alt Hacker NewsI just spent the last week with the large number of digital nomads. The story that they sell me is that they’ve set up their life so that they can work from anywhere. Mostly this is possible because their jobs involve the manipulation of bits and the aligning of minds. Starlink, a camper van, and a webcam is the minimal setup. I don’t know if it’s just my small town mind, pure stubbornness, or something else entirely, but it gives me the fucking heebie-jeebies. Modern day carnies coming through town to make a quick buck an leave nothing behind.
Over the last number of years I’ve transitioned from coding database backends to physical labor. Part of this has to do with an addiction problem involving Adderall and other uppers and my choice to live clean, live in the world, and live in community with other people. But it also just feels right. I like to think that I can also work wherever, because I know how to pave a driveway. I know how to lay a foundation. I know how to frame a house. I’m learning about how to build septic. One day I’d like to build a house as a gift to my family. Instead of removing my physical self from my job so I can do it anywhere, I’ve taught myself skills that will be useful to my neighbors wherever I go.
My partner has chosen to work a very important but very “deep“ job in the local government bureaucracy. The only way his job works at all is that so many people know his face. He’s been a pillar of his community for 10 years and has proven over and over again to be trustworthy and likable around town. In pretty much every way he espouses the exact opposite philosophy of the digital nomad. His roots are so deep then if we moved it might kill him entirely (hyperbole).
I don’t especially know where I’m going with this, other than to say that there are ways forward that are not total alienation. There are ways to live where you are not competing with the machine. There is still a physical meatspace world full of people with hopes and dreams that cannot be captured digitally and cannot be replaced robotically. A world built on trust and care and mutual respect for one another. If you have a job in which you feel you are just “producing text”, I feel for you deeply. They’re coming for us all eventually, and thy started with the writers/programmers. What a strange time to be alive
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Starlink, a camper van, a webcam and no kids.
There's a livestream every Tues about house/landscape remodeling I've followed for years to fix my own property https://m.youtube.com/@PerfectGuyLife/streams and they talk about how any good contractor will never run out of work because it's all based on trust and local networking. Eventually these guys go into lumber yard sales because they've built up a huge network of trust that every other builder knows them and lumber sales commissions are enormous. Most yards are all locally owned family businesses too no faceless national corps.