Pining Careers
As a Krishna bhakta, Radha and her pining carry a deep import of meaning for me. What I am now discovering is how pining could affect our relationship with careers.
I didn’t become an agritech entrepreneur because I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I became an agritech entrepreneur because I wanted to be a farmer. This was the closest I could get to being near farmers and farming.
When you are an agritech entrepreneur pining to be a farmer, it changes your relationship with agriculture and farming.
Every time I meet farmers for field visits, it is more than work.
Before I started my journey as an agritech analyst, I used to work in a technology consulting firm. My desk job involved helping clients select the right social collaboration platforms. It nourished the sahadeva in me. Making good slide decks, building frameworks, and that sort of thing.
There was another secret dream I cherished - I wanted to become an organic farmer. I spent my weekends visiting organic farms and observing wise farmers at work. My dream was a grand one. I wanted to quit my full-time job, run away from the city, grow food for my family, homeschool my child, and run a small, independent consulting business that provided enough income to continue my land-living experiments.
There was just one problem.
None of the members of my family were ready to sign up for any of this.
Thanks to my yoga practice, it took me several years to discover the underlying motivational forces fueling my dreams.
Much to my horror, I painfully discovered that my dream was my refuge to run away from the world.
It was my oasis to run away from big BAD cities, to maintain an arms-length distance from extractive capitalist systems, and to find comfort in virgin, innocent villages while climate change threatened to rip big cities apart. I slowly changed the orientation of my navigation system.
I decided to live in a city and work in agritech so that I could continue to visit farms, meet farmers, and hopefully figure out what it takes to design food and agriculture systems that didn't treat urban and rural as separate compartments in our heads
When I visit farmers as a part of my work, there is a part of me that observes how would it be, if I were the one who was being observed.
Funnily enough, life has now come full circle.
I don't want to swap places with the farmers I meet and I am happier doing what I do in the four-way traffic lane intersection of food, agriculture, culture and technology, with traffic chaos becoming crazier thanks to a phenomenon called climate change.
Of course, in the work I do, there are a lot of open questions about food and agriculture and I have a lifetime to figure things out. Why do we have these separate compartments called RURAL and URBAN? Why should agriculture be the ritualistic goat that has to be killed to achieve development? What is development btw? Who is developing whom?
Careers can be finite games and infinite games. Infinite games carry a deep sense of pining and perhaps the chain of causality is such that because there is pining, it becomes an infinite game.
Have you examined pining in context with careers?