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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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!"
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“ 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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?
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 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.
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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.
Bees too. Yesterday news included the Dutch training bees to smell covid.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/oddly-enough/bees-netherla...
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.
Do you actually believe the grouse perching on house was foreshadowing??
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.
Does the Grouse know? Probably not. The grandmother would though.
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.
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.”
This is just the story of the ant and the grasshopper in reverse.
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 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.
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.
A rich man is not he who has a lot, but he who needs little.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wupToqz1e2g
The delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe
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?
He’s a 72 year old Batchelor who’s once stepped foot outside a Welsh valley. If happiness is a lobotomy then credit to us who don’t choose it.
I'm glad that you've found satisfaction in having children, but that's no reason to put someone else down.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
In fact, having children significantly increases the risk that what you leave behind is actually detremental to the world overall.
It takes a special lack of irony to write a comment like this. One of the most closed minded comments I've ever read.
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 guy at least got an article written about him, what have you done?
Why not? By definition it would leave you happy, what does it matter?
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How many children are optimum?
This valley dwellers will be there long after the ruins you created swallowed all you touch.
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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.
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.
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.
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
2 bayleaves salt and pepper suit to taste. 2qt water cook/simmer for 1-2hr
I muck around with it sometimes... thrown siracha, hot peppers, sausage in it to varying degrees of tastiness.
I generally sauté the onions, celery and fennel together then add the rest. It can all be done in one pot for convenience.
https://youtu.be/3DxS-CIJFj8
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.
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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.
I say, well done.
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.
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.
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.
Why do you say he seems deluded to you?
It’s likely mild, and he’s likely genuinely happy with his life despite.
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.
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.
"Disclaimer": migrant myself. Not necessarily my dream to go back "once retired". But my wife yearns for her motherland. And so do many.
Spoiler alert: with that attitude you'll never make a choice and always search.
And then most people spent a year at home. Strange times.
If we humans optimize by happiness, then we should have nothing but envy for a life like Wilf Davies leads.
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'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.
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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.
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.
You know that you have reached a level of understanding that if you ever did get the boulder to the top, you'd push it back down.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Exactly, wouldn’t you end up with scurvy from the lack of vitamin C?
Perhaps diet has much less to do with health compared to physical activity than Americans tend to act as if.
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.
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.
So is tending to a farm.
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.
"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)."
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.
Would it be less stressful and inconvenient if you could put the same thing in your bread every day?
Do you imagine that would make you more happy or less happy?
Dead Comment
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.