Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Honestly, the fact that engineering isn't public facing was a big plus! But it's the tech part. I'm a zoology/maths major that switched to engineering for a bit. I thought it'd be great! I love combat robotics, and I tinker with gameboys ffs.
This resonates. I have boundless wonder for the amazing things in the universe that we get to witness (using said tech) from the molecular level up. I don't know why this stops at human-created things, as I do like tech too - as a layman.
It just feels like human development and expansion is a zero-sum game with nature, and my heart is with the biodiversity we are destroying. I was so excited for circuits class too.
May I ask what you ended up doing? Did you become disillusioned with the field?
I think I got lured in when techbros had some credibility, and I hoped to learn enough to participate in creating technological solutions to remediate ecological destruction - renewable energy, e-mobility, ... I was an adult student who had half of her licenciatura in EE done (like bachelors I think?), then Covid hit and it was the perfect excuse to give up university and spend some time considering the doubts that had been building up.
All the hard science just didn't add up. Somewhere in my thermodynamics semester it just started to dawn on me that a lot of the so called technological solutions were just greenwashing bullshit while we were still celebrating endless growth, endless innovation and endless consumerist bliss. The big picture was still missing, and any ethical or philosophical training was entirely missing from the curriculum, so you have all these clever youngsters being trained to earn good money in tech and never spend a single thought about the larger implications of their activities.
I've simplified my life. I work as a technical translator - like I did before studying EE. My brain wouldn't do complicated stuff for a long while, and as this capacity grows back slowly I try to put it to good use in small scall permaculture - I tinker with ram pumps and electric fence. I've took my drone out the other day to see if it could be used for searching lost animals in the mountains (happens often where I live), it's too much of a fire risk this time of the year though. Solar cooking and heating is another field where I've done some stuff and want to do more.
I also try to figure out where using tech is useless, especially on the farm. Transporting stuff for example can be reduced to a minimum. Often the laziest method wins. We don't bring the food to the animals but the animals to the food. We compost things in place whenever we can. We use animals for land clearing, fertilizing, weeding, removing pests. A lot of this can also be applied to non-farm life. I plan to document as much as I can, so I guess I'm in research, popular research.