I love my day job.
When I speak with very close friends about it, it’s when i’m down. With others, it’s usually details and economics. but the core of it that I want to bring out more– I love my job. I wonder if I can communicate why.
The thing I love most about it is that it is so expansive while being so close to the baremetal of civilization, that you can come into it from any worldview & any subject and there’s some aspect of it that is perfect for you.
From CS to physics to literature to city planning, altruistic social work to cold administration to hardnosed business, there’s an insight and process in your field that will fail spectacularly here 99/100 times and be a groundbreakingly perfect fit in that last 1/100.
No matter what you do on this earth, there’s a dependency & supply chain for it that goes all the way back to a piece of land and the hard math and soft feelings that make it tick, that make its stewards rich, stagnant or poor, happy or angry or sad, or healthy, hungry or sick.
That piece of land can be anything from a forest to a farm to a mine to a pub to an office or house– it’s an ecology: A give and take. a few thousand feedback loops. inputs, outputs. maddening, intoxicating qualia. rational & irrational behaviour driven ultimately by emotion.
You can approach ecology or agroecology by simping for nature, or with a pure hatred of it, with cold imperialism, with a pragmatic or grudging admiration or a secret agenda all of your own– the only thing that determines whether you were “right” or “wrong”, is all your results: short-term, long-term, permanent, on yourself and others.
Everyone has a model of the world– they see a place, a piece a land, a material in front of them, the beings those things relate to, and they see a canvas. an ecology of elements, politics. every model is a perfect fit in one or more contexts, and disastrous in most.
Our purpose in life is to find the exact place where our models of the world would make us and that part of the world better. Wisdom– collective and personal– is earned from living this fully, and discovering places where another approach, another person, is the better steward.
The end goal of everything I’m doing, all the pain of it, is to create a platform, a base, a pool of resources or tools that allows you to mould the world around you. I want you to feel like the world is conspiring to help you make it real and prove that it works or doesn’t, and for that particular place at that particular time you, your loved ones, and your ideas are a culmination of mutual potential.
Because it’s not really about agriculture at the end of the day but why we’re doing it in the first place. We are agentic, conscious matter– nature’s newest experiment in this part of the universe. Both “going back to our roots” & “doubling down on modernity” are simply reactions to our origins.
Where will we go from here? I believe that each one of us owning a piece of ecology is vital to that question. I think what we will eventually see is a beautiful patchwork of worldviews finding their place across the universe– each transcendent for humanity in its own way.
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