Hi guys, Thanks for some of your positive responses. I made my decision not because I was unhappy doing what I was doing. I truly loved what I was doing. I did experience some of the health complaints you guys are talking about though. I made my decision because: We are presently losing 200 species a day on this planet. That rate is as high as during the greatest species die offs in the earth's natural history, during disasters, like eruptions of super-volcanoes and meteor impacts. Ecological diversity is of course what keeps us alive. Climate change is going to be absolutely disastrous. The scientific community is in the vast majority in thinking that it is man made, that it is very real and that it is very dangerous. Not just for our children, but at this point, for ourselves. Petro-collapse or peak oil, which is not on too many people's radar right now, but it will be very soon. Over 30 towns in England have become 'Transition Towns' in order to build resilience against both petrocollapse and cimate change. Agriculture is entirely dependent on petrochemicals. 10 calories of petroleum are now being used to produce 1 calorie of food, compared with the 1 to 1 ratio of the 1930s. If you don't know what peak oil is you are very dangerously in the dark. Population overshoot. There are currently 6 billion people on the planet and growing exponentially. You guys should all be able to guess what happens when you have a finite resource base but an exponential growth rate of both economies and populations. The carrying capacity of the earth w/o constant petrolium input is estimated at between 1 and 3 billion depending on who you ask. I closed my eyes to all these facts for years hoping they would go away and that somebody would 'be on it', but they didn't and they aren't. Just a single one of those 4 forces is massive and all of them combined are at this point probably insurmountable. The longer we wait the harder will be the crash. But... I found permaculture which was designed by scientists (ecologists and systems theorists), and believe it has great promise and that it could completely revolutionize agriculture. Not only that but it is tremendously energy efficient and increases biodiversity and soil health. i.e. it is the complete opposite of current agricultural practices. I think it would be very attractive to software people, especially open source types, as it is all about design and small scale local interactions. It even uses design patterns. When I saw that there was hope, I had a sort of spiritual awakening, a crumbling of the walls of denial, and a grieving for the planet we are about to destroy, that's why I'm leaving, and that is why I am planning on talking to as many people as I can. There will be more and more of us 'dropping out' in the near future as the forces described above start to become plainly obvious in not so nice ways. So you see, it is not about back pain, or if my lamp is bad for me. I'm sorry, I know it's a downer, but it's time for people to start talking to each other about this stuff, especially smart people like yourselves. It's life or death now, but the problem is that humans, even the smartest humans do not react to threats unless they are directly in front of them in plain view. We have our own evolutionary psychology to blame for this. We need all the brains of the earth on this one. Good Luck. -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/.