I spent two years during the pandemic working at a hand-made beeswax candle factory. I spent most of my day either running the wax filtering machine or dipping taper candles.

When I received an email saying that my job was going to be work-from-home for the forseeable future, I knew that I had to quit. At the time I had really been relying on office friendships and work for too much of my socialization and self-image, so moving to a remote environment took too much away from me.

I found the light factory work really enjoyable. It was so rewarding to make simple, high quality products wit my hands. It was also nice to have a job where I was interacting with a wider cross-section of people, as I tend to not really enjoy tech culture very much. I had forgotten what it was like to work in an environment where there is comradery among the staff and a healthy distrust of management. I feel like in tech people are always grovelling to their bosses and the C-suite, which rubs me the wrong way. A bunch of temporarily-embarrassed billionaires I guess.

I'm back in tech now, but with the perspective that I am working to achieve some mid-term monetary goals. After I pay down my mortgage considerably so I can cut down my monthly expenses, I will highly consider going back to a crafting job of some sort. Life is too short to spend it on the computer.