I have joked with co-workers about giving up programming and going into a profession that doesn't involve technology at all. Usually, the profession is farming, selected because it's so far removed from technology, and obviously - literally - fruitful.
But the reality is that I would not make a good farmer. The hours are long and bad. The money is not good. I'm actually not good at growing things, in general. So while saying "I'm giving up all this web insanity and becoming a farmer" makes the point easily, it's not really practical.
Instead, I've decided to choose a practical fallback profession: Bread making.
It's probably a little strange to say, but I do like making bread. It's something you can do with your hands that produces an obvious useful output - food. There's enough science involved to make it interesting to experiment with. Altogether, it's a significant improvement over farming.
I also have some great ideas about how to improve the production and distribution of bread in general. The type of shop I would work from would produce small loaves of bread for use in sandwiches. The story I usually tell about how this idea came to me involves the loaves of sandwich bread you get from the store.
Have you ever noticed how supermarket-bought commercial bread can sit on the counter for weeks and not get moldy? Yet if you buy fresh bread from a bakery, it'll go bad after a couple days? You have to wonder what chemicals are in that commercial bread to keep the mold away for so long, and whether that's a good thing to be eating.
I want to make small loaves, and deliver them to homes on a schedule. You'll never run out of bread that you have to buy loaves at the grocery store, and the bread will be fresh within a couple of days. You can select the type of grain you like, and get artisan-quality bread instead of pre-packaged, mass-market, big-label brands. Overall, I think people will like this idea, and I will like making it.
Anyway, that's the "plan" if all else fails. Or working as a fry cook at McDonalds. Who knows at this point.
