How do I transition from tech to a more physical/natural career?

Unlike most people I meet at work, I didn’t set out to work in tech. I have a liberal arts bachelors and a social science masters, and after growing up in pretty severe poverty my standard of living was such that 50k was an incredible salary.

But I’m a millennial and my first jobs out of grad school were in a very boomer-heavy office, so I became the technical person. What started out as learning Excel formulas turned into programming languages, and now I actually manage a data science team at a start-up.

My standard of living hasn’t increased much despite the income changes, which means I often feel like I have more money in this job than I could possibly need, and that’s even with frequent donations to charities and gofundmes, plus vacations abroad whenever I can get time off.

My job is pretty high stress. I constantly have to learn new platforms and coding languages, and now that I’m managing people on top of that it seems 80% of every day is eaten up by meetings. Right now, it’s worth it for the salary, but I’d say at least 50% of my salary goes into savings every month.

Last year, I bought a house. My only debt is the mortgage, and my monthly minimum payment is only 20% of my current monthly income. That’s not even counting my spouse’s income, which is less than mine, but only by 20% or so. We deliberately bought a place we could still afford if one of us died, got fired, or went on permanent disability.

Anyway, the house is in a very rural area since we work remotely. That’s been nice, but it’s also made me realize how much I love being outside, working with animals or plants or just lifting and carrying stuff. My partner is the same way. We fight over who *gets* to mow the yard or weed the garden beds because we both love it so much.

I’m starting to think of leaving the tech industry completely to go to something more manual that I can do in person in this area instead of remote, but I’m not sure where to even start with that. I know if I walk into a local greenhouse tomorrow and ask for a job, they’ll just say I’m overqualified.

I know well how to transition from manual or retail labor to higher paid and more office-based jobs, but how does one go about doing the opposite? Has anyone else done this?



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