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Sweeney

Hello Everyone,

My name is Sean Sweeney. Friends call me Sweeney...or Sween.I found factory e farm online about a year ago. I found it intriguing. I was 23 at the time and hadn't found a full time "real" job yet out of college. By "real" I mean one that was deemed worthy of someone with a Bachelor's degree. Being the entirely unskilled Liberal Arts Bachelor that I am...I landed in the Corporate Cubicle World best depicted by the movie "Office Space". A year in that environment has made me understand the importance of this project even more intensely. I am in the process of signing up to become a True Friend right now. I desperately wish I had the technical or trade skills necessary to be a part of this project...but i'll support it in whatever fashion I can. I truly see this as a dedicated plan of action toward freedom for those who feel alienated by and those who have been left behind by the modern work condition. To understand why I have returned to Open Source Ecology after a year, with much passion in my heart, read the passage below which I wrote to a friend 3 months ago while at work.....

" I am at work, bored to death, feeling particularly isolated, and need to vent. Excuse the rambling...but this should fit in nicely with the lifestyle theme here.

I am typing from a cubicle. My cubicle is in a monolithic office building. I am pale and in much worse health than I was when I started this job 6 months ago. I am 24 years old. I am in quiet despair already and it is frightening. I never thought I would be here but I am. I spend most of my days staring at a monitor, trying fruitlessly to satisfy my frantic curiousity by reading blogs and essays on intellectual points that interest me. My (meaningless) work suffers as a result. I wake up at 6:00AM and get home at 6:00PM. I have developed a horrible habit of never doing anything productive and have lost any sense of romance that I had 6 months ago. I have no burning desire or reason to pursue "career advancement" in this environment. I simply do not care for this charade and it is not in my nature to do so.

How did I get here? 4.5 years of college and $45,000 worth of student loans have played a large part in leading me to this lifestyle of indentured servitude. I am compelled to perform the mindless acts that I do by monetary enslavement that I submitted myself to. Isn't it strange that modern society pushes lower middle class teenagers to take on the black albatross of college debt without even teaching them personal finance in the public education system? Not at all if you've examined history and the various ways the masses are coerced into cooperation with an entity foreign to themselves and their self selected groups. Unfortunately most of us aren't scholarly and philosophically inclined at the age of 17. The bright side of all this is that I now have a piece of paper declaring me a Bachelor of Communication Studies. Yes...I am now a low level Baron of Rhetoric and Persuasion. A poor one at that. In hindsight I would have majored in a hard science...but the thought process of 19 year old Sweeney was much different than that of the 24 year old.

I am struggling with what my next move should be but I am sure that it will take more courage than I have ever mustered to break free from this Corporate hell hole and the scant financial safety it provides. The economic uncertainty of our times and the ashes of the super consumer culture that my generation will likely be left to sift through does not make things any easier.

I know I will be fine but I am definitely wandering through forest right now with a rickety compass at best.."

gregor

Oh, there are still plenty of things that can be done directly by liberal arts majors on this project, that much is obvious. The wiki is a hopeless mess and there are a lot of other issues like that for instance.

mjn

@gregor
Waiting for you to return and help us straighten out the wiki. :) I for one miss your contributions.

- Mark

Howdy, Stranger!

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