I want to talk about why people who spend years building digital systems eventually start dreaming about a house in the countryside, a vegetable garden, a farm, or a small restaurant.
There is a strange thing I’ve been noticing more and more among people in IT.
First, you want to build a career. Then you want a good salary, interesting projects, remote work, a Senior position, then Lead, Architect, or Engineering Manager. And after a few years, you start dreaming about a house on the edge of a village. A few garden beds or a small cheese farm.
Some people start growing vegetables on a small plot of land. Some dream of opening a bakery or a restaurant. Some actually buy land and move out of the city.
And I think there is much more to it than simply wanting to leave the city.
After years of digital work, we start missing reality
Programmers, DevOps engineers, SREs, data engineers, analysts, and many other technical professionals spend a huge part of their lives in a world that cannot be touched.
We work with code, APIs, databases, cloud infrastructure, logs, charts, tickets, and metrics. We can spend an entire day creating something incredibly complex and then, in the evening, have this strange feeling that we didn’t actually accomplish anything important.
You wrote hundreds of lines of code, but you can’t see them as an object you can touch. You fixed production, and a few hours later, nobody is thinking about it anymore. You optimized a system, and the best result of your work is that nothing happened. The server didn’t crash. The request became faster. The infrastructure bill went down. The user simply continued using the product.
We’ve learned to consider things nobody notices to be a good result.
And that’s perfectly normal for good engineering. But sometimes people want a completely different feeling.
They want to walk outside in the evening and see that something real has grown during the day. Touch the soil. Pick a few cucumbers. Fix an old chair. Knead some dough. Make cheese. Build a table.
And then look at it all and think: I made this with my own hands, and here it is.
Not in a browser. Not in a dashboard. Not in Jira.
Here.
We’re drawn to tangible results.
In digital work, almost nothing ever truly ends.
There is the next release, the next bug, the next incident, the next version, the next framework, and the next technology. You have to keep learning something new, because what you knew yesterday is already becoming outdated. And so the cycle continues, an endless race.
Even when everything works, there is always another question. Can we make it faster? More reliable? Cheaper? More elegant? More secure? More scalable?
Now imagine a vegetable garden.
You planted the seeds. You watered them. You waited. The first sprout appeared. Then a flower. Then a small green cucumber. A few weeks later, you picked it and put it on the table. You ate it.
That’s it.
No next sprint. No urgent ticket. No production incident. The cucumber simply grew.
Maybe this is one of the most underestimated things in modern life. Sometimes we don’t want another achievement. We want the feeling that something has actually been completed.
Burnout plays a huge role. And it’s not just about working too much.
Burnout is often discussed as a consequence of overwork. But research shows that the picture is much more complicated. It involves workload, autonomy, support, a sense of fairness, psychological safety, the quality of relationships, and how well the work itself aligns with a person’s own values.
The situation in technical professions is particularly interesting because the complexity of the work almost never ends. Tools, architectures, technologies, business expectations, and now even the development process itself are changing because of AI.
According to the Engineering Leadership Report 2026 from LeadDev, based on responses from more than 600 engineering leaders, 45 percent of respondents are working more hours per week than they were a year ago. Among software engineers, 40 percent reported feeling emotionally drained at least once a week, and among engineering managers the figure rises to 49 percent.
This no longer looks like a problem affecting just a few overworked people.
When almost half of professionals regularly experience emotional exhaustion, the issue is probably not only about an individual’s ability to cope with stress.
There is another interesting detail. More than 49,000 developers from 177 countries participated in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2025. Only about a quarter of developers said they were happy at work. Among the factors they considered important for job satisfaction were autonomy and trust, competitive compensation, and the ability to solve real problems.
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That last point is particularly interesting.
Solving real problems.
Not abstract ones. Not endless technical debt. Not another layer of a complex system.
Real ones.
When KPIs take over an engineer’s everyday life
Engineering teams have long relied on a huge number of metrics. Deployment frequency, lead time, reliability, error rates, recovery time after failures, performance, infrastructure costs, and many other indicators help organizations understand how engineering is performing.
Metrics themselves are useful. The problem begins when a person starts feeling that they have to be faster, more productive, cheaper, more stable, and constantly learning something new — all at the same time.
It becomes an almost perfect pressure machine.
You have to write more.
Make fewer mistakes.
Learn new technologies.
Use AI.
Solve problems faster.
Maintain legacy code.
Keep an eye on security.
Understand the business.
And ideally do all of this while continuing to increase team productivity.
At some point, a person stops feeling like they are simply doing their job. They start feeling like they are constantly having to prove their worth.
And that’s when the idea of a few garden beds can suddenly become surprisingly appealing.
People who made the leap
From Google to the land and food
In 2022, Mantaj Sidhu, who had spent almost five years working at Google, left the company and moved back from Dublin to Punjab. There, he started working in organic farming and later became a co-founder of the farm-to-table project Gill Organics.
Back in India, he made a very literal choice. He wanted to work with the land, grow food, and solve a problem he could directly see and feel in his own life. I want to share a couple of his thoughts on the subject:
“I wanted to step into the real world, apply my skills to solve a tangible problem, and derive a sense of achievement from genuine impact rather than a title or paycheck.”
“Today, the personal income in my bank account may be leaner, but the time, energy and focus I invest belong entirely to me.”
From Meta to noodles
Alvin Tan’s story is an even starker contrast. He worked as a software engineer at Meta, but eventually left his high-paying career and started selling traditional Singaporean Hokkien Mee with his girlfriend at a small food stall.
The reason he gave sounds almost absurdly simple:
“Because software engineering is boring.”
Another form of creation
We are used to thinking that professional development should always go upward.
Junior becomes Mid-level. Mid-level becomes Senior. Then Lead. Then Manager. Then Director.
Every next level means more responsibility, more money, and more people expecting something from you.
But human life doesn’t quite work that way.
Sometimes the next stage of growth is not more complicated work, but a simpler life.
A person can spend ten years building complex systems and then want to build a greenhouse.
They can spend their entire career optimizing processes and then start baking bread.
They can manage a team of dozens of engineers and then dream about a small twenty-table restaurant.
They can spend their days working with cloud infrastructure and their evenings searching for information about how to grow strawberries.
And there is nothing illogical about that.
Quite the opposite.
We simply want to feel human again
Technology is wonderful. Creating software really is amazing. We can imagine something that didn’t exist yesterday and, in a short amount of time, make it work for thousands or millions of people.
But there is a downside to that ability.
When you live in the digital world for too long, physical reality starts to feel almost like a luxury.
The smell of soil after rain.
Warm bread.
The wooden surface of a table beneath your palm.
The sound of rain on the roof.
Apples from your own tree.
Chickens in the yard.
A vegetable garden that cannot be updated with a single prompt.
There is something deeply calming about things that cannot be sped up.
A seed doesn’t know about your deadline. Cheese won’t be ready sooner because you have a quarterly review today. A tree won’t release a new version on Monday. And maybe that’s exactly why all of this is so appealing.
A little slower, please
We created technology to get work done faster. We created automation so we wouldn’t have to repeat the same things. We created AI to accelerate intellectual work even further. We created systems that run around the clock.
And then we started living as if we were supposed to work around the clock too.
Maybe that’s why, after ten or fifteen years in IT, a person starts looking at the land with completely different eyes. Not necessarily because they are tired of technology. Not because they failed.
Simply because, at some point, it becomes important to create something that exists somewhere beyond the memory of a computer.
Something you can grow.
Something you can cook.
Something you can build.
Something you can take care of.
Something that needs time.
And something whose result you can see with your own eyes.
One of the simplest things we miss in adult life.
Sometimes we want a world where our value isn’t measured by how much work we have completed. A world where the result can be touched. A world where we don’t have to constantly improve.
We can simply be.
And feel the ground beneath our feet.
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