There are things that I can’t understand, like how’s it possible that I was fooled. My understanding was that nowadays all these “electronic” things were recorded somewhere, so it’s possible to know that the money I sent someone has indeed arrived, and who that someone is. Back in the day this wasn’t a guarantee, you know - no, it was all kept on paper, and that’s not a reliable solution since the records can burn or get lost or just disappear. We’ve overcome that thank God, it’s all in a database in the cloud. Still don’t understand what any of those words mean in this context, but I was assured by my son-in-law that works in tech that it’s basically impossible to lose any record - there are even regulations and audits and redundancies and protocols to prevent that to happen.

Since 2014, whenever I would meet someone new, I have been able to give a pretty unique answer to the question “so, what do you do?”. Being a farmer is part of my identity, and the fact that I was able to not only continue with what my grandfather built, but also do it in such a way that was according to my values (I have always tried to put Nature first) is still something that fills me with joy. But all good things come to an end, and this is no exception. This is an attempt to put down my meditations on all these years of having what’s, perhaps, the most idealized job in the world.

We’ve all more or less seen this happening before. It was 9.30pm in a suburban train on a Tuesday night, coming from the centre of the big city into some place that people that work in the big city go to sleep in. I have done that same trip, in the same context, a few dozen times in my life. What really shocked me this time around is how silent the train was.

This is a difficult text to write. Not because there’s a lack of resources about it - on the contrary, too much was already written about it. It’s also not because this is a particularly complex subject, even though some finer details might entail the knowledge of advanced mathematics (thankfully, we won’t get to that). The difficulty here stems from the fact that the well has been poisoned. And the well we’re talking about is language itself.

If it’s your first time here, welcome! If it’s not, welcome back! Assilvestrar is a Portuguese word that roughly means “making it wild again”. This has also been, for the past two years and change, a project I’ve been building, with the aim of creating of an online community that would roughly share the same values that I do. During this time, there have been some posts written (if you know Portuguese, you can have a look here, but I’ve also developed an infrastructure that would facilitate the community-building aspect.