Every programmer I know has at some point longingly expressed how “[they] want to work with [their] hands”. Some say they wish they were a carpenter, some want to be in the fields on a farm, some want to raise chickens, or milk cows. It is however inevitable that I either hear someone say it or agree with it at some point. Often, the sentiment is accompanied by a general dissatisfaction with the impact of the speaker’s work or profession. Maybe someone just got a particularly mind-numbing feature request, or spent several weeks arguing in meetings about several pixels of padding for text on a button on a support page in a single app.

One of the first examples that got me to notice this ongoing trend was back around the end of 2020, when a number of my friends shared and commented on a hackernews thread about someone who had responded to a request to add an RSS feed to a DBMS with the news that he had quit programming and switched to carpentry, in a particularly pithy manner (as an aside, I took a look at his woodworking shop while writing this up, and it is quite beautiful, you should definitely check it out).

Now the relevant part here isn’t necessarily this particular post or person (It seems to me that he really prefers and loves woodworking over software which is of course completely valid, and I honestly understand it in many ways), but the reactions to it, many of which were wistful among people I knew as well as among the comments online. Though there was certainly debate between commenters(see the thread linked earlier if curious). If I had to sum up the reactions, they fell into two camps. It was split between a group who mainly expressed admiration and a desire to be doing similar work, interspersed with condemnations leveled towards modern software practices and businesses, and a second group who mainly saw the flaws in modern development as being similar to those in any other job, or who thought that other jobs were even worse off. My real interest in writing this post is exploring why people – especially tech workers – seem to resonate so strongly with stories such as this one, where other tech workers leave behind their positions to return to work based in crafts, agriculture, or homesteading. This is particularly interesting to me given the seeming stability of this fascination regardless of the economic situation for tech workers (in 2020, the market was quite strong, though there’s been noted layoffs in recent years). In fact, here is another thread on reddit from a year ago referencing the same phenomenon. Another one here I’ve only looked through the comments of, but many discuss their desire to leave IT for farming. If you aren’t a tech worker, trust me in that you will hear people say how much they want this if you are a tech worker.

ebd2’s post was just one particularly salient example, but if you’ve been online enough over the last decade or so, you’ve probably seen plenty of these kinds of posts in the same way I have, and not just from software developers or general tech workers. Across tech, it appears that many people are tired of working in offices, with computers, with meetings or emails, and want to abandon this life and start anew in more meaningful labor. In fact, over the last few years, there’s been a noted increase(see here or here) in a style of content that portrays idyllic lifestyles in times perceived as simpler, especially in short form video content. I can’t help but propose this “cottagecore” type content as deriving from the same zeitgeist. For popular examples, take a look at Nara Smith making all sorts of odd things from scratch, or at the popular but ominous ballerina farm, which inspired significant discussion over it’s formation (discussed here among other places). If this content is so wildly popular, there’s certainly some form of backlash against modernity and a desire to turn back the clock.

After hearing this desire to return to a more hands-on type of labor once again recently, I began to ask myself why it was so common. Why does everyone who sits behind a computer long to be out in the fields or workshops? Is this specific to some subgroup in tech that I happen to cross paths with regularly, or is it a broader modern ennui? To understand why I find the topic so interesting though, you’ll probably require a bit of background on me. I currently work as a researcher in the application of machine learning to problems in healthcare and genetics, but I was raised on a farm in a very rural area of Vermont. My mother’s side of the family have been farmers in the area for generations, generally growing and selling hay, as well as sheep and some amount of dairy farming. As a child on a farm, I of course helped work on the farm – throwing hay bales, carrying water buckets, shoveling massive piles of manure. I also worked in the associated side industries, like basic construction. I appreciate what I learned from this work, and the lessons were deeply valuable ones, but at the same time I would be lying if I didn’t admit that the intensity of it was a serious motivator for me to study harder than I otherwise would have and focus on technical skills, precisely so that I wouldn’t have to do physical labor anymore. I dreamed about the idea of getting paid to sit in an air conditioned office, free of clouds of dust, never having to deal with the constant little cuts and pricks from the blades of dried grass in the air of a hayloft slicing my arms over and over. Personally, I still like gardening, and there are parts of farming I enjoy quite a lot. If I lived in an area with more space, I would likely still farm as a hobby, but having your income or food supply come from it is a very different concept in terms of stress.

Considering that, I hope it makes sense as to why I find this trend puzzling. Why would people who are so comfortable, whose job was to me a lifelong goal, want to do exactly what I worked so hard to move away from? I suspect the answer is tied up in the nature of our work in the modern world, as well as in the inspection of who has been mythologized in American history. So we’ll be taking a short departure from the modern day to look into this, if you’ll excuse the seeming change in subjec