Erase the Silicon Valley Mindset.

Repent now before it's too late...

I started this blog to explain why I gave up technology, my engineering job, my smartphone and became a goat farmer. Why I came to the conclusion that seeking an agrarian, neo-feudalist, traditional-existence leads to more fulfillment for a family and life in general. Why the happiness that consumers seek in their modern materialistic world, they will never find. At least I never did when I had "the Silicon Valley mind-set".

I also wanted to explain exactly why the Amish and the Mennonites have stronger community bonds and have a level of lifetime happiness & fulfillment on par with billionaires. But there I go again, by focusing on the End of this Agrarian journey I am still "putting the cart before the horse". This is my former Silicon-Valley head rearing itself again, wanting to "fail-fast & hard". Before I get into all of this this good stuff on my blog it is imperative that we go back and delve deeper into my former mindset.

For some of you, Silicon Valley is just an intangible thing. Big-Tech. Social-Media. Smart-phones & the world-wide-web. I am old enough to remember downloading Cindy Crawford GIFs on dial-up bulletin board services & alt.newsgroups. Well I am going to "lift the veil" for you right now from a former-insider point of view.

Defending Engineers, the Tradesmen of Modernity.
To my young Brothers-in-Arms that seek an agrarian future some-day, but not today, I can still defend becoming an engineer if that is the current track you are on. As long as you heed the warnings outlined hence-forth. I warn you because when the technological world is "losing their heads and blaming it on you", as they most often are, you can get too deep into that world to escape it.

They literally need your brain, and for that I am glad my brain no longer serves them, but instead serves me, my family, my farm, my traditions. Frankly, I just don't have the time to lend my brain to outside parties. I have so many books to read and musings to write and babies to have to even think of getting caught up in that world again.

Also be forewarned, being an engineer is a very cushy gig. Zero Braun, All Brain. If you have a brain in which people are willing to pay you to use it, at some point using your brain to fulfill the dreams of others gets old. It just no longer gives you the dopamine rush it used to.

The Metamorphosis of the Engineer
Let's go back to the beginning as a fresh out of college engineer. At first you lack confidence. At first you're just a lowly-engineer trying to prove yourself. Picking up what work the older engineers no longer want to do. That keeps you going! After-all, moving up the Hierarchy & Power-process is fulfilling. The dopamine rush of solving big and then bigger technical problems that few in this world understand. Like a lone mental giant scaling a mountain of technical manuals. After 5 to 10 years of this you become what I call: "The Diva-Engineer"

The Diva-Engineer
As I mentioned earlier, middle management and the C-Suite, wants and needs to harvest your brain power. Once you realize this it lends itself to a certain inner and eventually outer-pompousness. For engineers, we all know the type. The Diva-engineer. He is the the engineer who has grown tired of the old problems to be solved. He needs to be talked into using his brain.

Management has to make a really good case to the Diva-engineer, Why he should use his brain in order to fulfill what they would like him to do. They implore him that it is "ground breaking technology" they are working on this time or maybe he messed up "big-time" and created a bug in the past and the Diva needs to fix it and redeem his lost Stanford-glory! Often he agrees and gets busy flexing his brain. Other times he exclaims about how they want him to do something archaic, that is "how we used to do it" back when he was a young-engineer. "We just don't do it like that anymore!" he whines.

They almost have to beg the Diva-engineer just to work. In Silicon Valley The Diva-engineers, at least the best of them, start showing up to work at 11:00 a.m. and often cut out at 3:00 p.m. They may or may not show up at meetings when invited. They hate spending time in the lab with the "real-product", you know the finished product the consumer-plebs have to use. After-all everything works fine on the Diva-engineers development-machine. The managers beg them just to do some work. "Please can you just do some work in the few hours you are here." They try to entice him with food and snacks like a caged animal in the Zoo.

Sure they eventually try to replace the Diva-engineers, with younger engineers or an immigrant, but these noobs will take twice as long to do any highly-technical task and probably fuck it up to boot. Or you could just beg the Diva-engineer to do a little work once in a while. After-all, the Diva-engineer can do in 4 hours what the young engineers can do in 8!

I've worked with some of the biggest fucking Diva-engineers on the planet, most of which now work at Google or Apple or whatever faceless big-tech monstrosity they can now continue to be a Diva in. Life in a startup is too hard for most of these Diva-folks anyways. Too much room for failure and too much is demanded of them by the younger start-up fanatics who lack the knowledge to enact their own dreams.

Over time, with confidence, I too became one of these Diva-engineers. When I finally really started to "check-out" of Silicon Valley and moved into an RV/Camper, I pretty much only came to work two days a week. The other three days of the week I was off in some remote canyon or beach somewhere on the other side of Mount Hamilton or near Davenport, where I still had a solid Internet connection of course. They had to beg me to come to the office, but they still wanted me on e-mail so they could "talk me into working" from afar.

It was while I was off in those remote canyons that I saw Cattlemen. Old and young cowboys moving their herds. Multi-generational family-farmers, who still bonded with their family & community while working, toiling & sweating together. Meanwhile Silicon Valley begged me to come back to the Agile-Pod to discuss one more “user-story” on a "post-it note" designed by some midwit in marketing. Fuck Marketing. I didn't even know it at the time, but I too soon would ride off into the sunset in order to become the herdsman and to start my own family.

The F.I.R.E. movement.
Financial Independence Retire Early. I do believe in financial independence, Yes. But the idea of retiring early is a materialistic one. The idea that you should work for 20 years and build some passive income just so you can retire early and do what you really want in life. It is a flawed concept from start to finish. Passive income for what? So that you may live passively harvesting the brains of future peons. By the time you figure out what you want to do in retirement will you even be able to know what it is and still enjoy it?

I say that you should strive for financial independence so that you can work towards a traditional future so that you never need to retire early. Are you going to make a million dollars farming? No, not unless you want to get into dystopian industrial farming which I have grown to really loathe. Regrettably, the cities depend on these dystopian farms in order to consume Big-Macs.

Are you going to earn yourself a fulfilling quality of life by embracing Amish style farming? Sure as hell, just look at the Amish. But you will never build a future, a traditional future at least, one that allows for a family to flourish, if you are caught up in the engineering world for too long. I firmly believe this. I never wanted kids back when I was a capitalist-engineer. My relationships with women were strictly based on sex and companionship, no more. There are some quality "go-getter" women in the Uber-capitalist world, but not the kind of women that lend themselves to starting a quality traditional family. Not the type of pioneer-woman that wants to go start a farm, build fences and sweat-it-out by your side. What kind of community was I working for in modernity? Not the kind of uber-consumption community that I wanted to be part of.

My final words to a young man looking at becoming an engineer is this. Become an engineer, Make some money. But don't get lost in that world. I sure as fuck did for awhile once. I really was one of those engineers that thought I was part of some sort of intelligent technological future for society. I thought that I fit into some larger-hierarchy and power-process by being an engineer. Sadly it was a power-process that only enabled others to harvest my brain until I could escape to my land.

Use engineering and capitalism as a means to acquire material so that you can reclaim the traditions that you think you've lost because you will never find fulfillment and happiness in the material world alone.

So that's my defense of engineering boys. It is one of the few professions where you can start from nothing and make some good FU money. What you do with that FU money is where people go wrong. Not that I talk too many engineers anymore, but to them it was all about making money, investing it in stonks, crypto or the "next big startup", getting a townhouse near Cupertino, earning some passive income so they could afford another Tesla. But never escaping the material realm. Never transcending the technology. Few of them had children and if they did have children they made them grow up in some gated-community on the outskirts of an urban hell-scape outside San Jose in Los Gatos. Maybe Carmel or Santa Barbara on the weekends. That is, in my opinion, no way to raise a child to fulfillment.

Learn some trade, learn to code, trade crypto. Whatever... Just don't get lost in the material world as you seek a redemption to an Agrarian pursuit. As I have warned, if you wait too long you will never have enough because you will no longer know what deprivation is about. Thank god my former employer went bankrupt and shut down its Silicon Valley R&D group. For if it never had I probably would have become the worst possible outcome. I would have eventually become, The Cursed AirBnB Farmer.

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