I’m a software developer. In my 20s, I worked for a small investment bank in London. Those days are long gone. Now, I live in a van and share custody of my children. I mostly park up in rural Norfolk. It’s cosy. We have a woodburning stove, and I work with my hands a few days a week to make money.
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I burned out in the corporate world. I was drinking too much, and I didn’t really like the work or its ethos. I realised that there are three things that are important to me: to work for people that I like, to make something that I believe in, and to do a job where the process of the work itself is something I enjoy.
I’ve explored completely different ways of living since leaving financial services. I gave up drinking in my 30s and started riding my motorbike into the woods. I found a peace there that’s unlike anything in a city.
I lived in a community in Somerset, which was where I really began to understand a different way of being. We were felling trees with axes and handsaws, and I learned to use a pole lathe to turn wood into bowls. It was a real, physical experience. I was in the woods alone in the sun, turning a bowl I was making from sycamore, and I could see the sunlight shining through the wood before it hardened. As I spun the bowl, I could smell the sugars burning. It was a sublime and revelatory moment in which I felt connected to everything.
When you work in a corporate environment in a city, you don’t understand what you’re missing. You don’t know what life can be like. In the community, we would scythe our grass crop by moonlight. This wasn’t unusual in the long past – when you scythe before dawn, the grass is dew-covered and easier to cut. Once the sun comes up, time is limited. We were working in the light of a full moon, a whole group of us, in gentle back and forth motion up and down the field. A team. When it was done, we celebrated with homemade cider and went to bed.
For a while I thought I’d stay in the corporate world and save money to buy my own land. But life is short. I can’t live like that now that I understand the depth of the sacrifice.
I’ve met other people who’ve taken similar paths. When software engineers drop out, they do it in style. You’ll find them up mountains, napping stones and wearing rabbit skins. It’s lateral thinking.
Ted Jones is a pseudonym
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