Let's be farmers again
What should a "normal" life and career look like?
Since stepping away from “traditional employment” back in 2021 — and then stepping away from the “traditional American life” by moving to Europe in 2023 — I’ve had so many conversations about life, careers, wealth, and philosophy with friends, peers, and colleagues— old and new. People often reach out to me for advice and I’ll usually make time.
They’re usually a certain demographic, albeit a very small one in the grand scheme, of educated high-income white-collar professionals in their 30s-50s who quietly struggle with questions of what they want their lives to look like versus what their lives could look like versus what their lives “should” look like.
I think the sequence goes something like this…
I know what I want to do with my life and it’s not what I’m doing now…
…but I can’t do that because X or Y
…and I should just accept this because my life “shouldn’t” look like that anyway
The first part stems from the fact that so much white-collar “work” has become divorced from how we want our work to feel. Feeling like you’re doing good purposeful work — and feeling good physically and emotionally while doing it — is an integral part of living a good purposeful life… and I suspect most feel the same. So, when your heart is no longer in your work, your pursuit of self-actualization enters a crisis period… no matter how wonderful your life is or seems to be from the outside.
The second part highlights the financial and “sunk cost” baggage that we build up in our lives over time. Like plaque in an artery. Expensive habits, routines, and nice properties, social expectations and relationships, kids and schools, life in high cost-of-living areas near high-paying jobs or near family, student loans and other sunk investments that got us to the present moment, and other factors dubbed the so-called hedonic treadmill or lifestyle creep. There is also the worry of “what would so and so think?” So, it becomes easier and easier to give up on what we actually want because doing so involves larger and larger perceived sacrifices as time passes.
The third part is the justification. It’s what pacifies the dread of our capitulation, our betrayal of our own wishes. And it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of — or perhaps an indoctrination into — what a “proper” work ethic should be and what’s “normal” or traditional.
Let’s focus on the first part.
What could be driving this feeling or lack thereof? Putting aside the fact that we’ve become so far removed from so-called “primary economic activities” that involve getting dirty, so many workday tasks have been processed away, sped up, or set on auto-pilot with technology and software over so many decades. This leads to a significant proportion of a traditional 8-12 hour work day consisting of unproductive meetings and performative work. I’m not talking about economic productivity — that’s going straight up and to the right. Corporate earnings are up. The stock market is up. I’m talking about feeling like you’re producing something valuable. Alas, robots and software have already taken over and nobody noticed… like the frog in boiling water.
But then a feedback loop developed — accelerated by COVID — in which these same technological forces made remote work possible, which then removed the healthy distraction of social interaction and camaraderie in the workplace, which then isolated and made even more apparent how performative and unproductive a lot of work has become in many white-collar professions, which began pushing many smart ambitious people even further away from traditional white-collar careers and contributed to this lack of feeling.
It’s as if the pendulum has swung too far from the farm over the last ~100 years. Think of it — only ~2% of Americans work in agriculture today versus 50-75% back when. Is our primal rustic work ethic swinging us back? Our physical farm is gone but a metaphorical one lives in our minds and in our souls. It’s not just about getting your hands dirty or getting back to “real” purposeful work. It’s also about pursuing balance and taking back control of your day-to-day life — feeling good physically and emotionally. A yearning.
Most people likely assume farm labor 100 years ago involved back-breaking work and grueling hours that make modern corporate life look like a vacation, and therefore more justifiable. This narrative can seem to justify modern long hours and “always in/on” mentalities. But this narrative isn’t necessarily true.
Esteemed American historian and Vanderbilt professor, Paul Conkin, wrote in “A Revolution Down on the Farm” about early 20th century farm life… emphasis is mine
Almost everyone who writes about farm life stresses the hard work, even the drudgery. Farmers have helped nourish this image, often to their political benefit. But economists know better. Several farm tasks, particularly preparing the land for crops, planting, and harvesting, required long hours of work by several people, but only for short periods. Larger farms often had hired hands to meet these peak labor demands, but they had to board and pay these employees year-round. Clearly, farmers had to work more days out of the year than did city workers. Almost all farms before 1930 had horses to care for and feed twice a day. Most had milk cows, hogs, and chickens, meaning chores every day of the year. In this sense, the work was unrelenting, although it might take only a couple of hours each day. But aside from the peak periods, labor was usually redundant on farms. This meant that farmers often looked for outside work in the winter months, and southerners often rented out the labor of their slaves. Of course, farmers could find things to do on the farm in the winter or after the crops were laid by in the summer, but my observation is that they took plenty of time off for hunting and fishing or simply loafing at the country store. Also, apart from the intensity of labor during the harvest (or the threshing of wheat), I found the pace of farm work to be leisurely, with rest periods, long lunch breaks, and the slow handling of more routine tasks.
So what we have here is a sample of day-to-day economic life in America prior to the rapid surge in industrialization and automation that has since spawned an extremely specialized economy and then, of course, a ballooning white-collar corporate sector and growing administrative state. Hey the farmers can’t just loaf around all day while machines do the work... they needed to do something, right?
So there was really no such thing as a 9 to 5 work week back on the farms. I’ve read recently how the “9 to 5” concept was created by the labor unions, who represented the ex-farmers who actually did break their backs for long grueling hours during the rapid industrialization of the economy. This is to say the entire concept of consistent, daily, regimented “corporate” work could just be an anthropological flash in the pan… that began once we left the farm. Nothing “normal” or “traditional” about it at all.
Farmers and other self-employed merchants, artisans, and traders of yesteryear were diverse and multi-faceted people who balanced hard work, ambition, life, and leisure throughout the courses of their entire lives. Today, we seem to have removed this interval work and intra-year seasonality, occupational diversity, burst productivity, and leisurely downtime from modern expectations of life and career success. In their place, we’ve created multi-decadal “life seasons.” You are educated for 20 years. You devote 40+ hour weeks consistently to some “main thing” for 30-40 years, and then you pursue those leisurely intervals at the end of your life — assuming you even make it that long. Powerful institutions from modern universities to the retirement planning and asset management industries profit from this reality.
So then should we be surprised that 29% of Americans have suffered from depression at some point in their lives, and almost 18% currently have or are being treated for depression? Modern — and particularly American — social and career expectations have turned upside down. What have we done to ourselves?
But this is all changing quickly. The desire for “real” work and balance has reached a fever pitch among young and mid-career professionals — especially those with young families. Increasing numbers of smart people are crossing off the excuses, ignoring expectations, rejecting justifications, and redefining their versions of material and experiential success, and are often moving far away from their comfort zones — figurately and literally. These folks are high-agency, and I meet many of them because they naturally over-index in expat communities and obviously over-index in small business and entrepreneurial communities.
You see the evidence in rising business formation in the US.
You see it in the rise of “fractional” professional services.
You see it in the burgeoning interest in entrepreneurship through acquisition (ETA).
You have folks working in law, finance, and consulting trying to buy HVAC and plumbing businesses. You have SaaS salespeople trying to buy machine shops and industrial contract manufacturers. You have blue-blooded Americans moving to other countries to diversify their life experience… because they realize they can.
None of these people are asking permission. They are incredibly ambitious and want to work better and smarter. They want to feel like they’re creating or doing something of value, of purpose. And they want to build something that gets them back to a feeling of real work and success, as they define it, and balance those things with family, life, and leisure time… and they don’t feel ashamed or weird or lost doing so.
They’re farmers.
