Quitting engineering to pursue art full-time

Any ideas on actual roles?

I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

Construction trades (e.g., any role involved in building a house).

Get a portable Laguna or Woodmizer saw mill. Optional kiln.

IMHO, Farming is the ideal switch for a techie. Technically, you are switching from the likes of Matrix to speaking to animals.

Another activity that I believe would bring more joy than 99% of jobs, if not all, is charity.

Are you speaking from experience? Personally - speaking as someone who had needed to plant, hill, water, weed, and harvest plenty of sacks of potatoes by hand as a child - I would say that coding is vastly preferable over farming; and in fact, that most things are preferable over farming.

Teacher seems to fit some of those.

I've wondered for a while now, how difficult is sustainable farming now if you incorporated all the modern technologies?

It should be ridiculously easy to self sustain with all this stuff we've built! Instead we just work just as long to produce ton of crap that does nothing for our happiness.

I'm doing it with almost none of the modern technologies. Loving it so far, but it definitely isn't for profit. Farming is a losing business these days, few make profit that isn't effectively living off of government subsidies.

I wouldn't trade it for the world at this point though. Its a very strange, and satisfying, experience to raise, butcher or harvest, and cook food that you raised on farm.

How long does it take you in a day?

I had saved up a good amount of money (before losing it all lol, where I could do this). I was thinking about buying some nice land, setting up an aquaponics farm, and just running some solar farms/generators.

No fret from me if you want to do it all by hand, but there really ought to be a middle ground between living as if it was the 1800s and working 8-10 hours day at a desk.

It very much depends on what you want to grow/raise and how you want to manage it. If your goal is to feed your family, you can pretty easily do that with a few hours of good work in a day when its all setup.

We don't do absolutely everything by hand, but we definitely avoided many of the modern approaches. We have 13 cows, 9 chickens and 20 chicks that just hatched, and a small garden (~3500 sq ft).

There's always certain jobs that take all day or multiple days, like cutting our fields (~50 acres), planting/harvesting, and butchering a pig was a huge undertaking given that we've never done anything like it before. On average, I'd say we put it 6-8 hours a day split between two people, with the occasional days of both working 8-10 hours each.

> I think the thing that kills me is the mental exhaustion of software development. Just thinking about how to solve problems all day is mentally taxing.

In my experience tolerating managers and people who don't really care about software is the much more exhausting part of software development.

Also, woodworking (furniture, cabinetry, etc.).

@redbell If you do go into a profession having to do with "charity" - what is more often referred to as non-profit (or not-for-profit) - please go in with open eyes. I don't want to dissuade you from looking into such careers; simply research things as one might be expected to do whenever looking at a new job/career. I spent 1 year at a well-known non-profit (similar tech leader job to what i've had in corporate world), and it was quite annoying from the perspective that it was the same (or worse!) bureacracy as compared to the corporate world, but with less pay. On the other hand, there were 2 medium-sized projects that i participated (and some portions led) in which have been the absolute best, most fulfilling thing i have ever done professionally in my almost 30 year career. While most of the co-workers were nice and had genuine desire to help their fellow humans, everything else about non-profit work (except for those 2 amazing projects!) was the same crap as corporate work (but again, less pay)! Again, i'm not saying you should not pursue a career in non-profit; simply do your due diligence in research. Goodness knows, we need non-profits to be more effective! Cheers!