems pretty unlikely, especially when other better-understood causes exist.
It doesn't have to be supernatural. We know, for example, that dogs can smell various diseases. Also, someone pointed out that as people age and become ill, they tend to do less outside the house, and shy animals will start to come out and stay closer.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
Blanket ridicule of such phenomena is just as irrational as are many superstitions.
Sure. But in this particular case, it sounds like there was a fairly longish period of time between seeing the "omen" and the supposed effect. Yes, the shy animals coming out was given as a reasonable explanation.
Over a period of time enough people noticed a correlation that it became an “old farmers/wives tale”. Had a university done a study with equal or lesser N you’d probably have taken it as fact. LOL
We're talking about birds portending human death. The author even suggested a likely explanation for how the old wives tale started (animals being attracted to run down places because the building's owner is being cared for elsewhere), which would seem to indicate they don't actually believe birds can tell when someone is going to die. I don't think this situation qualifies as "Spidey sense".
The existence of cognitive biases may help in some instances, and may harm in others. But they are not a substitute for data and proper experimentation or mechanism of actions.
We had similar sayings around the number of crows you'd see together. As I got older, I realized if you spend enough time outside you'll see any combination of crows you might need to fit the rhyme and have a little talk.
One for sorrow,
Two for joy,
Three for a girl,
Four for a boy,
Five for silver,
Six for gold,
Seven for a secret never to be told.
Interesting, in the UK I know this for magpies but I also know some additional lines which are absent from the Wiki page…
One for sorrow, two for joy, three for a girl, four for a boy, five for silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told, eight for a wish, nine for a kiss, ten for a bird you must not miss.
In rural England I've heard of that for magpies (which are corvids I think), but never crows themselves.
Someone I know from Scotland sings a song with the same sort of pattern but about crows proper (like 'Ten green bottles' but for crows - "the last craw wasna' there at a'").
Everything is filtered through human perception and pattern-matching. Everything. There's a difference between groupthink religion (which tends to spread exponentially when unchecked) and harmless little beliefs like this. So what if someone notices a pattern where there isn't one?
It's known that animals can sense certain scents that can indeed be foreshadowing of death or health decline. Isn't it even the slightest bit possible that the grouse may have smelled something that humans couldn't begin to perceive? More importantly, do you have any proof or knowledge that would actively disprove this? No, that's not a requirement in science, but it is a handy discussion aid.
"This valley is cut in the shape of my heart". I've known farmers like him, bachelors who are mild mannered and love their lives and the extended family that comes with living an entire life in one valley. He maybe goes to Sunday service for socialization and the local pub to watch the game, and as long as his sheep are healthy and the sky does what it promises (because he knows the day before always if it will rain), the peace he feels is the result of being in place, of not creating too much fuss, the satisfaction of seeing the stone walls he built in his 20s holding strong and knowing they'll be there long after to tell his story. He leaves behind him more of a legacy than many of us.
A successful businessman on vacation was at the pier of a small coastal village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellowfin tuna. The businessman complimented the fisherman on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them.
The fisherman proudly replied, “Every morning, I go out in my boat for 30 minutes to fish. I’m the best fisherman in the village”.
The businessman, perplexed, then asks the fisherman “If you’re the best, why don’t you stay out longer and catch more fish? What do you do the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied “I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, spend quality time with my wife, and every evening we stroll into the village to drink wine and play guitar with our friends. I have a full and happy life.”
The businessman scoffed, “I am successful CEO and have a talent for spotting business opportunities. I can help you be more successful. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds, buy a bigger boat. With the proceeds from the bigger boat, you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats with many fishermen. Instead of selling your catch to just your friends, you can scale to sell fish to thousands. You could leave this small coastal fishing village and move to the big city, where you can oversee your growing empire.”
The fisherman asked, “But, how long will this all take?”
To which the businessman replied, “15 – 20 years.”
“But what then?” Asked the fisherman.
The businessman laughed and said, “That’s the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions!”
“Millions – then what?”
The businessman said, “Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, spend time with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your friends.”
The reason to accumulate wealth is for security. The fisherman's current income could disappear any day. He could be injured, the area could be overfished, a glut of foreign fish could reduce prices, etc.
This is just the story of the ant and the grasshopper in reverse.
But the fisherman rents and when his generous landlord sells to a real estate corp that capitalizes on market inefficiencies, he'll find himself out on the street and replaced by a remote software developer.
When he gets heart disease in 20 years, he'll find himself in an underfunded public hospital too.
When his kids grow up and he wants to send them to uni, he'll find himself taking out a 100K loan.
Then he'll find himself fishing all day long just to pay off the interest on his debt/to stay afloat and he'll regret no capitalizing on his younger days, but it's too late because all the fish are gone thanks to foreign fishing trawlers.
I've heard this story so often that if I just say "the fisherman story", most people know I mean this one.
I enjoy a lifestyle similar to that of the fisherman. My humble little website works well, and though I could build other things, I'd have to start setting an alarm and making phone calls again. I'd rather not. If you reach a point in your life where you can stop turning the crank and still enjoy a good life, by all means do it.
That's a cute story. However there are vast differences in reality. The fisherman is likely an uncultured bigot and xenophobe with life experiences that reinforce this condition, and who will suffer terribly from the ailments of aging that the businessman's wealth can afford respite from. For example.
While we are making things up, I submit that the fisherman is an extraterrestrial who keeps his space faring ship in the sea. Every day he paddles out to check on his alien family before returning to his social studies back on shore.
You're getting a tug-of-war of downvotes/upvotes, let me see if I can expand too:
Rural: "The city-living ways don't work out here so well, but there's too many of you guys for me to even begin to tell you how to act or what to do, so as a compromise just let me be"
City: "Rural folk live really unsustainably/unculturably/deplorably but they don't know any better, its up to us to make them understand. Anyway the urban center provides more value than what the countryside provides, we should be dictating the path of progress in this county/state/country/continent.
The locus of power has always been around cities though, so that is where elites and elitism will always centralize.
He's almost certainly exposed to more cultures, though you are right: he could be extremely bigoted and xenophobic. It's just less likely, even if marginally.
This isn’t about bourgeoise vs proletariat. It’s about a completely asinine allegory that elides tons of real world context in order to push the ridiculous narrative that the simple country folk know something the rest don’t.
No, it's about you calling someone a xenophobic bigot because they're a country bumpkin and assuming someone else is probably not a bigot because they're a city person.
Side note, you do know the definitions of the words "xenophobic" and "bigot" are right?
One of the reasons that this is quite beautiful is that it portrays the ideal of having just enough, living simply, and being grateful. There is something also stoic about the character described.
I imagine the farmer you're telling us about doesn't want attention, material possessions, or any kind of excess at all. This person is happy to build something slowly over time, in small increments. They're happy with what they have, who they are, and that they exist.
I think there are elements in your portrayal that we can all strive for, whether this person was a farmer, carpenter, or programmer, doesn't really matter.
I don't know this guy, but I know the area a bit and it is not so different to where I live about 70 miles away...
>A rich man...who needs little
This guy is rich in several ways. A farm in Wales is still a pretty valuable asset, especially in a valley rather than on a hill. Owning a farm gives you a lot of financial independence, which can take a lot of stress away!
It was a lovely article, but...An old country man told me that the three rarest things were
1) a dead donkey
2) a red headed parson
3) a contented farmer
Here are the tests I would apply before I would agree he had reached some zen state of contentedness
1) how would he feel if a parcel of land came up for sale next to his. Would he itch to buy it. Most farmers would move heaven and earth.
2) How would he feel about me walking through his fields to share what he has got?
3) Is his stocking rate excessive?
4) If someone told him that by managing his flock differently he could damage the ground less and improve water quality in the river, would he take that advice?
5) If there was an awkward corner of his land next to my house that was not useful to him, but it was perfect for me, would he sell it to me at a fair price?
6) Why is there no succession plan. When he dies his sister will move into a home and the farm will be liquidated, the flock of sheep sold, the land broken up, the house sold off...because he didn't let anyone else in.
I'm afraid I have met enough like him to remain cynical.
The fact that he went into hospital and came back out to a functioning farm suggests that he has a good relationship with his neighbouring farmers. My guess would be that he's planned for exactly what will happen to his livestock and farm when he passes.
This tenant is true at so many levels. In the everyday ratrace that we are all living, the "financial freedom " we all strive for is nothing but our passive income being enough to cover our expenses.
Most of us race to increase our passive income, when maybe the healthiest choice would be to run to decrease our expenses.
I love this comment, but also had a chuckle at the contrast between “not wanting attention” and having a newspaper article about yourself being discussed worldwide on hacker news. I understand you were referencing someone else’s story they were telling in another comment, but still found it amusing.
Ah, legacy. It always makes me happy to listen to Carl Sagan's words on his text "The Pale Blue Dot":
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
I respect the simplicity and contentment of his life, but it seems to stem from a base of incuriosity that I find harder to respect.
The complete lack of variety in his dining routine in particular is something I'd never want to emulate. This man is basically a low tech Soylent bro, using food as just a source of nutrients. He raises sheep (and is not a vegetarian) yet never even eats mutton or cheese?
I watched your link, it is one-sided. Who knows if there is real opposition. Sure, this video is not showing any behaviour worth criticizing. Maybe it is true, and everybody really does love moving to the city. But just given the fact that it comes from a region with no free press, I can't trust them on that.
I am alluding to the forced migration to city life (including malls to spend money at). This was simultaneously done while razing the villages and all of their history, interestingly, China as we know it, with all of their history erasing going on, is only about 70 years old.
He's not independent. Caretakers, probably state funded, come and provide care to his sister. The "powers that are" are providing for both of their general wellbeing.
Can you please not post shallow dismissals or personal attacks or generic tangents or flamebait, or call names, in HN comments? You did all of those things here.
I'm glad that you've found satisfaction in having children, but that's no reason to put someone else down.
Children as your legacy are no less consequential or meaningful than this man's stone walls. In the end you are grasping for empty meaning and purpose in the same way the farmer is, your children will perish, their children will perish, you will be forgotten and so will they like the rest of human existence. Our lives have no larger purpose or meaning beyond what ever we pretend gives meaning to your life, like children or stone walls.
We are mere Spatiotemporal blips of information in the infant universe with delusions of grandeur. So if you have to tell yourself deep in the night that you actualising your reproductive prerogative makes your sad little life more meaningful than the farmer, please grasp at those straws.
I made a conscious choice to not have children for personal reasons (deeply fucked up family and while I know I'm not callous and cruel like my father I simply couldn't rule it out enough to be willing to risk it).
I'm completely at peace with the thought that a century from now no-one will think about me one way or the other.
I mean statistically the chain of events that led to me ever existing as me was so small that after winning that hand, it's time to leave the table and enjoy it.
A different perspective is - why do I need to leave something behind (children or otherwise)? What matters is how I spent the little time I have on this planet, while I am alive, isn't it? Why do I care what happens after I am gone? There are enough things to think about, to work on, while I am alive. As long as I am happy and helpful while I am alive, that seems more important to me than anything else.
You don’t need to. But entire worlds are destroyed every day, and if you should fall in love with one, you might find yourself interested in it’s preservation.
Yet, our very existence is a consequence of reproduction, even if we may have forgotten our ancestors.
The only true delusion of grandeur is thinking that dwindling others' experiences against the vastness of the universe is enlightenment: If we don't experience our existence in geological/cosmic time scales, why waste time believing we are mere blips?
I'm not dwindling others experiences against the vastness of the universe. I'm merely pointing out the absurdity of the parent comment that somehow elevates the meaningfulness of having kids over building a stone wall. My position is neither is any less or more meaningful beyond individual experience.
Of the people that lived 100K years ago, we have almost nothing. Possibly some cave paintings, though the vast majority of art from then must be gone. However, every single person alive today is descended from people who lived then. You may or may not find that meaningful, but it would be hard to disagree that having children was the most impactful course of action available to anyone alive then. The same is true for nearly all of human existence.
With the current pace of change, having children may no longer be the obvious winner it has been for all of history, but it might still be...
Fossilised remains in the sediments on earth are all that remain of the species that have come and gone before us. Many species are lost to time, because they weren't fossilised or their effects preserved. And our fossilised remains will be lost to the cosmos as well. You experiencing humanity in the midst of it might make it seem substantial. But we are a genus a mere 2 million years old and a species as young as 200000 years. For comparison, the dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years. All of human history is 200000 years, again seems of consequence to us because we are participants in it but on the grand scale really isn't.
Does that mean we shouldn't just bother, absolutely not, we are given this gift of experiencing life. Something rather than nothingness...etc. But we can do with a little more perspective on how utterly inconsequential we are in the grand scheme of things. Having kids seems consequential in the context of human existence, but when human existence is inconsequential (there is no lasting impact or transmission of information beyond our temporary side-effects on the environment) it puts our existence into perspective.
The vast overwhelming majority of matter in the universe is inert.
The fact that we've hit upon a certain arrangement of matter which yields consciousness and the ability to manipulate the matter around us is something which seems worth preservation.
I contain the information for how to give life to inert matter. I've done it three times now, and I think it's worthwhile.
You thinking it is worthwhile is all that should matter, just as a farmer thinking it's worthwhile to build a wall that lasts. Both instances are us giving meaning to self actualisation of individual drives be it preservation or propagation of genetic information or building something that will outlast you.
Hmm... Since when did we reach this height of "enlightenment" that children (humans) are now being compared to a stonewall in relevance, no matter how sophisticated the wall might be?
Yes, it is more meaningful to have kids than to build a stonewall.
Aren't walls inventions of man, as such, an effect caused by man. How can an effect (invention) of man be equated to the inventor?
Do you compare the effect of human freedom to the effect of unconscious matter in history?
A stone wall has no chance to beat its fate. Humanity, however unlikely that might be, does stand a chance.
We're very far from where we started. We're here because of both people that had kids and because of people that built stone walls. In many cases they were the same people.
I can't tell if you're trolling, but in case you're not and unless you think there's a mathematical certainty to your argument, you might do well to spread your bets.
I don't know what specifically you are referring to but, the sun is going to be a red giant in 4.5 billion years, earth cannot sustain life. Deep into the future, all the stars will eventually burn out and there will be no more new ones born. The night sky will be dark. The only radiation emitted will be black holes slowly evaporating on a time scale so huge we can't even meaningfully comprehend it. There is no energy to sustain life. Then there is the heat death of the universe to look forward to.
Humans might survive past earth, but oblivion will come for us all the same. We just get to play around in our little imagined worlds of purpose and meaning a little longer all to no avail beyond living one's life.
And that's all any of us can really do, chose how to face existence knowing there is no grand scheme in which each of us is some how important or matters. Choosing to live is equally as valid as choosing not to. We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
All we can do is live a life we are happy(good state) with, be it building stone walls that last or having kids and raising them.
> We are evolutionarily engineered thinking emotional machines where certain states make us feel good(love, friendship, self actualisation food...., accomplishment) and certain states make us feel bad (sickness, loss, pain...)
Certainly this could lead one to be a little more circumspect about grand pronouncements.
It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
> It seems like you’re saying some people are being tricked by our brains, but others (like yourself) are able to pull aside the veil and truly understand our place in the universe. Perhaps we’re all being tricked.
I make no such claim. We interpret and navigate the world with the mental models and toolsets we have. If you can do math, you can calculate, estimate, plan, budget....etc. Similarly, some toolsets give you access to insights and paradigms eg: religious toolset might make you interpret the world differently. I merely have a certain toolset which lets me look at the world in a certain way, does not mean this toolset is exclusive, leads to authoritative interpretations or it's acquisition is special in any way.
I could just say "In my humble opinion"
>Regardless, in a universe where nothing matters, truth and knowledge have no more value than children or stone walls.
As always value is in the eye of the beholder, there is no objective value beyond what a subject is able to get out of it. So if you feel truth and knowledge are important, they are. If you feel faith is more important than truth, it is, to you at-least.
One problem I've noticed with the way human beings communicate is that for any given situation, there's no way of knowing whether the person speaking is doing so with an implicit "imho", or whether they mean the things they say literally. In this case, I thought that you were speaking literally.
I wonder how much this phenomenon (and others like it) contributes to the amount of polarization and disharmony we are experiencing in the world right now, or in the past for that matter, all without our knowledge or interest.
we will have left earth (and inevitably our sun) long before 4 billion years away, most probably as a hybrid species by then
on the theorised heat death timescale humans have only been around for less than infinitesimal fractions of quadrillionths of a percent of their potential. what's to say we don't in that time escape it by transiting to a new, younger universe?
Or, you know an asteroid hits us causing the 6th Extinction Level Event killing humanity. As long as we are doing wild speculative Sci-Fi the Great filter in our future is a real possibility to consider.
For now, we are an incredibly young species who has time and again demonstrated our penchant for chasing after short term incentives at the cost of longterm harm. We are making the earth unliveable faster than we are progressing towards being a multi-planetary species (which seems like an insurmountable leap given the candidates and the cost structure we have to work with). But humans are inventive and resourceful so here's hoping we grow beyond living on earth.
How much do you rally know and remember from your ancestors which is more than a handful and always the same stories?
How did that really influence you?
We can look back, we are not a magic generation unique to all the other generations before us. We know what's going to happen with us and our legacies.
One difference between the current and previous generations is just how much information is recorded by and about us. There will be a lot more evidence of the existence and experiences of people alive today than people of a century ago. Whether people will care to look is a different matter.
True and that makes it even more visible how little the future cares for you.
My mum is the only one who likes to look through our holiday pictures.
They will be there and no one will care.
Only some ml tool to potentially tell my future Familie members that I might have been depressed based on pictures and the ml notes it down for potential medical relevant information.
No one will know what I liked and disliked. No one will see that my life had ups and downs.
I really thought Facebook would be a great thing. Sharing and seeing what my Familie is up to but no one is using it for sharing family pictures. And I myself I'm sometimes annoyed by too many WhatsApp pictures.
I do get why it is like this but realizing and accepting it took a bit
Print the book version on vellum, and you'll preserve it for a few thousand years (or ANSI paper with the infinity sign, which supposedly lasts for at least 750 years).
We do have a lot more data however we don’t have enough time to absorb it. Until something like Neuralink improves that, I don’t think it would be much different. So many of us take pictures all the time but how many of us really go back and look at the old pictures? And do we really have the time to view all pictures from our own time let alone previous generations?
That's such an unkind thing to say about another person's life. He seems like a contented and inoffensive person, and he's quietly living the only life he'll ever have. There's real dignity in that. I do wonder why you wrote this.
As for children: being a parent myself, I think it's best not to instrumentalise them by viewing them as a legacy that you'll leave behind after you. They're their own people. They don't owe you that obligation.
People are different, with different desires, personalities, mentalities, ..... Isn't it only natural then that 'happiness' would be different from one person to another?
Why speak low about him? You're content with your life, and he is content with his... it really is that simple.
You can't go up to an artist and say, "Hey, your painting is crap, you should change x, y, z," because it is the artist's painting, not yours.
These threads are always so entertaining. Someone will make up this pastoral romance while implying that the city life is somehow lacking. Then someone will do the opposite and the wars will begin. Very entertaining.
For my part, I enjoy modal editors so I think vim is better than emacs and I like the GPL over BSD.
I think you misunderstood the issue people have here. It is not the pastoral Vs city life that is the issue. It is the OP assertion that this guy has been lobotomized because he is content with his life.
Haha no, that's par for the course. Each one of these people will always make some remark like this. "You leave no impact on the Earth. 40 yrs in your apartment and then burnt in a crematorium. Who knows you existed? Villageboi leaves legacy. Cityboi never existed. No trace."
"Yeah, but villageboi is a lobotomized mole. I am sophisticate. You have no frontal lobe"
The peak of discourse. Hahaha. And then depending on which lifestyle you have chosen, people will pick some arbitrary thing to argue about.
"You said villageboi. Actually, I am village girl. And it's not village. It's farm"
"You said lobotomy. Actually, it's a corpus callosotomy"
That's what makes it so entertaining. The idea that people think they're being all this sharp when really they're just offended that their preferences were made fun of.
But you're clearly an Emacs user. See you on your way back from the RSI doctor, nerd!
Yeah that was an offensive way to put his point for no reason.
It's also a failure of empathy on OP's part - we look at the world through our own lens but we should at least try to look at it through other peoples before accusing them of choosing "lobotomy".
Such a close-minded view. Children are great but they're just more people with their own experiences, like this man. And it seems rare these days that they might be as naturally at-one with the world around them as he is.
I hear you. In not sure if want to be raising kids today.
I had a moment in my 20s where I just stopped and thought, "Every single ancestor I had from my parents back to algae had offspring. What if I don't?"
If you consider the whole Ocean as history, and the present moment as a single solitary wave heading towards the shore, and your life as the surfer on that wave, it doesn't matter what came before you. What matters is the wave. You get to ride it and wipe out. And that's it. I don't care if that wave is a composite of a million unknown ripples in the cast Ocean. It doesn't matter really.
Why would you have children if you live in a cramped apartment in an equally cramped and dangerous city? The amount of effort you're putting in for that tiny life is barely enough for subsistence, much less for having children.
The answer to that isn't having material wealth, especially when you get no time left over to appreciate it. So the problem is having enough time when you waste most of it toiling for the dreams of another man, and for next to nothing in return. Because that's the real economy. (If you do, though, then congratulations I guess, but then you're not in the position of most people anyway.)
I think, however, that you'd change your mind about things if you had the freedom, the space, and the ability to grow your own food. Then you'd see how foolish most city dwellers actually are. As for the philosophical musings about whether you should have children... Well, it's your life, man. If you don't want a shot at prolonging your true legacy, then that's up to you. But you're certainly doing a service for everyone else who do want their kind to succeed.
For me it was just a realisation that reproduction is just one way we pass ourselves on, but one that has a lot of evolutionary push to make us want to do. For me, I was just born without that push for whatever reason. I'm not sure if it's a symptom of undiagnosed asperger's that I suspect or some other thing like that. Regardless of the reasons why I don't possess that drive, I don't think children are the only way we pass on. In fact I think every action we do is a form of reproduction, including building stone walls. Maybe people think that there is something inherently different between biologically producing a living being and other forms of interacting with the world but I don't believe so personally.
In terms of your moment in your 20s, the way I see it is that it goes beyond my conventional existence as a human: I'm not just the product of all my direct ancestors, but also of all the causes and effects which have effected those ancestors. It's obvious that I am the continuation of my great great great grandfather, however I am also the continuation of my great great great grandfathers lunch that fed him, or doctor that saved him, or the Sun that supported him. Reproduction is an essential component for continued existence of sentient beings, but so is food, so is warmth, so is water. I feel that the Sun is just as much my parent as my biological parents.
JFC, who speaks like this about someone else? Have some respect for a kind man who's content living a simple life.
Imagine if someone looked at your comment and denigrated it "oh wow you had unprotected sex with your partner and managed to not kill your kids before they turned 18. Congrats on the achievement!"
I don't think he was doing that. It's just a perspective.
It is when I read these stories that I truly consider how short our lives are. I can't stop thinking about how fragile our beliefs are once we hold them up against someone elses values, earthshaking.
> those of us who have children leave behind much more than stone walls we built in our 20s
Ah, yes. A planet completely ruined by overpopulation. That is your legacy.
Also, your existence is just as meaningless as this farmer's.
You probably remember your grandparents, at least you know a little about their lives. What about your grandparents parents, or your grandparents grandparents. They were people with their own full lives, hopes and dreams. Do you even know their names ? Let alone what they were like, what they cared about, what their life was like ?
They are forgotten, just like you will be, regardless of how many children they had.
It saddens me to read such nihilistic comments here. Specially based on such clichés.
Under which metric is the planet complete ruined? and why do you think it's overpopulated? what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you, and based on what?
Under lots of metrics, today's planet is a much healthier and prosperous place to live for humankind than it was 100 or even 50 years ago. As an example, for most human history life expectancy was no more than 30 years. Nowadays we are around 70 and quite some countries already over 80. Poverty was common some centuries ago, with around 90% being considered poor. Nowadays it's only around 10% of population. Literacy has also advanced tremendously, with now around 90% of people under 25 being able to read and write.
And all of that has been happening thanks to those that were here before us. Yes, the ones we have forgotten their names, but for whom we live now in the capable and free societies that are most of the western countries.
Having children is an extremely important part of that legacy. They are the immediate inheritors of the ideals and visions of the ones that were here before us.
> Under lots of metrics, today's planet is a much healthier and prosperous place to live for humankind than it was 100 or even 50 years ago.
We have created healthier and more prosperous societies. It is difficult to argue that we have created a healthier planet, yet our long term survival depends upon the health of the planet.
> Under which metric is the planet complete ruined?
Nature is being destroyed, we polluted our planet enough that it affected the climate. The air we breathe is filled with ultrafine particles. The water is full of microplastics.
Sure, we are able to afford more things, and we have made advances in the medical field. Our expected lifespan has gone up, but are those last few decades worth it ? Spending your last years in adult diapers and being regularly tortured by doctors in an effort to extend your life as much as possible doesn't seem like a big win to me.
Our good years are spent working longer days than ever, doing unhealthy, stressful work to the point that we have to spend our little free time exercising to keep our health. All the while the majority of humans spend their lives in cities that resemble ant hills more than a space designed for humans. More people than ever suffer from anxiety and stress-related mental health problems.
Is life really a better experience now than it was 100 years ago ?
> what's then the maximum number of people that should live on this planet according to you
Why wouldn't older folks' quality of life continue to increase as we develop new medicine and technology? Cancer and Alzheimers will never be cured? We'll never be able to induce cellular regeneration like many other species can, or artificial body parts will never advance beyond their current crudeness?
How many people spend their working years doing mind-numbing or back-breaking manual labor compared to even a century or two ago? How many people back then would have been radically oppressed from birth but even today can pursue their own dreams? Life is still relatively "nasty, brutish, and short" but it is getting better and I see no reason to expect that progress to end, let alone regress.
While you despair over a grim dark future, I look forward to a garden Earth, resplendent in biodiversity, home to fifty billion humans free from disease and material needs, yet with less footprint than we use today. Technology can do this for us, as long as we don't get stuck.
“Nature” is us, too. It’s constantly changing, but there’s as much of it as there ever was, because our nature is to build. Indeed, so are the ants whose ant hills that you criticise cities for resembling.
The improvements to duration of lifespan have also come with improvements to quality of life.
My father’s final year of life started with a cancer diagnosis, and while it was an extremely long way from “fun”, tech gave him mobility, and he’d only lived that long because of half a lifetime of treatment for disease-induced epilepsy.
My mother had a few years of Alzheimer’s — still essentially untreatable, and yet tech made it easy to keep her entertained, and GPS tracking made it easier for us to look after her without her getting lost due to a moment of intention on our parts.
Our good years involve less and easier work, in better conditions, than 1972, much better than 1921, and insanely better than 1871. When did we start mandatory schooling? When did we end actual slavery? Conscription? When was polio vaccination introduced, when was smallpox eliminated, when was anaesthetic easily available for childbirth? So yes, life is much better than it used to be.
Of course, I actually like living in Berlin, metro area population 61% of what you think the entire plant should have.
This is such an myopic human-centric world view. If every other species had a voice, or an opinion on what the success of man has meant for their own lives, their own families, their own future, what would they say ?
Consider how much man has cost every other living thing on this planet today.
I so much appreciate your point of view! I don't understand those nihilist statements as well. Looks like Satre's smoke has permeated most minds.
We are having this convo because someone had a child.
If someone really thought and believed life isn't a great thing (equating a stone wall to a human being) he'd be either a dishonest person or a weakling to be alive educating us.
For if he truly believes children and humans are all nothing, then, why toil in vain. Why procrastinate, why suffer at all for nothing.
Why is it that the majority of the humans that live and has ever lived chose to toil and provide for their family? Why is it that many folks that has ever lived are happy to have kids and nurture them. Is it ignorance that has given our ancestors the joy they experienced in child bearing and nurturing?
An "intellectual" that is enjoying the wealth of our ancestors turns to proclaim it all nothing because we cannot remember their names.
> For if he truly believes children and humans are all nothing, then, why toil in vain. Why procrastinate, why suffer at all for nothing.
Because suicide is vastly different from never having been born at all. Like every animal people have an extremely strong survival instinct. So strong that people have to be under extreme physical or mental pain before they consider taking their own lives.
This is not an argument for procreation but against it. It adds to the absolute horror that is life.
Also, after a couple generations the ancestors become so many that the "legacy" contribution from a given ancestor to a given descendant becomes statistically negligible.
That man has set the ideal conditions for raising a lot of children. While most city dwellers scramble from 9 to 5 to own but a cramped apartment—which also leads most of them to forgo having children in the first place—this farmer has plenty of time, and plenty of space. And he grows his own food! It's the ideal condition to raise children. And it's far safer too. I would know, because I grew up on one. But today both women and men are of course taught that a career is much better, toiling for the dreams of another man. Well, I'm not so sure.
>today both women and men are of course taught that a career is much better, toiling for the dreams of another man.
What kind of awful garbage take is this? It's objectively false, people who willingly don't have children are saw as society as second class citizens who are thought of as pathological. The VAST majority of humans have children at some point in their lives. It's true that there's a larger amount of people who willingly forgo having children than in the past, but it's still an incredibly fringe way of life.
>I would know, because I grew up on one.
Not saying that nobody should ever raise children in a rural area but the majority of people I know who grew up in rural areas got heavily involved in drugs and/or alcohol during their youth out of boredom. So there's downsides as well.
The world doesn't have an infinite amount of farmland, you can't raise "a lot of children" on a farm and have their children raise "a lot of children" on a farm indefinitely without running out of farmland. That, by definition, makes it not "ideal."
Yes, what an amazing world we are leaving our children. I'm sure they'll be so thankful of the task our habits and livelihoods have left them. You've left them so much, indeed.
To put your accuser in the nihilism box does not absolve you. It would be extremely unlikely for you to not be a active participant in the process of making the world worse.
Children are not the penultimate achievement of humanity. In fact, they're one of the core things that take zero learned skill and can be created and raised entirely via instinctual means.
I would argue that those who leave the most behind are those who are kind and thoughtful to those in their lives. They leave behind one of the most important and precious things that anyone ever could - pleasant memories in the minds and experiences of others. They brought direct happiness to others through their kindness. This is the type of person I strive to be, and I feel enriched and deeply fulfilled when successful in doing so. In some ways, the type of peace that can bring can be one of the few things that you can "take with you" in death, in that you will feel that happiness until your very last moment, which you will most likely not generally do with material possessions.
Just like one could live their life wholly not applying the same level of effort you describe here to their lives, living on “zero learned skill” and purely “instinctual means” alone.
I’d argue having children is the same. You can do it with zero effort, or you can do it with intention, to leave behind a better off generation, and devoting yourself selflessly as a parent to that cause.
I believe the lifelong quest of high-quality intention is what ultimately is the greatest achievement of life one can chase. Whether that is intentionally treating others with kindness and leaving pleasant memories, or intentionally raising healthy and inspired children who will continue to take up noble intention.
My peasant grandmother very rarely set foot outside her village’s mountain valley. When my grandfather got to held an important political party position she had to make do with living ~20 km down the valley in the area’s only town (that’s where my dad was born), but as soon as the chance arose to get back to her village she immediately took it (and I presume she also convinced my grandfather to take it, he became the village’s mayor).
She was very, very happy with her way of living (she lived to about 85 or 86), almost no medical problems in her entire life (apart from the last couple of years), why would she have wanted to give that all away? For some fancy trips to the seaside? That was not what she considered a good way of living.
They are not rich, but they do have way less stress then the city dwellers. And if stress is to be considered the one thing you do not like, they spend way less time in situations they do dislike.
Unless they go into debt. Then the bank owns them and the farm, and the debt turns into stress and you have the city experience, out in the great outdoors.
I always wanted to do ancestry for my family (family tree?) And I realized and still realize how far away people really become.
My last grandpa will die soon. I know his stories everyone knows but I don't know what he would have voted, what his favorite food is, what music he liked.
He has dementia now and forgets that he is at home and asks go go home.
What do I know from his life really?
He will end in some online tool as a name, two dates an image and lines connecting him to other family members.
I thought about making a legacy somehow and if I would make children I would create a family book and create rules which would share my thoughts with every future generation and everyone gets reached to follow it and enhance it like having Familie values and keeping them.
But at the end of the day I do realize for myself that this will not work as imagined and it doesn't matter at the end anyway.
People who have children do indeed leave a lot more behind. Yet almost nobody can name their great great grandparents, know what they looked like, or in fact, know anything about them. Sure, "you're their legacy", but they never got to know you and vice versa.
I think this is a more recent phenomenon of the modern’s. One can look to other ancient societies that still exist in small pockets, and their storytelling is orders of magnitude better than ours. Especially when it involves passing down family history.
You also have to realise that only partial family history can ever be truly handed down, particularly when there are no official records. Look back 6 generations in your family and there are 64 direct ancestors (if you're lucky and there was no inbreeding). There's no way all of those names and personalities get preserved. I went looking for family history in parish records and thought that I found a goldmine. Turns out there are about 5 people with the same name in the relatively sparsely populated town that my great great great grandfather was born in. Maybe some were cousins. Maybe one of them was a first-born son who died in childhood, so the traditional first-born name was recycled. It sounds cold hearted, but that shit happened.
Oh there's a great history of story telling on my father's side of the family. He's 94. There's a solitary photo of him sitting on his great grandfather's knee when he was about 5. He has an astonishing memory (that I'm afraid to actively doubt for a number of reasons, mainly though, he's the oldest person I know and nobody alive could corroborate or deny anything he says). He's recently been on TV, being interviewed about his time as a steam train fireman. An example of the amazing stuff he knows... My mother grew up in a large country house that her family somehow inherited. (Honestly, I have no idea and neither does she - they were broke, like most people, but they were rattling around in this large house, and totally mismanaging the land). It was built by a decendent from a French Knight who landed in Ireland in the 1100s during a conquest. There's next to no information about the family, beyond what you might find in Wikipedia about the Knight, and a few generations of the family before they blended into the population. Still, they retained status (justice of the peace, and owning a large estate) and were definitely wealthier than the locals. But the last of that line was Richard DeVerdon, who only had a daughter, Elizabeth. She died at the age of 18, in the year 1845. I was doing some research on the matter an found a large headstone in an ancient graveyard a few miles from our house. My mother knows next to nothing about her family history, and there are few records from the time. Talking to my father opened up a surprising story from his side of the family. My great great great grandfather was a young boy living high on the hills above the graveyard. His own father was ill in 1845 and could not go out to the end of the field to look down to the graveyard, so he asked his young son to go out and look down at the funeral procession and come back to describe what he saw. It's probably why the boy remembered it so vividly. It was a huge funeral, because the young girl was heiress to the estate. He related it directly to my own father when he was a boy, as they stood in the same field looking down at the graveyard. And my father told it to me simply because I asked if he knew anything about the De Verdon family, and the girl's death. It astounded me that I could barely read her name from a very worn headstone, but he could give me a description of the funeral procession that he got from someone who saw it with his own eyes in 1845.
What an arrogant opinion. You're unduly proud of being a parent. There is no inherent value to it at all. You force beings into this world and believe this is a feat? Ridiculous.
Children learn from their parents and if this is your attitude then I expect your children will inherit it. Will the world be better for them and their perspective of it is the same as yours? I very much doubt it.
Hopefully your children will learn how not to judge others for different life choices, perhaps they will be more humble and not assume superiority over others just because they had children.
In case you had not looked around the world recently, having children is no great achievement. Any idiot can have them.
This person's children are so fucked, its obvious they don't see their children as human beings with thoughts, feelings, dreams, and emotions of their own - just as a way to extend their own personal ego. It's an emotionally damaging way to be raised.
Perhaps he gets more satisfaction out of a stone wall than a child. Happiness and achievement are completely subjective. It isn't a credit to anyone who doesn't grasp that, much less denigrate another out of that lack of understanding.
Why is it a lobotomy to enjoy something? And sure you might have added code to Facebook to more accurately track users, or you made a 1% difference to your employer's bottom line, but this guy is a farmer, and you can have all the money in the world but at some point you still need a farmer somewhere to supply you with goods. No one NEEDS what you create. So perhaps don't be so derogatory about others life choices, I am pretty certain that this farmer would not criticize you for your choices.
Precisely twice as many people have had an impact on the world by having children as the number that have had an impact on the world through action. Unless you believe that Mary was really a virgin. Then the number is slightly less than twice as many.
Children aren't much of a legacy either. They have 50% of your DNA and nurture. Grandkids 25%. Grand-grandkids 12.5%. Within a few generations your contribution is watered down to almost nil.
Children are amazing in their own right, but they're not exactly a legacy. If you want legacy, write a good book, start a successful company, etc; ideas are things that can become legacy.
In enough generations, not one atom of your descendent's DNA will be specifically yours. The impact of your parenting will be diluted. The time spent on parenting shuts off an infinity of other options. I adore my children but the ways we enrich our culture and those around us matters just as much as our kids. And besides, why should a well-lived life look the same for him as for others?
> ...not one atom of your descendent's DNA will be specifically yours.
Ignoring the fact that you are probably not correct scientifically speaking, I think that the constitution of your descendants is figuratively, symbolically, if not scientifically, yours (please pardon my English). It's yours because you played an entirely crucial role in creating this lineage. Whatever path it took after your role in it, that path was shaped by your involvement. You don't have to believe in the spiritual importance of lineage to acknowledge that your actions, and simply being, have some important, significant impact upon it. I find this outlook a bit too modern and nihilistic for me.
This sounds quite sanctimonious, just because you have children doesn’t mean your life is somehow more valid than those that don’t. This mans life is arguably more valuable to society than us sat in an office. He’s producing food and helping to feed a nation
*I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
This valley dwellers will be there long after the ruins you created swallowed all you touch.
Yeah, and if everyone in the world did exactly the same thing we would be already a) out of space on the planet b) starving because you can’t just eat sheep c) dying because there’s no high-functioning medical industry requiring a working manufacturing facilities to have nice things like MRI
1) we weren't running out of space on the planet until there was high functioning technology to prevent people from dying,
2) you can eat just sheep,
3) people lived just fine before we paid for massive bureaucratic buildings full of men to tell them they don't know what's wrong with them and full of facilities to keep people on life support.
Im nowhere near the extreme of this guy but I cook a vegetable soup and eat it 4-6 days a week every week for dinner. I save the calories and good (edit: interesting) cooking for restaurants.
I mess around with the soup occasionally trying new flavoring or techniques but its the same damn soup and I like it. Its easy to make, keeps well, costs nothing relative to output, and leaves me time to think about other things other than food. Also its very healthy.
At this point its just a habit. Sunday or Monday evening is soup making time. Two hours nets me two weeks of food.
Before I had a family, I did this too. You really grow to appreciate food more by keeping it low key so often. And I agree, it’s relatively healthy. You kind of eat well on autopilot.
Then when you have something different and special, it really is special.
My family loves to have something great for every single meal. It’s very excessive and unnecessary - but I keep it to myself and let them enjoy it. It’s not a bad or destructive habit at all, I just wonder often if they value or appreciate it as much as they could.
Totally understand this would be hard to pull off with a family. My friends think Im a bit weird (I probably am), and im totally capable of cooking more interesting things, but its a lot of effort for very little personal satisfaction.
Plus theres so much excellent food out there, created by culinary experts, that I love to try. I save the fun for the pros :3
I also eat the same dinner ~6 days of the week, largely for the same reasons of practicality. Being able to prepare dinner on Sunday saves loads of time during the week.
You could easily tweak this to be similar to something I grew up with, from Slovenia: https://www.tasteatlas.com/manestra Maybe cook longer and blend some of it to thicken it up.
The funny thing is that we call that minestra in Italy. I keep being pleasantly surprised by how food is just different shades when you move from country to country...
Why freeze it if you keep it in the fridge for just one week? Depending on what it is, but generally most things last just fine for a week or more in the fridge.
They're probably asking because it depends on the quantity they're making.
I had a friend who asked me if he could freeze the soup recipe I sent him and while confused I told him it shouldn't be an issue.
Later on I'm visiting and he tells me he's making that soup. I walk into the kitchen to see a 40qt/37L pot being cooked. No wonder why he was asking if he could freeze it because the poor fella would have needed to eat 3L of soup a day to finish before it went bad if he didn't freeze it.
I'm sure I've read that the more varied your diet the more calories you will consume.
Of course we are advised to have a varied diet but I suspect that is because most people have such poor eating habits. If you can squeeze all the nutrients you need into a single dish then why wouldn't it work.
Sure, he's an extreme and very few want to emulate it because there's a mild element of delusion. But, he's found the thing so many of us work our entire lives for only to never find.
Part of life is letting happiness find you, part of life is finding happiness, and part of life is pushing away things to find happiness in what you have.
Happiness is a terrible word because there are different kinds.
I think contentment is closer to what he's found, his world makes sense in his context and is comfortable and familiar.
Happiness is what you want when you are young, contentment is what you get if you are lucky later.
I think that is how it should be, it's a good progression since too much contentment when you are young would have made me less driven and been less driven wouldn't have helped me reach a point of contentment in my late 30's.
I have a partner who loves me and I her in return, a stable job I enjoy, money in the bank and time and money for my hobbies - it's not euphoric happiness but that never lasts, contentment can.
Searching for happiness or thinking that one needs to be happy all the time is not the path to any sort of lasting happiness. Contentment, much like discipline, is what has staying power.
you did use the word "mild". but it made me wonder if not every person I've ever encountered that looked happy seemed like that a bit.
The happier somebody is the more deluded they look to the rest of us. People in love are perhaps the most obvious. But it says probably more about the observer.
The specific happiness that we're talking about here is contentment -- with your life, with who you are.
I think it looks so odd to so many of us because we tend to be an ambitious bunch, and I find ambition to be pretty inversely related to contentment. The sort of acceptance that this man displays feels like giving up, in a sense. And in many ways, it is -- but that's something that Buddhists have been teaching for centuries.
"Giving up" seems to imply unfulfilled ambition, though. It only feels like giving up because we project our own ambitions onto him. If his ambition always was to lead a simple, predictable life close to nature, he's achieved flawlessly. Maybe I'm just re-stating what you said, sorry.
“ Don't aim at success. The more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.” - Victor Frankl
The farmer has a lot of ideas about what it would have been like to leave or do something different and why there was no point in doing so. Having never left, these ideas are not based in experience, and there is likely an element of self-justification. It is very very common for people to come up with reasons to justify their choices. To the extent that these reasons are unexamined and not evidence-based, they are deluded. That doesn’t make them bad or even ineffective, just not fully based in reality.
It’s likely mild, and he’s likely genuinely happy with his life despite.
Indeed, they are rationalizations. Whether out of fear of the unknown or attachment to what he has. Our cognitive bias is such that losing something feels worse than gaining. I think some are more or less novelty-seeking by nature, but the environment around you has an impact.
If I think of it as a strategy it makes more sense, i.e. "doing the same thing has worked well and will probably continue to do well, so I'll continue to bet on it". That hardly demands all the extra pre-conceived notions, but people view challenges to their ideas as a threat when they've made them part of their identity.
A bird not flying outside it’s habitat is not delusion. Likewise any animal.
Just because there’s this modern idea that you need to travel and sample (trample on) everything, doesn’t make it more rational. Will going to Mars do anything for happiness? You haven’t been, you can’t know! That’s a fallacy, I’m not sure what, but it’s a fallacy because we know animals are adapted to their environment. We also are pretty good at knowing if we’re feeling alright.
You’re confusing scientism with reality. You can’t begin to claim to be right about some scientific thing without having explored a lot. But happiness can be found locally, in total ignorance. Your dog knows this. Only a human could confuse something like that through the curse of knowledge and modern culture.
What I will say is this man is rich. Not everyone, in fact almost no one, can afford to buy a farm in a beautiful area that’s surrounded by people and culture you like, with a temperate climate and natural beauty. He’s very lucky.
It's not the fact that he doesn't leave that's delusional, it's all the ideas he has about leaving that can't be based in reality as he has not experienced them.
It's similar to anyone who has strong opinions about something that they don't have evidence (scientific or experiential) to support.
Again, the delusion isn't that he's happy with what he has, it's that he appears to have some strong opinions about what it's like to, for example, live in London having never been there. A more evidence-based position might be "I'm happy with what I have and have no inclination to see or do anything else".
He seems to be saying people have told him as much, or he's heard as much. It’s not like he’s stating it strongly either, I think mostly he’s just making conversation.
It sounds like you're reacting strongly to the word delusional, and it may be my mistake for using a word that often comes with such strong negative connotations.
My intended meaning was that there are beliefs here that aren't and can't be grounded in reality. Not necessarily more than other people tend to hold, but in the context of this article, which I thought romanticized the man's viewpoint a bit, it seemed relevant to pick up on.
Saying that bringing up the word delusion is delusional seems a little unkind in this context, though I think you're right that a milder term would fit better.
My great-grandfather was traveling to USA for work back in 1912. He came back after 6 years and settled in his village becoming its head. Almost everybody in my family knows this story and it's indeed fascinating, because at that time people rarely moved anywhere.
And now we are fascinated by a man living in the same place all his life. It's funny how the concept of norm changes in 100 years.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time. -- T.S.Eliot
A man living in the same place all his life has no basis for comparison. I would be more convinced that your great-grandfather's village is something special since he experienced elsewhere yet still returned.
I have lived in the same place only once in my life for 7 years and it was an exception because we raised kids, even then we ripped our kids out of school to move them to a different country just for the sake of "experience" and so we wouldn't get bored and comfy (as parents).
In my whole life (close to 50 now) my average years in 1 place was 3-5. I could numerate _all_ the countries I lived in but it would look ridiculous and make boring reading (but it includes some crazy places one seriously wonders what could bring one from A->B).
Only last night I sat on the terrace of my an old friend from childhood. We downed a few Guinness (imported and considered a novelty where we are). It led us to exactly this conversation because he doesn't like anything "fancy" or imported but makes an exception knowing I love it and knowing I'd come he bought it. He is the exact opposite of me and I've always looked up to him because he got the roots (and everything that comes with it discussed here) that I lack. I'd love to have roots and in my most romantic day-dreams wonder what it would be like having never left and still among the same people. (and with my siblings not spread around the globe but in the same town)
He has also often wondered what it would be like living like me, hearing about adventures from Asia, sometimes war zones, or more recently South Eastern Europe, always "trying to make it in a different way", sometimes thriving but quite often literally just surviving.
Despite knowing another quite well, we're only able to look at each others reality in a romanticized / idealized way because we have no idea.
"The grass is always greener ...." most importantly I totally lack the basis for comparison to _his_ life as much as he does to mine, because I've been wired and set up to be me very early in my childhood (and so are my kids who also had no choice but had to endure going through the experience of getting ripped out of school and moved to a new place every couple of years).
I think we are creatures of habit. And braking them is very hard regardless if the habit is to never make any changes, or must shake things up every few years to avoid going nuts.
My parents moved me between countries throughout my childhood. It resulted in lower quality of life, for my whole life. I'm 40 now. Trading your children's good childhood for your own adventure is a selfish choice. I urge you to move to a good place for your children and stay there until they are ready to live independently.
Don't most migrants have nostalgia for their country of origin? Where their roots are, no matter how much of a globetrotter they were. Sure, if the country you grew up in a beleaguered place, you wouldn't think of going back. But I've heard so many migrants say things along lines of: "oh, man, once I'm retired... <fill in blanks>".
"Disclaimer": migrant myself. Not necessarily my dream to go back "once retired". But my wife yearns for her motherland. And so do many.
What I found that is as migrants we have an idealistic nostalgic image of the homeland in our minds but in reality our homeland also changes quite fast so much that one is left with disappointment mostly....
My father grew up on a rural Irish farm, then came to America as a young adult. At age 78, he hatched a plan to move back to his family home, where his brother and a nephew still lived. After three years there, he came back to the US, complaining that it wasn't the Ireland he remembered.
I moved within my country but besides sharing the same language, it mostly feels like living in a different country (for good).
Sometimes I feel a bit of nostalgia, but along life I've learned that you tend to remember the good things and the bad things get opaqued by time.
So when I feel a bit nostalgic I have learned to get a bit rational and think back to when I was there, and to the times I've come back to visit parent and relatives (holidays etc).
I then rationally remember all the reasons why I left and all the reasons why I decided to stay where I am. And nostalgia vanishes, almost immediately.
There is value in finding your place in life and being content with it. Yes, you might be able to change it, perhaps to conform to more traditional standards of 'success', but why bother if you're happy as you are?
If we humans optimize by happiness, then we should have nothing but envy for a life like Wilf Davies leads.
I came to this realization in university - I love software, I love writing programs and solving problems, but I really don't love office work or the idea of sitting at a desk all day. I dropped out of a software engineering program to work on a factory floor, a decision I haven't regret once in five years (even if my parents would consider me a failure). The hours are good, the wage is good, benefits are good, I get to come in stress-free and leave 8 hours later in the same cheery mood. I tried stints in "more successful" fields like in-house software or sales teams, but there was just something about it I loathed. To the outside world I'm just some deadbeat small-town factory worker, but I don't think I could make my life any happier or more enjoyable if I tried.
My happiest period with relation to work was similar, laborious but satisfying because I got something done every day and didn't have to think about it after work. When you're writing software, it's hard to turn off the switch (I think especially if you find software development itself to be an interesting subject) when you leave the office. It's hard to not think about the design, the thing you'll do tomorrow, continue pondering that failed test case or new bug report into the evening. I only really got past that myself by introducing a significant break between work and the rest of my day with exercise in the 1-3 hours after work. But that's a rather high cost for anyone with a family.
Working for a big software company (thousands of software engineers under one roof) will make that off switch work again. You'll leave the office and instantly not care or think about anything you do until you cross the threshold the next morning.
This is the positive side (along with the salary) of being a tiny cog with no power to influence broader design decisions.
Worked at Microsoft and now I’m at one of the big AAA game companies (working on their online services side, not games directly) and both were/are very stressful. High expectations of commitment and personal investment in what I do.
Same here. I love software but also hate it. Too many decisions.
During lockdown I relish the opportunity to clean the house and cook because they are straightforward tasks where there are clear goals and I always achieve success.
Software for me these days involves too much despair and worry over whether things are done the right way.
You'll never find the right way. But there are lot's of ways that are good enough - you can learn to get satisfaction in a good enough solution and move on.
And if you got it wrong, and it wasn't good enough, you can take another stab at it later with the wisdom gained meanwhile.
A friend of my parents was a professor, lecturer and author in biology. One day, he was fed up and became a Tram Driver.
I'll never forget how he explained the bliss of coming home, dropping your company-bag in the hallway only to pick it up next day before going to work. How he never had to read up on recent insights in the field of driving a tram on weekends. How he was finding joy in reading biology-books in the evenings, free of any pressure, again.
(If this sounds denigrating to a tram driver, it is not meant as such, at all)
I wish I had made that decision when I could. I'm over 20 years into software development and every few years I try to get out of it, but most places won't hire someone with professional experience because they're scared you'll quit, and that problem just compounds itself over time. Instead I now work software for a few years on, then take a year off. During the working years life is a real stress, constantly thinking about work stuff, even on my off-hours. I can only dream of having a job that I could just switch off at the end of the day. Or - better yet - a guaranteed basic income so I didn't have to work doing something that exhausts me so thoroughly.
You still can! You just need to find someone willing to give you a shot. If you're financially able to, definitely tell them your story and offer to work at a reduced "probationary pay" for some months to show you're dead serious.
I don't see a reason why any time is too late to get out. I was in software development and sysadmin field for about 15 years. Then started hand engraving (got quite good at it) and now I'm a full time CNC machine shop and growing steadily. Loving (almost) every day of it. Also went to college to study mechanical engineering. Of course being your own boss usually doesn't let you switch off at the end of the day, but that was just the choice I made for myself.
I believe I could get back to IT if I really wanted to, or needed to. Would need few months of getting up to date with all latest developments and living in the "land of the unicorns" I don't think getting well paying job would be a problem.
Look for work in an industry with demand. In US that would be electricians and plumbers. If you take the time to get certified, no one will doubt your sincere interest. I don't think anyway.
Good to read this. I'm a software developer working on my own projects, and to still have some income in the first years I decided to work as a garbage man. It's so wonderful. Meeting different kinds of people all the time, doing physical work (more flirting with women during my workday haha), and when I get home I'm physically tired but mentally prepared to write another software module. Perfect fit, this mix of mentally/creative work and physical/'stupid' work. Indeed, for the outside world I'm also a deadbeat (although they never say out loud). But my real smile makes them doubt their selves, makes them even envious sometimes. Such is the power of making choices for yourself.
I can relate a little bit; early on I worked a job where I basically just wiped computers and confirmed they were working, then loaded them on pallets. It was purely physical work (lift a computer, take it to a desk, connect it, power it on, boot to a CD, confirm HD was wiping, go to one that had finished, pop out CD, shut down, disconnect, carry to pallet), in a hot warehouse, but the whole time I did it I felt good.
It is not always possible, but as a senior software developer, I try to keep the feeling of 'finished' in my team. It is, by far, the most important piece in keeping a team happy, productive, cooperating and improving.
Definition of done, demo's, releaseparties, well-defined delivery requirements, chopping up tasks, user stories, etc. All help a lot here. But all require effort to maintain, establish and improve. Continously and significant effort.
So I've actually never cared much for release parties. I think because by that point the work is 'done', and I'm ready to move on. Plus, if upper management is involved, it feels very parasitical ("let me attach myself to this launch"), and if they aren't it feels unnecessary (we know we did a good job). And the timing is always problematic; if it's literally as we release it feels disingenuous just knowing that if anything goes wrong the team has to step away from any sort of party (but not upper management, or others who glommed on), and if it's after the fact I've mentally moved on.
That said, all the other things are must haves, not just because of morale but because of effectiveness. Things don't get done without definitions of done, things don't get proper feedback and iteration without demos, etc.
From your story, you seem to have very different "release parties" than what I have encountered.
The ones I'm talking about are ranging from "buy some nice beers and munchies and drink one in the office" to "hire a boat, bring a radio" to "have dinner together". Basically a friendly, shoulderpatting event amongst peers.
*Edit: obviously all pre-covid lockdowns and work-from-home.
So that just sounds like a team event, which I try to do once a month just to help keep the team connected.
I think the difference is internal vs external release then. Our internal releases were generally "nice job" and the like, as we completed sprints. It was still a clear recognition of something being completed. The actual external facing launch that the company cared about, the 'go live', was more what I was referring to, and which never really meant much, to me at least.
The curse is that upper management perceives this effort but doesn't perceive its effect. Even from the common fundamental perspective (the enterprise has to optimize, to dissipate as few resources as possible in order to reach the more financially beneficial and durable state) this effort is justified, however as they don't know its real impact...
True. Though, if that management is measuring the right things, they will perceive it. But "the right things" is very broad and hard to define; and probably dynamic over the years event.
I mostly work at desk. I feel really good whole day if I had sweat in the morning even while working with PHP (cycling for a couple of hours). I was wondering if sweating at the job has something to do with the satisfaction.
I respect your choice tremendously. On the other hand, on plan on retiring in 2-4 more years and devoting myself to dangerous and obviously excellent adventures which will likely have me dead by 50!
I'm rationalizing my decision to stick it out just a bit longer, but I have zero fucks left. I'd rather dig ditches than write software for one of the big companies at this point, but I'm not digging ditches.
People use the same word "team" to describe both hypercompetitive groups of mutual enemies playing a zero sum game, and happy groups of cooperating people striving for a common goal.
Usually the first group is seen as more socially acceptable and usually makes more money, but the second group almost always has a superior quality of life.
Coworkers and the relationship with them matter. Its almost never talked about.
That is all good and well, but nowadays not everyone can get a decent factory job.
When I didn't have my CS degree finished and no IT experience, I've applied to thousands of factory and warehouse jobs and got nowhere. I only got a curier job through a family connection.
I agree. If you don't want or like this person's life, more power to you. But here is someone who works hard and finds satisfaction and enjoyment in what they do. I hope we can all be so lucky.
When we bought a home, mowing the lawn became my responsibility. I knew I could look at it as a chore that needs to be done but eventually a task that annoys me and could make me bitter about the whole thing.
So I decided to learn all I could about lawn maintenance, which tools I need, and how to use them. And it became a point of pride for me and a challenge rather than a chore.
So mowing the lawn, the very act of it, is now a joy and something I look forward to. All my work (de-thatching, aerating, seeding, fertilizing, watering, pH balancing, edging, etc) pays off when I mow the lawn now and it makes mowing something I look forward to and never have to be bothered to do.
It was a shabby lawn when I took it over and now it’s a thick, lush carpet that I enjoy very much.
Taking an hour once/week over the summer to do the yard is actually very relaxing. Put a podcast on or music and shut out the world for awhile. When done, it's a great physical reward of a completed job.
That is according to your definition of "living life and being happy".
The person in the article is clearly happy and has found his place in the world that he's happy with. For that, he has found the thing most people miss out on or just don't get. Leaving home just for the sake of it, more so if you're just happy wherever you are is just wasting time.
I would like to travel the world because that would give me the happiness this person has found just by staying where he is. That doesn't mean he should change his way because my definition of being happy is different that his.
Trying to eat something different everyday is an American obsession that I'll never understand. It's just so stressful and inconvenient. I grew up in a small town where eating the same for dinner everyday was extremely common. Tea or coffee and bread. The only variable would be what you put in your bread. Some days it would be butter, some days it would jam. Some days it would be honey, some days it would be avocado.
I think eating the same thing every day is fine, though you need to make sure to have a balanced diet with good nutrition. The author mentioned his uncle who just ate bread, butter, and cheese for every meal, and I’m not sure how you can even survive off of that. Surely it’s lacking something important with no fruit or vegetables.
I’ve heard that humans had a long period of time after we became sedentary and started relying on agriculture that the average height decreased significantly, and it was only in recent centuries that it has gotten back to normal due to more varied nutrition. So even if you can technically survive on a very limited diet, it can still have negative effects.
> I’ve heard that humans had a long period of time after we became sedentary and started relying on agriculture that the average height decreased significantly, and it was only in recent centuries that it has gotten back to normal due to more varied nutrition. So even if you can technically survive on a very limited diet, it can still have negative effects.
It's not the variety of the diet but the quality of the food itself. Bread is good for energy, but if all you're eating is bread, you're not getting complete proteins, omega 3s, and other nutrients. It's fine, however, to eat nothing but meat and many societies did this for hundreds of thousands of years.
Farming is anything but sedentary, especially in the 19th century and prior. People's height was stunted because food was not abundant enough. Agricultural societies tended to grow faster than farming productivity could keep up with. A lot of people were simply malnourished and therefore never reached their natural height capacity.
But as you say, the hunter / gatherers such as the native Americans were taller on average than the first European settlers to arrive in America. This is not due to a particularly diverse diet. Most cultures subsisted on meat from hunting (largest source of nutrition) and a select few vegetables. The difference is that hunter / gatherer societies tended to self regulate their population according to available resources.
I think it's false. Hunter gatherer communities (no societies back there) lived by what they could find - either hunt animals or look for fruits, plants and mushrooms.
Then there was a shift towards agricultural societies, where people relied on their plantations and domesticated cattle. I don't think the cattle meat would be enough for most of their meals, probably the most of them would be bread and soup.
This is just a vague recollection from A Brief History of Humanity, but it makes sense to me. Eating just meat sounds terribly "costly", you have to actively ignore all other sources of food around you.
Even ancient hunter gatherers probably ate a diet of more (wild) plant than meat. Catching animals is hard work, with the technology of the time.
But in general, I think we know a lot less about the lives of people so long ago than many people (including academics) like to think. Research methods are often based on either assuming modern people's lifestyles are "just like" ancient people, or big leaps from extremely limited archeological evidence.
No, of course they didn't. They lived in the Ice Age. Edible veggies and nutrients were extremely sparse and hard to come by for 1M years. Also wild plants prior to cultivation were not these big beautiful tomatoes, apples, bananas, and cucumbers we see in the grocery stores today. Those plants were selectively bred for thousands of years to produce what you see today.
Grass-eating bison, aurochs, horses, goats, sheep, etc were our primary source of nutrition in the ice age, not to mention mammoths (as well as fish).
And this is evidenced by ancient cave paintings tens of thousands of years old depicting hunts as well as the bone remnants in the caves and homes of ancient humans.
But mostly what the conflicting theories with consensus that changes from generation to generation tells me is that it's very hard to know for sure how people 15K+ years ago lived.
So really all societies did this until the advent of agriculture ~10K years ago. And even then, the agricultural revolution was not evenly distributed and hunting or fishing as a primary source of nutrition was common even just 150 years ago.
> The author mentioned his uncle who just ate bread, butter, and cheese for every meal, and I’m not sure how you can even survive off of that. Surely it’s lacking something important with no fruit or vegetables.
The only thing you're really missing there is dietary fiber, which -- being indigestible -- doesn't have nutritional value. However, it does interact with your intestines as it passes through them in a manner which tends to promote their health.
So no, survival is not even a question that should come up.
“Not even a question that should come up” is a pretty sour attitude to take in general, and I don’t even think you’re right.
Fiber does have a health impact as you say, and having good health is one of the main ways known to delay death. And what is survival but the delay of death?
My point is that by eating a larger variety of nutritious food, you are less likely to suffer from poor health due to a lack of something you need.
There are a long list of illnesses caused by vitamin deficiencies, including Scurvy, Rickets, magnesium deficiencies and iron deficiencies (as well as others). These can be life threatening too, so survival is very much a question that should come up.
> you need to make sure to have a balanced diet with good nutrition
You know, you are going to die. They're going to lower you into a hole in the ground. The worms will have you for dinner. That's it.
Right before you die, are you going to say to yourself, "boy, I'm sure glad I made sure to have a balanced diet with good nutrition" ? Will you say, "I'm glad I didn't enjoy cheese and bread with butter every single day" ?
70 years of pure joy, of every moment counting, of getting just what you want, is worth a million years of trying to extend your life and health. Don't live the life you think you're supposed to, and don't live for the future. Whatever you like, do it now.
What an insightful point! Maybe I should eat nothing but candy, smoke cigarettes, and go into bright sunlight with no sunscreen everyday. Who cares if I get diabetes or mouth, lung, or skin cancer!
Or maybe I can just take basic precautions like eating more than three different foods? You make it sound like that is such a burden, but it really isn’t. It’s possible to enjoy your life even while taking care of yourself.
In fact, I have a much easier time being happy when my health is good than when I am sick, so I’d say these precautions are important for a good life.
> The author mentioned his uncle who just ate bread, butter, and cheese for every meal, and I’m not sure how you can even survive off of that. Surely it’s lacking something important with no fruit or vegetables.
Exactly, wouldn’t you end up with scurvy from the lack of vitamin C?
Is the author overweight? Over weight for what? For living a life of hard manual labor? Well in his 70s and still mobile and able to run a farm seems like he's doing fine. Besides ... he may have gained weight after his stroke; used to eating a farmer's meal but not moving about much.
Besides ... you've heard of studies that have shown that the calorie expenditure of hunter-gatherers, walking around all day, is about the same as couch potato Americans sitting around all day... here's the link: https://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2013/06/13/191036200/what-...
Eating something different every day is not "an American obsession". Heck most people I know would want change and something different in their routine of food. I personally have 10-12 breakfast recipes that I cycle through and regularly try stuff I find online
I'm American, and I have to disagree. I have the same thing for breakfast every day, and I love it. I usually have the same thing for lunch, too. It's convenient and I change it up just a little now and then. For dinner, my daughter and I do different things. I think that embracing this is a good thing. It's comfortable. It's safe, and I am content. On the weekends I do change it up too, but during the week, I find my favorite foods to be part of my daily routine. I like it.
I tried eating a particular dish every day for a while. (To the exclusion of other foods.) I didn't get tired of it -- I loved it and still do. But I had to stop because, after a while of this, I would still be hungry after eating a large meal. My stomach would be physically full, but I'd be hungry anyway.
I'm still not sure what the problem was. It was a dish basically consisting of lentils, onions, and shredded chicken, spiced heavily; I'd eat it spread over bread.
Try milk, cheese, grains, egg, muesli, stew, varied foods, get recepees known to work like ayurvedic ones or good veg recipes. Avoid too much bread, good rice (basmati) can be filling. Organic ecological foods also.
If you only eat one dish, it better have everything needed and even then it can be lacking. No need to torment oneself.
I could eat the same thing every day, as in I don’t really care what I eat.
However it doesnt feel like a good idea for nutrition reasons. So I try to eat as different as possible with minimal effort instead. Like getting the dishes I’ve never heard of when eating out.
My parents come from a place that is the polar opposite of America, and eating the same thing repeatedly would get you sent to a mental asylum, based on how my family life revolves around food.
The idea of not using an innumerable number of fruits, vegetables, meats, and spices available is crazy to me. We’re even excited to go back to the city try at various times of the year because different seasons bring different foods.
We need some amount of stressors in our lives to keep from feeling bored and stagnant. Exercise is literally an imposition of stress, but increases our well-being. Really a matter of picking your poison.
Farming might be samey, but if something is hard work it's also stressful.
As an irishman, i can so relate to the comment on the jam :)
"My uncle, a bachelor and farmer like me, had the same food for every meal. He had bread, butter, cheese and tea for breakfast, lunch and dinner (although he would bring out the jam for visitors)."
> Trying to eat something different everyday is an American obsession that I'll never understand. It's just so stressful and inconvenient.
It's not like we do this to because variety is intrinsically good and we have to force ourselves. It's more like we're addicted to variety; the more often you have the same meal the less appetizing it becomes.
An American obsession? I think that is a gross over-generalization. I am American, by birth, and am happy eating mostly the same thing day after day. My spouse is from Poland, and she is not satisfied by that approach to food. Not by a long shot.
I feel you. I eat the same thing for weeks or months at time until I get tired of it. Unfortunately it's not just an American thing though. I've experienced the same in Spain, Denmark, Sweden and to a lot lesser degree in Portugal...
I married into a traditional small town Indian family last year.
One of the biggest idealogical challenges I've faced is the duality of ambition. My family in law live similar to the farmer. Low entropy. I know where they will be every day every 15 minutes, what they will eat, with little exception.
It's such a stark contrast to my personal life, which has been characterized by the constant need to improve, challenge, and adapt. I don't know what I'll be doing 15 minutes from now let alone 2:00 - 2:15 a year from now.
I personally am not an absolutist, and so I don't think there's a particular lifestyle that is wrong or right, but it's an salient dichotomy and something that I've found challenging to reconcile in practice.
This is similar to Sven Yrvind's philosophy on eating at sea.
>I will eat twice a day, breakfast and lunch four hours later.
>...
>I say, “Cows only eat grass and wolfs only eat meat”
>Modern society is so boring and there is so much food that we have to be stimulated by spices and chefs and different foods to eat. At sea in a small boat its different. Life itself out there is so interesting that I do not need stimulants.
>My breakfast consists of one can of sardines, one slice of dense dark rye bread and muesli.
>...
>My lunch is the same as breakfast but no sardines.
Don't sleep on the canned sardines. They never stop being good imo. Their high protein and fat content makes them really satiating. I think they're the ultimate food if you're dieting.
Since gyms were closed, I cut for about 4-5mo at the start of lockdown. Everyday for those 5 months: sardines. Never got tied of 'em or felt like I was on horrific starvation rations.
Be careful eating tinned fish that much. My cousin became very ill in university - losing hair, losing weight, sleepy all the time. They tested her for everything. Eventually they realized she had high levels of mercury from eating a tin of tuna daily. Sardines might be okay because they are smaller, so they bioaggregate less.
Sardines are small short-lived fish. They don't accumulate mercury the way that larger predatory fish such as tuna do. Sardines present a much lower mercury risk.
I agree the food itself is pretty bleak. But this resonates with me because I have a fond memory of a rushed meal after a surf with my father.
We were on a camping trip so all we had in the car was two small cans of tuna and some multigrain bread. After getting out of the water and feeling completely exhausted, there was something satisfying about slapping the contents of the can onto a slice of bread and biting into the most basic meal imaginable.
> She has two carers who come in four times a day, and they are wonderful.
My dad arranged something similar for my mom in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s. It is nearly impossible in the US, I don’t even know if you can still do it without being wealthy. It required long term care insurance prepaid for years, and it was still a nightmare of weekly paperwork to manage all the claims. The care for his sister, and treatment and recovery for multiple strokes - out of reach for many farmers around the world. This man is very lucky indeed.
Even small European communities have adult day programs for people with Alzheimer's etc. The idea of old folks homes is foreign in places where people aren't wealthy to begin with. Interesting how a market appears to extract wealth when it exists.
This is pretty common on the NHS. Also, as Wales is a devolved nation, we can plough more money into the NHS than happesn in England. Also less privatisation.
I've found a lot of freedom in similar decisions. Not sure I could take it to the same level, but even just having a small set of meals to eat every week makes shopping, cooking and planning around expiry dates so much easier. Clothes can be similarly hacked such that everything goes together and every combination is something you are comfortable wearing, leaving you never needing to consider what to wear. I've optimised these to the point that they take up nearly zero mental space and generate no stress. In my case, I use pre-prepared frozen meal delivery service, but I know some meal preppers who find similar freedom that way. Don't cook or order anything you won't eat at any arbitrary time, and you'll never be stuck with wasted food or indecision. And for clothes I found a small set that works for me and can be worn in any given situation (except formal, though that doesn't impact me in any way).
I see a lot of comments that seem to see all the things you miss out on in this situation. But in my mind, it frees up a lot of mental effort, time and stress. If I ever get bored I can go to a restaurant and eat something wild and it will be all the more exciting given I don't optimize for excitement or luxury in my everyday steady-state.
When Soylent came out I was super excited about this idea. Don't think about three meals a day that you normally fuss over, and instead have two predictable, quick meals and optimize to make the third one amazing. Soylent was OK, and DIY soylent offered some hope too. The third meal WAS always amazing, in a relative sense, and tasted better somehow than when I had the same thing before this diet. Unfortunately liquid diets are just not satisfying to me and so frozen meals won out.
I'd love to find other areas of my life that can be similarly optimized. I have hope for bill management services to take the annoyance out of juggling payments etc., and roboinvestors or similar automated financial services. Doing these things manually offers no excitement and no added value beyond the transitively provided service so I don't think they should take up my life.
The amount of time wasted across the whole human population on things like preparing meals, choosing outfits and managing everyday responsibilities must be huge and that is all time that could be spent doing other exciting or valuable things.
I recommend decreasing your gadgets to just a phone (for when you go out) and a tablet or laptop for home. That is, no TV, no stereo, no games console. Assuming you live on your own, you can do all the same things you did before, just move your laptop screen to a comfortable distance. I suppose you could buy headphones if you also want loud audio, but personally I prefer to go out to a bar or nightclub or movie theater to get that experience.
You can also optimize most of the furniture away. The last few places I lived I just had a mattress in the main/living room and cooking supplies in the kitchen. Not only is the up-front cost less, but you can live in a much smaller apartment, cleaning the whole place is much faster, moving house is easy. Personally I like to work lying on my stomach, so I don't need a desk, but I suppose you could get a small table and chair if your body isn't comfortable lying down or sitting on the floor for a lot of the day. More available floor space means it's easier to pace or work out too.
Other recommendations... Best to live somewhere without carpet, so you can clean it with a broom - saves buying a vacuum cleaner. You can use toilet paper for the bathroom and also in the kitchen and also to blow your nose. You can use shampoo for everything in the bathroom, including washing your hair, hands, body and clothes (if your house doesn't have a washing machine). You can use dishwashing liquid to clean most surfaces in the house, as well as your dishes. You can avoid using lights for most of the day/night by keeping windows uncovered and using the ambient light from outside.
The upsides are exactly as you say - since you're not spending as much time and money maintaining your house, you have more time to go out and visit interesting places, and you can spend more money at nice restaurants or splurge for a comfortable hotel if you want to enjoy some luxury every now and then. But I find I don't really want to. Life is a lot more enjoyable, in my opinion. Way less stress than cleaning and maintaining a bunch of stuff.
That's certainly one kind of minimalism, but I think it goes well beyond what GP intended. While your comment and lifestyle seems earnest, it's a bit too far for most given the GP context, in the sense that rather than minimizing the time taken to do routine things, it optimizes many of them out entirely to the point that it does not appear practicable for most (ex. mattress being the only furniture). Such things can certainly be taken to even further extremes: why buy a mattress? A sleeping bag might do fine and might well be good for your back. Everybody draws a line, and for even relatively extreme folks, that line is certainly shaped by social norms.
I'd wager there's a rather large number of folks like GP intending to minimize the effort required to do drone-ish tasks rather than eliminate them. I don't deny that it's only a logical next step to eliminate them entirely, but that seems a step too far for social conventions. After all, culture defies logic rather often.
I tried living without a mattress for a while. It wasn't super comfortable but it wasn't really a major problem till winter, at which point I realized I would need some more insulation, and a mattress seemed like the best bang for the buck. I might be able to make do without if I lived in a warmer place. Right now, though, the place I'm renting came furnished, so it's not an issue.
(Bonus with a furnished place - I don't need to worry about the kinds of bills that the OC was talking about because one flat monthly payment covers rent, water, electric and internet. My only other bills are phone and media/content subscription services, all of which are also flat rates, set up once and paid automatically.)
For me simplifying my life doesn't mean living with nothing at all, it just means living without unnecessarily complicated or laborious things. Clearly different people will draw a line at different places.
The point of my previous comment was more that it doesn't hurt to try eliminate things from your life, if it seems they're just a hassle. Who cares about the social conventions? I think a lot of people find themselves caught up in the rat race and take part without really thinking about why they're doing it, or whether it actually is worth all the effort. It turns out you can forego a lot of things and, actually, life isn't all that bad. That's especially the case if you are earning a decent salary, so you afford to can go out and treat yourself whenever you feel the urge. I think now is probably a better time than ever before to live simply, because we have immediate access to all the world's knowledge and art from a tiny computer in our pockets.
That's pretty much the exact philosophy I live by. I've definitely found no bed frame to be a hard-sell to family and friends, and it's hard to see why once you've tried all the options. A mattress makes a lot of sense, but a bed frame adds little value unless you are short on storage and one has storage built in, or you aren't mobile enough to get to the ground. But maybe I'm missing some utility that others have found in their bedframes!
Living in Japan now, I had a few months with a padded mat + quilt on the floor as is tradition (and a damn cheap one), but upgraded to a mattress on the floor because the floor was too cold in winter as you mentioned.
There's as much to be gained from taking stuff away that isn't useful, as there is from adding useful stuff to your life.
When I lived in China I found it a lot easier to live this way because the apartments are smaller and there seems to be more of a culture of going into the community to eat at local restaurants or finding entertainment in public spaces.
Now I am back in the North America I think it's harder, because people build houses much bigger, and seem to associate not having much stuff with being unhappy or underprivileged instead of well-optimized and free.
I've found a bit more in common with the rubber tramp and liveaboard communities in this part of the world. They are very mindful about everything they buy because space is limited, so trying to find things that are multifunctional is a high priority. A lot of those things work in houses too.
On the other hand, I don't think their lives are as low stress as I would like, because they end up needing maintain an entire vehicle as well as the stuff in it.
Two other hacks, for women at least, is to quit makeup and shaving. I quit makeup about 5 years ago by accident forgetting to put it on one morning, and then I realized no one at work noticed anyways. Quitting shaving has been more of a corona era thing. I'm not sure if I'll stick with it over the summer, but I've been out a few times in shorts and it seemed nobody much cared. That cuts a bunch of unnecessary maintenance time out of my life, which I can now use for other things.
If you only have a mattress, you can still move to a different apartment on your own. If you have a bedframe, you will need help. I never want to help anyone else move, so I try to keep my belongings small enough to move myself.
Sorry if you saw my original comment, I misread this as a dismissal through exaggeration, but after double checking my comprehension I realise I was both wrong and missing the fact that I can relate to most of this.
I've tried many of the things you mention, and while I don't do all of those things still, many of them do make my life easier and more stress free. It's interesting how many of the things I've just stopped thinking about as I tried them and subsequently rid my conscious mind of other more time consuming or stressful options.
There are so many better things to spend time on than the mundane parts of life.
> I'd love to find other areas of my life that can be similarly optimized. I have hope for bill management services to take the annoyance out of juggling payments etc., and roboinvestors or similar automated financial services.
You’re probably familiar with auto bill pay (I think most services have it, and many banks offer it as well), and index fund investing with automatic transfers, so I’m guessing those don’t solve the problems you’re talking about. I’m interested what you mean then.
Yeah absolutely, that's kind of what I'm talking about. Though even then, managing different contract durations across many different companies for many different bills each month is annoying, and there are companies that can do that part for you as well. Haven't ever tried it, nor checked the cost, but it sounds like something that might be beneficial to not worry about. They can send me a summary each month to make sure I'm not spending too much.
The index fund investing with scheduled transfers is exactly what I meant by automated financial services. I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit.
> I probably micro-manage it a little too much right now for no real benefit.
I do my best not to even log in to my account. One could go so far as to change one’s password to something impossible to remember, then delete it, so that signing in becomes a huge hassle of password recovery and identification verification at a banking institute (one of Dante’s levels of hell iirc)
Cooking is enjoyable and you can get the same flow state cooking that you can coding. And it’s where you can let your mind wander and come up with sparks of new ideas/approaches.
I also find cooking enjoyable, but I would hate it if it just became an extension of work! One of the reasons why I continue to cook dinner every night despite having a fairly minimal life in other aspects is because it's a set of physical actions that helps to get my brain out of work mode. This is especially important during pandemic/work-from-home era because there is no commute (I used to cycle).
But this experience of finding value in cooking is not really universal. I have some friends who legitimately, actively dislike the process. It's not that they're bad at it, they just consider it a waste of time. For them Soylent, or a food delivery service might be just fine.
I think the key is to aggressively optimize out the things in your life that aren't working for you. We shouldn't feel like we "need" to do things just to have a "normal" life, I think that's one of the causes of stress and unhappiness for a lot of people.
This guy is a saint. To have that kind of contentment and peace is the goal of most religions. Honestly I'd like to hear more of his life, would love to talk to him.
Probably being a shepherd has something to do with that. It is interesting to note that all the prophets of Abrahamic religions have been a shepherd at one point in their life, for examples the most popular ones namely Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were all once shepherds.
Come and visit Wales, specifically Mid-Wales, like say Lampeter, or Newcastle Emlyn. Go to a pub in the evening and have a chat to some of the local farmers, if you buy the beer, they'll be chatty enough.
I feel like my could hear that kind of contentment. But of course there are property taxes and the like. It's easy to lose what you have and what makes you happy. I want land, but will never get it.
All the highly important software people (myself included) would do good to remember that farmers are literally keeping us alive while basically working 7 days a week - and in many cases barely getting by.
Not entirely sure if this is coming from a sincere place or not, but Labour Day is a rather large event here in FIN. Of course like anything the original meaning has been lost to most people, and many treat it as a "drinking holiday."
Working in tech it’s very hard not to get lost in rat race and always go for more money, more knowledge, more everything. I’m actively trying to avoid it, but it gets to me as well. And most of my friends think I’m weird that I don’t want to get one more promotion or why I don’t want to push myself outside of my comfort zone. I’m fine where I am.
Yes, that can happen, but it entirely depends on where you work. Some employers are fine with letting people stay at a level if that's what they want. Of course their salary tends to stay pretty constant too in that case, you'll basically just get COL raises.
I was basically doing that in tech: working for food and a place to be. It was like living in a VM. After 2020 and 14 months of isolation, I'm retiring. Need to find a real place.
I find that our childhood joys imprint and become adult obsessions for some. If you grow up in one place, like this man, you may crave to stay there. If you are taken to new places frequently, you condition to want that. Happiest moments on the beach? You crave beaches. Favorite foods for a kid become comfort foods in adults. I grew up in the delta of the Danube, rich with fruit trees and amazing tomatoes. Ended up settling in a place that has great orchards within driving distance as well (every other climate felt really uncomfortable). Be careful how you condition your kids :)
Many people over 40 in Romania still crave the communist era sweets. I crave my grandpa's smoked meets and his wine, and my grandma's home baked bread (they lived in the countryside as peasants).
There's just something inherently satisfying about farming, growing your own food and taking care of land. Obviously it's hard work and difficult if you actually need to make a decent living out of it, but as a hobby it has been most refreshing for someone who spends his days staring at display.
I hope eventually I can raise my family in a farm-environment while working remotely, and get some extra income on top of that by growing stuff in small scale.
I know of people who do not eat veggies an have lived into their 70s before they have a stroke. The are also people who have strokes or other problems before 70 even if they eat their veggies. I fully expect that my high stress and sedentary life of a software developer will kill me long before 70. Such are the trade offs of a well paying profession.
You must be young if you think that dying in your 60's is a long, well lived life. The retirement age is around 65 (depending on where you live and work).
Surely you want some time to live life without the obligations of work? Otherwise what is it all for?
As I have gotten older and felt the speed-up in the passage of time, I realize a few years one way or the other won't matter. You'll reach the end of your time before you know it either way. The key is to be satisified with your life now, not waiting for some "later" that will be over and done with far too quickly.
I can definitely feel when I break out of the routine once in a while. A weekend feels like an entire week. Now with corona and winter I can barely recall what I’ve done for the last 6 months, if not just work.
>I fully expect that my high stress and sedentary life of a software developer will kill me long before 70.
You may need to negotiate better terms for yourself if you work in the most financially rewarding field of work in the world, maybe the history of the world, and you can't find the time to exercise or de stress.
Vegetables lowers the chance of stroke. They are not supposed to completely prevent it. There are many more factors that go into whether you get stroke. But, vegetable intake makes yours blood pressure go down somewhat and make you less likely to have stroke.
Yeah, onions count but I guess I was thinking a variety of veggies. When I eat some onion I don’t feel the sense of hey i think it would be awesome to eat a whole onion every day but everyone has different preferences and I try not to judge people for their tastes.
So I guess I was thinking more like a variety of veggies that presumably as a farmer he could grow if he enjoyed veggies. This guy had a clear idea of what he liked and went with it.
That was a publicity campaign by Facebook. It never would have grown organically from the open source community because it solves a problem only a handful of companies on the planet have - to offload processing power to the client.
Many of us including myself are unable to fathom living a life like this, but I imagine this man will die in peace with a flock of sheep to his name, listening to the cuckoos.
And he will be just as happy (if not happier) as any of us reading this article.
Here (in the UK at least) you can buy little jars of paste, often made from some kind of meat or seafood. It seems the intended use case is to spread it on bread. I personally have never tried it nor plan to but see for yourself via James May: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVdodVA3qTk
Liverpaste is popular in Scandinavia. It's great on dark rye pumpernickel. It's really quite tasty especially topped with some sliced cucumber and fried onions.
True true but we also have things similar to these pastes but they come in tubes and often have mayonnaise. Don't you think that's kind of the same idea?
No, I wouldn't touch them with a bargepole. But I do remember my grandparents eating such things in the early 1960s. And British cuisine (?) has a long (centuries) history of potted meats and shrimps, which I guess these are trying to emulate. A bit like the French and pate.
Paste is basically pate, long life, in little jars, with the exception of (confusingly) "sandwich spread" which many would say would be a paste but it's more like chopped pickle salad.
It definitely isn't a term for 'spread'. It specifically refers to meat or fish paste sandwiches. The paste comes in little tins. Meat is most common, but when I was a kid I loved crab paste.
I'm surprised there's this many comments and none of them are wondering the same things as me: what does he do with that onion? Is it eaten raw like an apple? Roasted?
"A lot of people, locals and birdwatchers, come here wanting to hear the cuckoo, but they don’t stop long enough; sometimes they don’t even leave their cars. This makes me feel so sad that I actually cry a bit; it pains me that others don’t get to enjoy it."
Probably the most inspiring two sentences I've read in years. There's good in the world.
At the same time you basically never have holidays, unless you have family who can look after the farm for a week. Or you say farm chickens, then it's not hard to arrange a few weeks between raising a batch.
I usually have the same dinner or close variants 6-days a week, then after few months when I'm tired of this menu I slowly update parts of it and it then evolves to something new. I don't force myself in doing it, it's often just about the simplicity of knowing that a given meal has the right balance of calories by knowing it works (i.e. maintaining the same weight) from one day to the next.
I do the exact same thing. Usually parts are rotated by things which come in season or on sale. After a day's work I enjoy spacing out doing something predictable.
This guy better brace himself for internet fame, he's got a full page dating profile on The Guardian. He might never leave Wales but I bet people come to him now.
I did the same thing when I was an amateur weightlifter. Granted, I only did it for about 2 years, but the level of peace it brought was real, especially since it made it way easier to keep track of calorie and macronutrient intake, which is important in weightlifting.
A lot of his other food isn't mentioned. The weight around his neck shows his exercise has definitely slowed down. Lack of exercise is a factor for stroke. That is a long term trend for him. He's definitely slowed down over the years and likely hasn't adjusted his diet. I'd guess he's consuming more bread/sugar than that regular supper implies. Likely some long term dietary deficiencies as well.
At 72(?), though, he's still doing better than plenty of others. Full of flaws and imperfections like everyone else but he's doing his thing and apparently enjoying it, so good for him.
I spent a time period living by myself in the South, and I didn't have the same supper every night, but certainly followed the same algorithm: Buy whatever veggies look nice that week, some meat, and tortillas or rice. My lunch was similarly algorithmic: Sandwich and a piece of fruit. Breakfast: Oatmeal.
Having family members who get sick of things changes that. There are certain of my favorites that are now off limits because I made them too many times in a row. Those things have to wait until they're all out of town for some reason. ;-)
This is not that hard to do and can happen naturally without overthinking it. I used to do a variation of this when I was single. I used to eat the eat the same breakfast (blended milkshakes with fruits/green veggies) and the same dinner (salmon/slice of bread with tomato and walnuts).
The key was
a) Eat to live instead of living to eat
b) Being too lazy to commit more than 5-10 minutes for food preparation.
c) Being single where I could own my decisions and "weirdness".
Besides baking as the other comment said, you can also caramelise onions on a frying pan with a tiny bit of oil, they're quite nice that way.
If you like stronger flavours, you can add your favourite salad dressing to a chopped or sliced raw onion (I usually add extra virgin olive oil, red wine vinegar and oregano).
> I hear London is a place best avoided. I think living in a city would be terrible – people living on top of one another in great tower blocks. I could never do it.
He should visit - most people in London don't live in tower blocks, and there's lots of nature around.
There are wild deer in Richmond Park, and Hampstead Heath is almost indistinguishable from any other forest (and quite close to the very center of London).
Coming from the "actual" country side, Richmond Park and Hampstead Heath feel like parody of nature for me. Don't get me wrong I like to go cycling and see the deers in Richmond but I've never had a feeling of being really in the nature. Too many people, too many cars around. Hampstead Heath is bigger I've been a couple of time only, but I remember how poor the soil was at places because of how many people walk around.
It seems a lot of this comes down to personality differences, particularly with regard to novelty or sensation seeking. There's no right or wrong, but it's interesting that both groups don't really understand the other.
For me personally, I have a very high inclination for novelty, even if that novelty comes with the risk of a bad experience. I just can't imagine doing, seeing, eating, working on, or talking about the same things my whole life. Heck, I work in tech but keep floating the idea of opening a restaurant to my wife (which promptly gets shot down).
For other people in my family, they know what they like, and that's that. Why fix what's not broken? I can't relate to that viewpoint one bit, but I can respect it.
Edit: Actually, now that I think about it some more, my desire for novelty might depend on the topic. I rotate between about three colors of T-shirts and wear the same brand of jeans every day and have no desire to branch out beyond this. Maybe openness is not a personality trait that applies universally to everything.
My girlfriend and I are at opposite ends of this spectrum in many respects. I seek novelty in most aspects of life. I often choose novelty over guaranteed enjoyment. My girlfriend, on the other hand, is afraid of novelty. When we eat out, if we have been to the restaurant before I can order her food without asking 100% of the time. It will be what she had last time.
My desire for novelty can be problematic. I find it difficult to maintain long term sexual relationships. I'm so bored of having the same sex in the same positions over and over again. But I'm also too introverted to be happy with polygamous or short term relationships, not too mention how expensive that lifestyle is.
Like you, though, I don't seek novelty in all aspects of life. I too wear the same few t-shirts and same pair of jeans every day. Maybe there is just so little room for novelty here that it doesn't matter? What difference does it really make to me if I wear a pink t-shirt instead of green? My girlfriend, of course, buys new clothes almost every week.
I also don't change things for the sake of it. My desire for novelty doesn't override if it ain't broke don't fix it. When I cook something I've cooked many times before, I will reproduce the method exactly and produce consistent results. My girlfriend will slightly change things every single time, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. My dad cooks like this too. I think he actually does seek novelty in the way he cooks something. If I cook a dish and it's delicious it will be just as delicious next time. If he cooks and it's delicious, next time he'll add a completely new ingredient to it, for better or worse.
Glad it works for him, sounds terribly boring to eat the same supper every day, and be so religious and stubborn about it, too. Imagine living your entire life and not having enjoyed Indian food, but only had the same meal every day, when you have a choice...
Being content with what you have is great, but arbitrarily avoiding new experiences, even those at small cost (e.g. trying an Indian lentils recipe) is probably the biggest regret maximiser I can think of, for me personally.
All the other stuff about enjoying nature, his surroundings etc, is great of course. But I don't see how it's mutually exclusive with some of the other things (like trying different foods worldwide nature + worldwide culture has to offer) that feel more like a stubborn pride to be able to say 'look how down to earth I am, compared with you fancy city folk'.
My partner was horrified to learn that I ate the same breakfast pretty much every morning for something like five or six years when I was a teenager. I always had cereal with milk. If I was extra hungry, I would have a second helping. Very rarely, I would try a different cereal brand, but I would always gravitate back to the same one.
The funny thing is that at the time, I thought nothing of it! It was just a part of my morning routine, not a sign of poverty or an unusual personality. I still don't think it's unusual at all, many people eat the same breakfast every day.
Yet, this horrifies her. She cooks a different breakfast every morning and refuses to eat leftovers from yesterday. I never had a problem eating something my Mom cooked on the weekend for three or four days in a row. Schnitzel is delicious for breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
I'm 35 and pretty much have the same cereal for breakfast every week day. It's not even a wholesome cereal. Sometimes I'll mix it up and have toast.
People have very different ideas of what meals should be.
While we have similar ideas about breakfast, my girlfriend makes large ish but quick cooked meals for lunch, whereas for me lunch is always a light meal like a sandwich and a cup of tea. Dinner is the main event for me, a reward for a day's work and a way to unwind, whereas to her it's just to tide you over until bedtime. Living together reveals these things.
I'm a foodie, and still, I eat cereal with milk, for the straightforward reason that I just don't feel like cooking or doing any extra effort at 7 AM.
Of course, if I'm at a hotel, I storm the buffet and try all kinds of things. Surely my breakfasts would be much more creative if I had a cook and a butler.
I've "rediscovered" cereal with milk after a long time and it became my favourite "default" breakfast - fast to prepare, nutritious, healthy (if you choose the right cereal) and easy to diversify.
I highly recommend a YouTube channel called Cereal Time TV [1] where you can find reviews of old and new cereals - I don't even know how I found this channel but after watching dozens of videos about old cereals I thought to myself "man, I want some!" so I bought a pack of cereals that I remembered from my childhood and that's how it started, I now eat cereal with milk almost everyday :-)
Reminds me a lot of my uncle that had sort of taken over my grand-parent's farm and never really moved away from there.
I can definitely empathise with his mindset, especially after many years in the city. Though being from a culinary-centered culture, the one size fits all meal is really depressing to think about, especially that he probably can get some really good produce from people in his network.
Being a farmer is really something different and here in Western Europe (I'm going to assume there's not that much difference between UK and FR farming cultures), it's really a labour of love.
I've been lucky to have some exposure to this world through my family and people often have the wrong perception of it and quite often looked down upon by people that should know better.
I wonder about the two strokes. Him and his sister. Probably genetic or is it a result of the same diet they both share? Is eating an egg a day really bad for you. Science has gone back and forth on this. He would get plenty of exercise what could have caused the strokes?
Strokes can be caused by a variety of factors and are increasingly common as people age regardless of physical fitness and diet.
An injury or illness leading to bed rest can cause clots to form. Clots can just form anyways. High blood pressure. Which, again, becomes increasingly common as people age regardless of fitness level and diet.
Then again, vegetable intake lowers chance of stroke too.
The guy lives wholesome lifestyle, but that lifestyle is not that terribly healthy as people want it to be. Simple lifestyles are not always the most healthy thing you can do. His diet is limited by habit/routine, but also possibly by cost and additional effort it would take to cook more healthier. He already works a lot and healthier food woold require more effort.
Farmers typically describe their animals as happy. This doesn't jive with the depictions made by activists vegans of even non-commercial farming.
One of you is wrong. Which is it?
That aside, articles like these are more about convincing the author than anyone else in my view. That doesn't necessarily mean he's wrong. See for example Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. He repeatedly mulls over the prospect of death, with aphorisms to suggest it's nothing to be afraid of. Death was on his mind. This farmer seems to focus on conveying that he has every reason to be happy. It's no coincidence that suicide rates are highest among farmers - is this man simply built different, or is he convincing himself?
It's an inspiring article, but it left me wondering what is his exit plan. He's got nobody to pass the farm on to, and his sister is dependent upon his care. At 72 and with his medical history, he will not be able to continue much longer.
This is in the UK where there exists something of a social safety net. For example, I very much doubt he pays for his sister's carers (speaking from experience), and he will have healthcare available for himself if he needs it. So he may not feel the need to consider an exit plan.
Couple of cellphone towers on the property maybe, leasing some land to other farmers, and/or he did a bit more before his stroke and now just focuses on the sheep? All pretty plausible
Farmers in Wales are pretty canny and they have some unique advantages due to the hillyness. Leasing out land for mobile towers is one option, as someone said above, but I've also seen them group together to build small hydro power installs in their streams, or set up solar panels, and sell that power to the national grid. Sheep are pretty much all you can raise due to the geography of the place.
Wales is poor, outside the cities. You can still buy a house for £10k here (it'll be shit obviously). He'll likely get some subsidies and his pension now too, and I imagine he probably trades for some of his food. Eggs for fish, that sorta thing.
The beauty of a simple life. Away from noise, stress and all things that make one miserable. Being content with simple things in life is nothing more than a beautiful life for you and your family.
I'm surprised no one is talking about the possible connection between his diet and his several strokes. Although I love the idea of quitting my desk job, leaving the city, and running a farm, this individual sounds and looks quite unhealthy and I wouldn't be surprised if
> two pieces of fish, an onion, an egg, baked beans and biscuits
every single day is a contributing factor. I'm all about simplifying life, but think we should remember that eating a varied diet is fairly important to well-being.
It'll start with his neighbours and friends helping out, and maybe eventually he'll have to scale down and be looked after by carers himself. But there's an equal chance he'll die happy on his farm - I've seen farmers with very progressed Alzheimer's that could run their farm without any trouble, as it's something they've done literally their whole life.
I'm like this with breakfast (well maybe not -every- day) but I eat an egg/cheese/onion/spinach omelette almost every morning, sometimes the spinach is lacking if I used it in something else. It makes waking up easier for me, and I never really get tired of it. Some mornings I spice it up a little with salsa.
Beside when I travel, I have only had 3 type of breakfast for the past ~35 years. First 20 milk and cookies (a specific type from a specific brand), then honey bunches of oats with almonds for another 13 years, and the past couple of years I switched to a different brand with less added sugars.
> If I could go anywhere, it would be to the Great Wall of China. The amount of work that went into building it is unbelievable. I’ve been a stonemason; I understand the ingenuity involved.
There are some rich people here on HN. Can somebody pay him a week there?
I know I'd do it if I had 7 digits on my bank account.
Sounds like a much simpler life that for a lot of the readers here is doable.
I purchased 3.3 acres of land this year to begin the process of simplifying. I'm leaving the software world over the next couple years to have a life of homesteading.
Farming isn't any easier than software I'm afraid. However I live in the countryside and work remotely and I love it here. Just down the road from the chap in the article.
On much of Reddit this thread would have been dominated by snarky comments about his food choices and lack of variety. I was positively lifted by the HN response/vibe on this.
Just take a mental note while reading this article, those people that moved out, probably had to move out because there was no place/work for them there.
He is a wealthy man that owns a farm. Same story about someone who would be a bartender in a local pub, where he was just an employee serving local drunks, would be much sadder one.
He's got 70 sheep mate. In Romania (IIRC) they'll unironically gift you farms like this because there's nobody else there to maintain them and you basically get some land for free. As the man himself points out it's a very simple life that involves a lot of hard work during all seasons, he's not privileged. Most people move out because life even in the service industry is easier.
His land is probably somewhat valuable compared to the local area, but West Wales is rural and the land is steep and hilly - it is really only good for raising sheep. And he's had it his whole life, so that value is meaningless to him.
However yes, you are right that many local people will have had to move away for work. Aside from Aberystwyth there's not a huge amount of work out that way. Lots of them will come down south to Cardiff and Swansea.
I’m not trying to be mean, but there is a chance this guy has some deep anxiety and self-esteem issues which means he doesn’t even think to look outside of his comfort zone. Routine is a way of not stressing yourself out with newness and the possibility you might not cope, and fail.
> I’m not trying to be mean, but there is a chance this guy has some deep anxiety and self-esteem issues which means he doesn’t even think to look outside of his comfort zone.
As a person with some anxiety and (what I have diagnosed in myself as underlying) self-esteem issues, this is something that I have been thinking about.
People around me tend to think that "oh, throwawayhermit is just a bit of hermit and likes to be on their own", which is partially true and my introvertedness needs time on its own. But on the other hand, a big part of my closing off from others is anxiety and self-esteem issues, which I presume are not that easy to spot at first when a person "seems confident and well off".
So, that has got me thinking, how many of the people closing themselves off from others are doing it because they are happy that way and how many are hiding from issues/fears (regardless whether they realize it themselves or not)?
> Routine is a way of not stressing yourself out with newness and the possibility you might not cope, and fail.
I feel that there is a place for routines. They can give you space to focus on something that actually matters, teach you mental discipline and give you some kind inner peace from not constantly searching for new and shiny things.
There's no evidence of anxiety or self-esteem issues in the article at all though, so what are you basing this on? It specifically says he's happy, which people with those problems generally aren't. As an extremely cynical person, I have to say I think you're being way too cynical.
If he is happy and content, why would he want to leave his comfort zone? Why does that denote some mental flaw? You could just as easily say that those who feel the need to challenge themselves outside of their comfort zone suffer from some deep-seeded inadequacy that they are trying to fulfill.
Does it strike anyone else as oddly ironic that he is so sad that people don't go to the effort to hear the cuckoos, and yet he basically doesn't want to experience... well, pretty much everything.
It's great he's happy with the life he has chosen. But I personally find people who are even slightly like that (i.e. closed off to new experiences) depressing to be around. My parents are kind of like that, and have been as long as I can remember. But to each their own.
I think he's sad because they _do_ go to the effort of hearing the cuckoos, but they're rushing. They're not fully present, and so they don't get the full experience.
He, by contrast, is very present in the things he does. That he doesn't choose to do many things is a different topic.
No, I don't think you can. But most people get enjoyment out of life without doing anything deeply. Sometimes you can look down your nose at them (eg people who get their science "facts" from Scientific American or /r/ifuckinglovescience and love to quote amazing bullshit at you). But sometimes it makes sense to take a shallow interest in things because, as you say, you can't go deep in everything, but that shouldn't stop you from singing badly, failing at some side project, gardening badly and doing high-effort low-quality DIY at the weekend.
The contrast reminds me of a fad among 20-something's back in the 90s, spending a year "roughing it" on a grand tour of some third-world country. They'd come back with a tattoo, weighing 60kg, tanned and full of derision for "...your first world addiction to consumerism, man", and laughing at people who take their jobs seriously. Telling stories of dysentry, dangerous situations, psychedelics, corrupt police, bribing border guards, and living on pennies a day. "You get to see the real <wherever>". But while they certainly got closer to 'grit', they never really blended in with the locals for the same reason that they couldn't appreciate poverty. It was because they knew they had an exit strategy. They were fake, like Carla in Fight Club, going to terminal cancer support groups. Like the rich girl in Pulp's song, Common People, hanging out in a rough neighborhood, renting a flat above a shop, getting a shitty job and pretending she never went to school. But she never gets it right because she knows she can call her Daddy any time and he'll rescue her. And true enough, every man-Jack of those 20-something's had a car and a career within months of their return, and they're rightfully embarrassed about the enlightened crap they gave everyone when they first got back. Maybe a 2 week holiday to see the scenery is just as good after all?
I believe there is probably a balance to be struck.
I am from (near) Rome, and am familiar with the phenomenon of people visiting the city over a weekend, or even worse, on a day trip.
That literally means you cannot experience the city, you can at most put some checkmarks on the 3 most popular sights. In a month you may spend a weekend in Paris, Madrid, Rome and London, but I believe it would be better to spend a few more days in only one of those. This is still different from, say, spending six months in a given city (which is what some people do to really experience it!).
To each their own, some people do prefer broad & shallow to restricted & deep, but I think these days we do tend to over-emphasize the shallow side.
Yeah, it's crazy. When I went to visit my cousins in Paris, I stayed for 19 days, and it was awesome. A friend said that 3 days was enough, and it would be nice to travel to a few other places too. Maybe enough for a quick glance at some tourist spots, but not to actually experience the city. I could have stayed for a whole month, or two, and would still be getting new experiences.
As you mention, there's a good balance, and maybe 20 days could have been spent in 2 cities. But a weekend is very shallow
I think it is. There are people who experience time differently due to disabilities, who simply are like this[1], but I it's also possible when trying to make an effort: Meditation is meant to give this ability: Also the Japanese "ichigo ichie" living in the moment is based on the concept, and some people I know not just "practice" this but are incapable of multitasking - because they chose not to.
Something can be gained by not stripping away boredom, but instead "savouring" the moment to see where it leads (essential for creativity).
Then there is the idea of taking a cold shower as first thing in the morning to tell your subconscious to better not be to comfortable, and prepare "properly" for your day ahead (without "expectation" of comfort). Eating the same supper is a similar spirit and strips away the comfort and thinking that "one has an entitlement to something".
> "Slowness" — in German, "Langsamkeit" — had, before Nadolny's novel been primarily associated with mental retardation. In Nadolny's world, however, this seeming disability is in fact a powerful asset; the possessor of "slowness" can afford to wait, because he must wait. As a result, he attains victories unimaginable to the more "hurried" multitude. Nadolny's choice of a hero is apt in this regard; certainly the historical Sir John Franklin was never known for his mental alacrity, but beyond that, his "slowness" is more of a post-modern conceit. In a manner reminiscent of Roland Barthes' "autobiography" of Jules Michelet, Nadolny's Franklin is completely consistent with the known facts, all impeccably researched. Yet interwoven with the truth there is an entirely fictitious construction of Franklin as "slow," ranging from an imaginary ball-game in which the hapless John always arrives several seconds after the ball has departed to a fictitious re-creation of Franklin's efforts, at the height of Admiral Horatio Nelson's naval battles, to find and shoot a sniper from atop the masts of an enemy warship. By waiting, without panic, and carefully noting the angle at which the sniper's shots have been discharged, Franklin pinpoints his location and takes him down with a single shot.
I got the sense he laments others lack of depth in what he has experienced, "They only stayed a moment and didn't see everything!". The irony is that others wonder about his lack of breadth of experience. "He hasn't explored enough and didn't see everything!"
I think you slightly misread the article. His sadness was for those people who wanted to hear the cuckoos (for example, birdwatchers) but could not because they were in a hurry, or did not have the patience or the time to listen.
That's not what he's saying. He's saying that those who want to experience things...don't. People drive from far away probably just to stay there for a few seconds and call it a day, while sitting in their car. Probably take a selfie and say they were there to experience the cuckoos...but really didn't. That's why he's sad for them.
That’s not what he saying either. He’s saying that cuckoos don’t care if you watch them, because the sounds they make aren’t for those people who pass by. The cuckoos are for cuckoos and he is a sad one indeed.
I think that most rich-country urbanites and suburbanites are spoiled for choice in things to experiences. It wasn't that long ago that most people hadn't traveled much further than the next town over, let alone another state or country. Logistics has gotten to the point where its practical to have most everything everywhere that lots of people are.
Life before plenty was hard and boring by our standards. You can still see this in poorer, remote areas -- my experience is mainly with the American midwest and random foreign travel. There simply isn't much to do (or eat, or see), unless you're close to a big city.
Is his way better? Nah, it's just what he prefers. But he's smarter than them, because, he doesn't try stuff he's not committed to. He just keeps doing what he loves. But they try things, but don't commit to it, and so they miss out. His ROI is higher. He invests in 5 things, and they all pay off. The cuckoo "fly overs" make a bet on the cuckoo, but don't persist enough to see it pay off. We can definitely learn something from this guy, in our "ephemeral age".
As Dang says about attention on HN: people give it their all, only the moderators do that, and that's what keeps the place from descending into madness. But everyone else can only give a part of their attention to HN. Fair enough, but you need some people giving it their all if you want HN to be good.
Caveat is, he's probably great at narrating his solitary life and justifying his seclusion. We don't hear from him about all the stuff that isn't great. It's possible there's lots of that stuff, too :) ;p xx
I mean, everybody ever is gonna miss out on the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of beauty this world has to offer. Even if you were immortal and could teleport you'd miss out on most of the beauty.
I think maybe by trying to experience many things, those people end up having experienced nothing deeply? And his advice would be to pick one or two of those things and really dig in.
I find them a bit less depressing than people frantically trying to experience "new" things as an effort to quiet the constant agitation of their souls.
I literally moved to China to try and find whatever I was missing at the time; a decade, four other countries, and countless adrenaline-seeking excursions later, some part of me is still searching.
It may not apply to everyone, or even a majority of people who go out of their way for something new, but I know exactly what the parent comment means.
Well, firstly, there was a misunderstanding in the parent comment, but ignoring that, I understand you are saying that you derive enjoyment from new experiences, which you have actively sought out for at least a decade, and don't enjoy the company of people who are not like that.
But do you mean to say that you wouldn't enjoy meeting an old Welsh farmer who is not like anyone else you know? From what you've described about your interests and activities, I imagine you might enjoy the experience, at least for a while.
From what you've said, you wouldn't want to be like him, but that's a different thing to the experience of meeting him, isn't it?
No, it's nothing like that. I was referring to this...
> people frantically trying to experience "new" things as an effort to quiet the constant agitation of their souls
...and pointing out that there are different kinds of, I guess, opportunistic openness. One is the normal, well-adjusted kind where you say sure, let's try some Chinese food or hey, I've never been to Wales, should we go to Cardiff this weekend? It's the Michael Palin version.
The other, darker one - the one I had and which the grandparent was referring to - is the kind where you're constantly looking for the next thing or place or whatever that will make you feel content with life. It's not about experience for experience's sake, it's about trying to find something, anything, that will soothe your soul. This is the Anthony Bourdain version.
It's not that I wouldn't want to go to Wales or meet the farmer; I would, of course. The difference is in the motivation and the satisfaction I would derive from it.
Calling it the Anthony Bourdain version resonates so well with me. He was someone I admired and pity at the same time. Looking back you can see the deep sorrow in his documentaries.
No, I don't think that about trying new foods. But I do think that trying new foods is on a more trivial level of openness to new experiences. When you've done it enough, it's all the same experience.
I don't mean the food all tastes the same, but rather, you've adapted to the idea of trying unfamiliar foods. At this point, every new food you try has a risk-reward where you could feel somewhere between extreme disgust or delight on either end. And people who are more open to trying new foods just weigh the reward higher than the risk. Conversely, less open people will weigh the risk higher, or they just might not care. Maybe they think, "Food doesn't move me that much. It doesn't make me nearly as happy as my sheep." (Of course, maybe they don't know because they've never tried sesame chicken.)
I think that people who achieve great things definitely have some kind of unrest inside them. "quiet the constant agitation of their souls" is a clear description of that. I like to call it "feeding the little monster inside you"
I'm not making a judgement call to what is better, being at peace where you are, or never be at peace and always wanting more.
It reminds me of when some interviewer asked Elon Musk: "How can people be more like you?", to which he answered "You don't want to be me... I'm not sure I want to be me".
My theory is that you have 2 things inside you: the individual and the DNA. The individual can be at peace, but it will be at the expense of the survival of the DNA. The DNA pushes you to be the best and find the best partner to reproduce. The DNA makes sure you are always at unrest and want to achieve more, get better, etc.
I think this story illustrates it well, because he is a peace even though he never married, and so will not give his DNA setup to a next generation.
You find noble, humble and virtuous souls depressing to be around?
Look at this austere man, so capable. Entirely singular. Wholly content. How can you come to find even a hint of the vaguest ennui. Truly I envy the man, I aspire to be so contented, unfortunately I've decades of conditioning to unravel to attain such a saintly outlook. Imagine how simple and humane the world would be if it was populated with people like this. The man is wise.
Would it be fair to assume you find such people "depressing" because they're resistant to your superficial intellectual rotundity? Because they don't play your games?
I find people who close themselves off to new experiences depressing to be around. Often it comes with age. I'm 57, but have a 7 year old daughter. I love how excited she gets to see new things and I enjoy them with her. My parents, meanwhile, are what you might call "world weary." Depressing, and boring.
Being "noble, humble, and virtuous", if that is what you call the author of the article, is an orthogonal property. I'm not really sure he is particularly notable in those respects though. He's not harming anyone, but he's not out there making the world better for others to any great degree either. He's just living his life.
On the contrary, I'm deadly sincere. You'd do well to read up on the Roman views on agriculture. It was, perhaps, the most respected occupation. In any case, this constant goading of science, the excision of religion, the exorcising of divinity of the soul and the blatant machinations which analytical minds use to crush the working class into their finely cut time pieces are abominable. All for the sake of... What? There's nobody in this world that could convince me there is a meaningful direction which all of this unremittant locomotion trends; other than ruin that is. And that's despite a deep desire to find precisely that.
We're sacrificing humanity for the vain and meagre rewards of the flesh and conditioned from birth to tow the line. This man seems to have entirely insulated himself from that, he renders his services seemingly for the sake of it. Lives, very apparently, with great modesty. He does this despite the social pressures to do otherwise, it is quite probable that he sacrificed romance to avoid the capricious intermingling of someone else, since few are contented without effecting their next step on the hedonic treadmill, their sisyphian burden.
They also use different tools and methods size is relative.
My favourite anecdote for visiting Welsh friends is to tell them about Anna Creek Station, a cattle farm in South Australia that is slightly larger than Wales.
I have no doubt Welsh land can support many more sheep per acre, but to make minimum wage (£17k) off 71 sheep you need to make £240 profit per sheep per year.
At £100 per fat lamb, you still haven't made minimum wage even if all 71 have twins and you have zero costs. Maybe they sell some wool, too.
In reality you have bills, sheep die, and you need to keep some lambs for breeding stock
Absolutely, and I suspect there are other things to consider as well, he certainly doesn't need minimum wage if he owns the land and lives on a diet that - based on my last trip to a Tesco in the north of England - would require significantly less than minimum wage to subsist on.
I'm not saying it's a life I want, but unlike an Australian or American farmer he doesn't need to drive for several hours to get to the nearest hospital/major shopping centre/his mate's farm. His sister's carers are paid for presumably by the UK version of the NDIS which ours was modeled on with all the good bits taken out because they were too expensive. Unlike an American farmer he won't spend the rest of his life paying for the ambulance and hospital stay from his stroke because it was covered by the public system.
It sounds to me like he is contributing to society as best he can, and as someone who has hiked through farms in the UK, and gazed at them from the train for hours on end, I think he has done more to improve the general condition of England than many other people can claim.
I can kind of see the advantage of having one outfit. Eliminates all decisions about what to wear. But if I did that, I would not have a closet full. Maybe a weeks' worth, to get from washday to washday.
I did that with pants in high school, wearing 5 identical pairs of black dockers that fit my after-school job dress code. Worked fine until another kid pulled me aside and asked if I needed help getting another pair of pants.
So I’m the only person who’s reading this as a parody? I’m trying not to dismiss it, I understand this might be a real person’s honest thoughts and experiences. But it has a cadence, repetition, provocation and smart innocence that could be an Onion article if penned by Douglas Adams.
I recognize a lot of myself and several of my family members in the letter, but I think they’d take it the same way.
Here's an interesting thought experiment – would you (and everyone else here) have the same reaction to this article if it was written by a North Korean farmer who was perfectly happy with life being in the exact same situation as this Welsh one?
Would he still be "enlightened" and "content" or brainwashed, oppressed and a victim of propaganda?
You mean if there was a strong implication that there wasn't a genuine choice, but an adaptation to hardship brought on by human rights abuses and an authoritarian government? Call me hypocritical, but no. I don't think I'd have the same reaction.
You can’t just boil an entire life down to a single metric like being happy/content. Many things (like freedom) may even decrease “happiness” yet also have deeper value.
Well, my reaction to this one is suspicion that it sounds a little too perfect and either the farmer is idealizing his life or the journalist has taken editorial liberties.. so, maybe?
I don't know that a journalist was involved in this. An editor may have been but this just appears to be a letter-to-the-editor or commentary submission
Journalists love to craft articles around some narrative theme.
Edit: I’m talking about consistency within the article and a “focus on the subject” stance. If the author wants to present the farmers happiness, that’s what they’re going to frame the whole piece on.
Not editorialized, but likely transcribed from one or more interviews and the interviewee and interviewer edit lightly.
There are people who couldn't write something like that given weeks but get them to start talking and they do a marvelous job. Drawing that out of people is one of the things that marks good interviewers.
> two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end. For lunch I have a pear, an orange and four sandwiches with paste. But I allow myself a bit more variety; I’ll sometimes have soup if it’s cold.
This would be a great meal for a North Korean farmer. If I read this same article by a North Korean farmer, it would either involve a different food listed, or they'd probably be lying about being a North Korean farmer.
> A UN assessment found North Koreans had been surviving on just 300g (10.5 oz) of food a day so far this year.
I remember traveling around some islands with a new acquaintance on his own journey. I remember him saying, "It's amazing and romantic. Most of the folks here have never left. All they need is right here."
Fast forward a day.
"Americans are idiots because they never leave America. Most of them don't even have a passport."
I would believe a North Korean farmer even more, that he was content with this life. A North Korean farmer who has eaten the same dinner every day for the last ten years is doing pretty well - it would mean they have avoided many of the North Korean famines and prison camps.
People have a range of “happiness” - in other words they can look at X and say “I think I could be happy doing that” and hold that the person truly is happy.
But if it is outside their range they will adamantly refuse to believe the person could truly be happy.
Given my own take[1], I was confused as you explained your thought experiment because I think I’d trust its sincerity more from a North Korean farmer.
Edit to clarify: not because I’m dismissing the oppressive dictatorship but because I think it’s more likely a rando person farming in North Korea likely has less exposure to a larger world that might make them happy, and less motivation to justify their self-isolation with denial.
I've seen people have the exact opposite reaction to this same article. ("If this was a foreigner from a poor country, would you still think he was boring and sad?") So much of our lives are just the stories we choose to tell about them.
It seems weirder to me that someone in a country like the UK would do this then someone in a country with less availability of foods but I don't see that as an issue of enlightenment or brainwashing.
I have been listening to an audio book, Man’s Search for Meaning, written by Viktor E. Frankl a neurologist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor.
Like many books written of experiences involving extreme suffering and trauma it’s extremely powerful and I tend to have to stop just to contemplate and dwell on certain passages or just sentences. I like your “thought experiment” as it’s not unlike how I go about reflecting on these kinds of books.
Frankl talks about being on a train being moved from one camp to another, and upon seeing there were no chimneys at this new camp there was a silent celebration among the prisoners. For whatever inhumane reason, that night the newly arrived prisoners were made to stand (I believe naked) throughout the whole night in the freezing cold. Yet they were all still greatful not to be at Auschwitz or another camp with chimneys. There is a separate passage where he describes the types of prisoners, the last he describes are those who had lost all meaning, spirit and would walk up to and grab the electric fence.
I can’t tell you how much heart it gives me to think of the human spirit in these conditions that can’t be broken. It’s very similar to some of the slave narratives I read, and on occasion coming across passages with descriptions of slaves on a plantation celebrating the opportunity to sing and dance together around a fire at night. I have shared with others I wish if push came to shove I’d have that type of spirit, to your point about brainwashing, I’ve received similar responses that I am romanticizing it and even that my mental impressions reflect racism, but The reality is I could have pointed to many other counter examples from my readings like the prisoners that lost meaning and grabbed the fence, but for better or worse that doesn’t lift my spirits and it’s not the examples I tend to pass on.
I often ask myself what I think I would do in a camp or on a plantation, what actions would make me the most proud and if I would have the courage and spirit to make them, but I never pretend to know what I would actually do and I’d never once judged the actions of any of them...even the most deplorable acts, like the prisoners that worked on behalf of the guards for the slightest of comforts. Even more challenging is trying to put myself in the shoes of some young German or Southerner born into and inheriting the evils of these situations, it’s a lot easier to say what I hope I would do, but just the same I have to admit no one knows what they would do, after all how many people do you really encounter that are willing to go against the grain rather than fall in line much less when it means death?
North Korea is a brutal dictatorship. What are you trying to imply with the question? That brutal dictatorships are not so bad an we've been lied to? Do you live or have you ever spent some time in one? Cause I do and I think people defending dictatorships deserve a swift kick in the nuts.
This guy doesn't really farm. If he did, he'd be in much better shape. I had family who were serious farmers (many chores everyday) and they were lean/skinny like runners even in old age. This guy overeats and doesn't get much activity.
As someone from a family of farmers, yes, people can be fat and work on farms. I know people who are in the fields everyday and with beer bellies like you wouldn't believe.
This man is 72. The fact he's working outside well past the age of retirement for most people shows he's not in completely terrible shape.
I dunno about that, I grew up in a Welsh farming town and there were plenty of farmers that looked a bit rotund but had astounding strength behind them.
What a disgusting comment, as if you've surveyed the weight of all farmers and are some kind of authority that approves who is and isn't a farmer. Really, individuals differ and there are millions of fat farmers, you just haven't met them yet.
Please make your substantive points thoughtfully and omit swipes and name-calling. Even if you don't feel you owe another commenter better, you owe this community better if you're participating here. Also, you've got a good point and you owe it better too.
I think this is an incredibly poor take, and done with incredibly poor taste – pun not intended.
Experience is, broadly speaking, able to be considered as a spectrum with both vast breadth, and depth. I believe this holds true not only for external experiences, in this instance cuisine, but also for internal qualia and more compounded experiences.
It is, to my understanding, widely accepted that people are capable of living lives that can be vastly alien to what we might consider ‘consensus reality,’ or everyday life, more loosely. Look towards monks, yogis, and more briefly, psychonauts as examples of living beings with, presumably, internal lives vastly different to our own. Yet in those people we hear accounts of deep personal satisfaction, even euphoria, from no external source. Contentness, at a minimum, doesn’t demand a minimum breadth of experience, or any experience at all, as a prerequisite.
I’d go so far as to argue that the small-mindedness you’ve presumed of this man, may be an acute reflection of your own base assumptions about others.
It pays to be mindful that others lead lives as rich, meaningful, and subjective as your own, even if the set of experiences in question may vary vastly.
I see no good reason to not take this man on his word when he says he truly is satisfied with his life, particularly when he’s at a point where he can reflect back on it – something not afforded to those of us still living what we can only hope to be the bulk of our lives.
Everything I’ve written prior notwithstanding, let me ask: do you actively go out of your way to try every new experience possible to you, costs be damned? If you answer no, then you accept that there’s a radius you choose to set, within which you’re satisfied knowing that the experiences you’ve had thus far, and their costs, are in equilibrium, and that you’re content with not exceeding that boundary. Who are you to say that his ‘smaller’ radius of experience, ignoring the incredible amount of contemplative time afforded to this man, and what that may imply for his internal life experiences, is any less of a valid choice than yours is? Surely you’d then accept you very likely fall within a subset of a larger radius of possible experiences, of which there are people willing to explore past the boundaries you’ve set for yourself.
Ignorance may in fact be bliss, but I wouldn’t be so quick to assume this man is the ignorant party here.
Who knows when his first stroke was? His sister's history of stroke as well could indicate that there is something more going on. He could have had multiple microinfarcts over the years leading to a mild form of vascular dementia with cognitive impairment or something.
He probably isn't holding the secrets of the universe in his noggin, but cut him some slack. I'd have tea with him. Sounds like a chill guy.
That’s a good point aside from “trying a new dish” and “trying out a lifestyle for a decade” being entirely unrelated aspirations even if they have eating in common.
Not much curiosity when it comes to food, but it sounds like he's interested in nature.
And to say that he is rejecting the other foods is a bit of a stretch, I mean, for example, are you rejecting a career as a sheep farmer? You might love it.
Sounds like the kind of person who doesn't have wifi. My dad died at about his age, never had the slightest interest in the internet, and he was a career scientist and did a lot of computer programming (mostly FORTRAN). He main interest outside of work was gardening.
To me this sounds a lot like that he's built himself a solid foundation in evading critical thinking about himself, possibly to avoid a more serious psychological harm which he thinks he may face if he looks at the bigger picture.
He compares himself to the animals: "They never ask for anything different for supper".
> "People might think I’m not experiencing new things, but I think the secret to a good life is to enjoy your work. I could never stay indoors and watch TV. I hear London is a place best avoided. I think living in a city would be terrible"
As a bachelor, how will he know what it is like to look into the eyes of a loved with whom you form a new family? Without watching TV, how will he know that movies like "Up" (Pixar 2009) or series like "Breaking Bad" are well worth spending their time, without incurring a dramatic time penalty in your life? Take the TV out to the porch, if staying inside is such a pain. How can he be sure that a visit to the British Museum in London isn't worth the effort, or time, or whatever he thinks that speaks against it? Will he find laughing people in the cafes of the city?
All of this feels like a "too afraid to discover" that he disguises it as a "secret to a good life". Not a happy life, but a good life. His sheeps make him happy. Like his spouse or kids could make him happy, or a trip to the city or watching 40 minutes of TV once a week. Or a delicious steak. Or riding a bike on a trail, if he weren't so old by now.
I wonder if the Welsh radio station has told him about the current dilemmas which AI is confronting us with, or if he thought about where and under which circumstances all this gear he owns to exercise his role of a farmer has been developed and produced and if his lifestyle, if applied to everyone, would have made it possible for this gear to exist.
It's OK if he decides to eat the same supper every day, if he prefers not to live with people, but to me this feels more like an elaborate thinking system designed to avoid something which would cause him pain, which doesn't cause pain to others.
Sure there is a lot to criticize about our modern life, and many people aren't happy living in the city and with their day to day jobs, or with their family situation, but he has built himself a very tall wall in order to be shielded from him being possibly affected by these problems and calls it a good life. Not much of a difference to a suburban man who tolerates his job, hates his kids, but has the biggest amount of fun when he jumps into his glider on the weekends, watches his favorite TV series at the end of the day and loves to go jogging every day for an hour. Or have a beer with a friend.
At least his sheep are among themselves, maybe some of them enjoy spending their time together and are glad to get anything to eat at all. But how would he know, if he's just happy pretending to be a fellow sheep and calls it a day.
Then again, there are comments like the one from telesilla.
I'm a little sad that it's removed. Votes on HN are a fickle beast, a popularity contest. IMO, it's usually worth saying what you really think even if it might not be received too well. Especially if it's a unique and genuine perspective, rather than spam or mindless snark. IMO, if you've never been downvoted to -4, you've probably never said anything really interesting either.
Where do you live where you _have_ been leaving your home for non-essential reasons? I recognize that different countries have had differing levels of effect from COVID, but I'm not aware of any that hasn't had at least _some_ impact.
Midwest US. Restaurants and "non essential" businesses were closed here for a little while but everything reopened (with some capacity limitations) by about June 2020. Supermarkets, department stores such as Target, Walmart, never closed.
I've been working from home but going shopping, going to the gym, etc. as normal since the reopening last June. I never was much for eating at restaurants but they have been open also.
Other places in the US were far more locked down. I'm glad I don't live there.
The US. While many businesses (especially restaurants) shuttered in 2020, most retail businesses reopened rather quickly though usually with a limited capacity (Home Depot, a massive store, was permitting something crazy small like 200 people in at a time here last spring and early summer).
Hiking trails and state parks in CO opened up by late spring or summer 2020. Restaurants and bars were really the places most impacted from what I saw of last year in the US as they went a much longer stretch without allowing indoor dining.
Many schools in the US also went remote. I think indoor dining/bars and schools are the things that were significantly restricted more than a few weeks in the US.
(work from home isn't really comparable to those I think; I worked from home for months and liked it, and I think for people that don't like it, it still isn't as impactful as the restrictions for restaurants and schools)
True. I have a blind spot around the schools situation since I don't have kids of my own. I tend to forget the full extent of it as it didn't impact me or my immediate friends much (school closures) as I have few friends with school aged kids anymore (they're all infant to toddler or college aged or older).
Restaurants, bars, and schools were the things most consistently closed. Around here, they opened up for this current (now finishing) school year but had frequent closures based on COVID cases amongst the students/staff with an option to stay home the whole time if desired.
I live in the US too. I wasn't asking "where wasn't shut-down?", I was asking "where was it _safe and responsible_ to leave your home for non-essential reasons?". Just because a facility has opened, does not magically make it safe to attend.
I live in a small city in Vietnam. There have been about four weeks of lockdown in the past year, besides that my life has been pretty much normal, dinner parties, festivals, hiking, island hopping. I've traveled a lot around Vietnam over the past year, there's so much to see here.
The only thing that's really changed is that there are no foreign tourists, but the local tourists seem to be making up for it.
Im in the southeastern United States, we never really totally shut down. We had a few weeks but then yea it pretty much ramped back up to near normal-ish levels.
I live in Charleston, South Carolina. Moved here in September because LA was so locked down. I go out pretty much anywhere I want here all the time, and nothing is locked down whatsoever. Could not have been happier to move to somewhere where they don't chain up the swings and let nobody into the parks except the homeless.
Where do you live? I live in Portland, Oregon. I haven't left the home except to go on walks around the neighborhood and to pick up groceries from the store (I order them online and they bring them out to my car) since last March. I'm seriously dreading the end of the pandemic. I love never having plans to go anywhere.
You’re (likely) seriously overreacting. I’ve lived in Portland. Live in Midwest now. I would’ve been hiking non stop in pandemic times should I be in PDX area.
“ easiest way to not die” are you super high risk? B/c you’ve already likely deceased your chance of dying by just not driving compared to Covid. But if you’re over 65 or have other major health issues then makes some semblance of sense.
Have you given any thought on how you plan on reintegrating into society, and the negative health effects of this type of isolation? I’m curious what the balance is between covid risk and isolation risk.
Social isolation is, on a population level, associated with poor health outcomes. The data shows this most strongly in the elderly, but it’s true at all ages.
Of course, certain individuals may enjoy and thrive in isolated environments.
I was saying that there are people who live long lives in relative isolation. People in rural parts of the US and places like Alaska.
Frankly, I believe those types of studies rreally about happiness with ones social life, not about ones social life relative to others. But that's just my take.
Are there studies that actually show that? It seem to me that lower life expectancy might be true in some cases but not all. I think it's mostly tied to ones enjoyment of being alone (more relative than absolute). Sure some people would not fare well, bit I fo believe other can be truly happy and do fair well. I know a guy in his 70s that lives pretty remotely in Alaska (and have you ever read one man's wilderness). I'm not saying it's for everyone. I am saying that it's essentially stereotyping to say it not for anyone.
>I'm not saying it's for everyone. I am saying that it's essentially stereotyping to say it not for anyone.
Well, someone can smoke for 60 years, from 20 year old onwards, and never get cancer either. Actually, tons do just that. But lung cancer from smoking is not "stereotyping", it's a causual mechanism and a statistical reality.
It's not like that you mechanically and deterministically die or your health becomes predictably worse at the individual level.
Not to mention there's also the psychological health and the developmental effect.
It would be interesting to hear if this desire for isolation goes away as you start spending more time around people (which, if I’m reading your comment correctly, it seems you will do). Wish you all the best, either way.
Are there outside places to hike outside? That might be a healthy and safe. Frankly it doesn’t sound healthy to not leave home but you aren’t the only one who’s been shut in for a year. Millions of people.
Dilution is generally the point when a specific threshold must be breached to succumb to infection. You can always where a mask, like a serious gas mask. People wi think you're weird, but fuck them.
I respect people who've tried something and decided it's not for them. But to never even try a different kind of food? I suspect it's less that he's found what he likes and more that he's scared he'd find out he actually liked something else better, and has wasted those 10 years.
The Welsh live a different way of life. This guy's attitude is far from unique. A bunch of people live in the same town, with the same job their great great great grandparents worked, that rarely travel more than 10 miles away.
Don't knock it, though, there's something to be said about this level of extreme stability. It simplifies a lot of life's worries.
It's something I never understood until I moved to Wales, and now I do understand, and I think it's one of the most admirable characteristics of the people here.
You can go out in the valleys right now and ask someone, ~40 years after the mines were shut, whether they'd want the mines back. And a significant proportion would say yes without pausing.
I went to university with a guy who turned around to me one day and said "I never want to leave the Rhondda". Not sure what he does with his design degree up that way but I'm sure he's happy.
There's a great tie to family and friends and where you live, here, which has somewhat died out in the south of England. I hope it survives even as more travel to experience things elsewhere. Of course the south of Wales does have one advantage that was taken from elsewhere, and that's that it's possible to live cheaply in the valleys and commute into the cities by train for work, so it's possible to do both here. I feel like England lost this somewhat with the Beeching report ripping half the rural railways out.
I don't think that many people want the mines back tbh. Easy to get and simple jobs maybe, but I don't know anyone who'd want the mines back. Anecdata I know. Wife's family is a mining family and I've lived and worked in South Wales for a while now.
Yeah I think it's less the mines themselves and more having guaranteed employment, and the camaraderie of working together in such a way. There aren't many professions that employ entire towns. You are right though, in that the attitude has changed - I think those who were alive at the time of the mine closures likely see it differently from those who have never known it. In that aspect it has changed since I first moved here, as that generation who grew up with the mines open has aged or passed away.
That sounds about right. My wifes side is a mining family and several of the men died young, not from accidents, but from lung issues so that potentially colours it a bit. On the tech side of things, I do see a lot of people who want 'better' jobs and there's often a lot of frustration in start-up folks I know that the Senydd just want call center or manufacturing jobs.
Yeah it's a bit of a shame that there's not more investment into tech startups here. Bristol seems to attract much more of that scene. Swansea seems to have more than Cardiff, possibly because it's slightly further from Bristol. I think there's pretty good support for starting your own small business here, but there's a bit of a gap after that which I imagine restricts the opportunities somewhat.
I'm Welsh myself, I grew up in a farming village, I'm quite aware. I think knocking it is absolutely warranted. I've got some respect for those who tried a different way of life and decided this was what they preferred, but not for those who picked stasis without even examining the alternatives.
Have you considered that people have different tastes? Personally, I hate eating; if I could take a pill to replace all my nutrition needs, I would in a heartbeat, even if it costs more than my current dietary expenses.
I think it's in reference to the rationalizations made in the article. It's perfectly sufficient to have preferences. But the author makes irrational projections about what change might be like to justify his choice.
I think "stick with what you know" can be a sound strategy if you are loss-averse and generally content.
> Have you considered that people have different tastes?
Yes. If he'd tried eating a variety of foods and hated it, I'd say fair enough. But how can you possibly know something like that without having tried it? To just dismiss so much of human experience without even considering it is honestly tragic.
As Proust put it in his somewhat overused but in this case relevant quote "The real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes". Understanding the human experience is first and foremost learning introspection, not tasting thousands of different fruits. Everything you can learn about the human experience is probably somewhere in that little valley where the man lives already.
Fiber seems to be the main thing he's missing (typical for a British diet). Other than that, he's eating a pretty well balanced meal. Between the fish, bread, and fruit, you end up with most nutrients you need.
My grandfather would take me along and we'd go to the neighbour to fetch eggs. He had a plastic bucket that he put them in with some old newspapers scraps in the bottom. I heard that before the war they didn't even need money. He'd simply bring a bucket of milk, and he'd get a bucket of eggs in return. But it was of course a lot simpler to bring money. It was far cheaper than in the store too.
My grandfather knew what all the birds were singing. Every bit, plus their behaviour. He'd especially heed the magpie, because it's a smarter bird. If it warbled this way, it meant that the weather would stay warm. If they warbled in another way, it meant that it might become rainy. He said that the birds knew, because their lives depended on it.
Another more commonly known sign is dependent on where the magpie makes its nest. If it it's high in the tree, then it will most likely be a warm and sunny summer. But if it is tucked way down in the tree, the summer will be cold and wet. It makes sense. There's more protection from the elements further under the leaves, but it's also colder there. If I were a magpie, I'd want to make a warm and nice nest for the summer, but all that could be ruined if I didn't heed the weather.
One day, the grouse was seen perching atop the family house. When I told this to my grandmother, she went silent at first, and then she told me that it means someone will die in the family. This was of course terrifying news to me. But it also turned out to become true, because my grandfather also died that year. May he rest in peace.