Introduction
The yeomen of ancient times produced food on their own land, on a Lord’s land, traded labor or goods for food, or found themselves destitute simply begging and consuming what others produced. We are all farmers of content, or simply consumers of content, or both.
Digital Content Creation as Subsistence Farming
We, like these ancients, find ourselves in an analogous situation. We plant digital content, channel the waters of traffic to this content, the followers consume, and if they are grateful enough, they repay the growing tree with the compost of money. In this context, and if you ever grew anything, you know that compost, good compost, is GOLD.
I do not want to overstate the connection between digital subsistence and real subsistence. The two forms of sustaining ourselves are inseparable in my journey, which is the great marriage of digital farming and actually raising our own food. This has become my obsession to live a simple and sustainable life.
Sustainability
Sustainability has become a chronically under-appreciated concept in my life and “career.” As many who continue to experience job layoffs in the tech industry, egg shortages in the grocery stores, and the extraordinary instability in the economy, both globally and at home, we are faced with some choices to make.
- Continue to go to work for an employer or start our own business
- Continue to depend 100% on the grocery store or grow what we can and depend on community farmers
These choices are not comprehensive, as you will see in my future posts, because so many sacrifices and decisions make or break our journey to sustainability.
What Can We Do?
Ultimately, we are being called to produce fruit, whether that is actual, digital or both. The industrial age is gone, this new digital age does not have room for a career mentality as it is forcing us to engage with our own replace-ability. We are too expensive as senior employees to keep in the corporations, and only a small number are needed to guide and coach the much cheaper inexperienced hires…so what are the too expensive and too old to do?
Join The New Peasantry…the New Digital Revolution
Join my family and I, as we discover the answer to this. We are farming our homestead, forming our children for entrepreneurship rather than a career, through homeschooling, and developing products and services to help those who join us on this path. There will be struggles, successes, losses, and failures…but I am certain joy and peace will be at the end of this. Blessings to my digital and local community who join us…and to all who are undecided.