Growing Beyond the Computer

The below interview is the last piece for Ecologies of Entanglement, a collaborative series between Are.na Editorial and Dark Properties.

It can be hard to find a good job—especially one that aligns with your values, interests, financial needs, family obligations, and (perhaps most importantly) sense of wellbeing. To make it even trickier, most of us start out on a “career track” when we’re young and naive, before we really know what we want out of life. And this track, unfortunately, doesn’t always lead us to a happy place.

I first met Cortney Cassidy when we were both attempting to figure out how to build a post-art-school career. We became friends while interning at a tiny artist-run print shop in San Francisco, before the Silicon Valley-ification of the city, back when a broke twenty-something could still afford to live in a sprawling Mission District apartment. While navigating the aftermath of the late-aughts Great Recession, Cortney and I bonded as we stuffed envelopes full of $30 art prints, hoping like hell this unpaid work would somehow help us find our footing at the bottom of the creative-career ladder.

Since then, we’ve both come a long way. Cortney in particular has defined a pretty illustrious career as a designer working for some of the biggest companies in creative tech. But recently, after a personal epiphany about the negative effects and ethics of her computer-tethered job, she’s fully pivoted her career—and with it, her entire lifestyle.

Cortney has never found it easy to stomach capitalism, especially while working inside the belly of the beast. Back when I was an editor at The Creative Independent, I commissioned Cortney’s wonderful essay, A soft manifesto, about the anti-capitalist values that helped her launch Mail Blog, a delightfully poetic blog that she prints and circulates through the U.S. postal service. In that essay, she defined a set of prescient prompts to help artists derive more meaning from their work, including questions like, “What can you gain, that is not money, from the work?” and “Can you afford to rest?”

It’s clear Cortney worked hard to reposition herself within capitalist systems for a long time, but at the end of the day, she found it wasn’t possible to do so without switching vocations. So, she made a huge change, and finally excused herself from the job she wasn’t compatible with. Now, Cortney no longer works in the tech sector, or on a computer at all. Instead, she is a full-time gardener at the High Line.

In the below interview, we chat about how she’s been “growing herself” in this new role, and go over the symptoms that led her to realize she needed a lifestyle change. She also shares what being a “pro” gardener means, and offers some advice to others who might be trying to find more meaning in their work, as well as in their overall life. If you yourself are reconsidering your career, I think you’ll find Cortney’s experience quite relevant. Perhaps you could even take this conversation as a sign from the universe that, yes, another path is possible.

Willa Köerner: Is there something you’re focused on growing right now?

Cortney Cassidy: As a gardener, my job is to help things grow — but right now I’m actually focused on growing myself. Personal growth is something we do throughout our lives, and it feels intense for me right now because I just went through a huge lifestyle shift. The process has made me feel extra vulnerable. Things are a little shaky, so there is lots for me to do to feel stable again.

Willa: To jump back in time a bit, we met over a decade ago. Can you explain what your career has been from then until just prior to your pivot to gardening?

Cortney: When we were interns together, I was studying graphic design in art school. I started my career designing for a magazine before switching to tech for a better chance at paying off my student debt. My official title changed often through the years as I floated between designing, writing, and editing. I never fit into a corporate job description or the corporate tech environment. Eventually I became desperate to find ways to apply my time and mind to something more meaningful—but I never found it there, obviously.

Willa: Did you feel like you couldn’t find the right role because you didn’t like the work, because you didn’t find it meaningful, or because you disagreed with the values? What was the problem, exactly?

Cortney: I didn’t agree with the values, like calling humans “users,” and rarely taking the time to understand the real problems. I like to work and I have a strong will to follow through, and that part of me got really abused within the tech ecosystem. I was always a tool for something I didn’t believe in. I was there to help the company earn a profit and nothing more. Even when I tried to make a meaningful impact within that system, like building a design ethics framework or joining the union, it never felt radical enough because I was still participating in an industry that manipulated my well-intentioned contributions for profit. Leaving was the only way for me to successfully resist.

Willa: When and how did gardening enter the picture in all of this?

Cortney: Several winters ago, I moved into an apartment with a garden space. I didn’t know how to garden, and didn’t realize the empty yard was going to become an overgrown jungle a few months later. I was in over my head by spring and started watching gardening shows to learn what to do.

The most important discovery I made, though, was that I could go into the garden feeling unwell after a day spent on the computer, and within twenty minutes I would feel joy and peace. It was transformative.

I knew my computer lifestyle wasn’t working because I felt physically and mentally terrible. I reached out for help in all the conventional ways, like acupuncture and therapy, but it was in the garden where I discovered that I’m the only one who can truly help me. It was me who knew what I was going through, and it was me who could identify exactly what I needed to do to change my situation.

Also, I had lost two inches of height, and I’m still young enough for that to be alarming.

Oh no, from bad laptop posture?

Yes. From years of crouching over screens. From that, I knew that something was wrong with the way I used my body. On the computer, I was only using my mind. The garden helped me identify that I needed to engage my whole being: mind, body, and spirit. I needed these three pillars to hold me up, instead of trying to balance everything on one. Finding the other two pillars—body and spirit—helped me get those two inches back. I’m lucky the damage was reversible.

You essentially found gardening through a journey of healing.

Yes. In an episode of Gardeners’ World, a doctor spoke about why, in the UK, they’re trying to prescribe things like gardening before medication. I cried because I felt so validated. I was like, “I must do more of this.” That was when I decided to go pro.

So for a while, you were gardening along with your full-time job. At what point were you like, “I need to quit my tech job?”

When I had the initial epiphany, my angst dissipated immediately, even though I knew I still had to do my computer work for a while longer. The change in my body was the sign I took to mean it was a good decision. But I wanted to be strategic about it because of the pay cut I was signing up for. I am my own support system, so if I fail, I have nothing and no one to fall back on. I wanted to make sure that I made every decision with as much intention and preparation as possible.

Perhaps you felt better because you had finally identified your escape hatch.

Right. I had been seeking an escape, and I couldn’t quite find one. But then I heard the word “horticulturist.” Almost as soon as I discovered what that was, I wanted to be one.

What is a horticulturist, exactly?

A horticulturist is someone who practices the science and art of gardening. I always identified as an artist, never as someone who understood science. But I was empowered to understand science in horticulture school when I learned that there’s so much beauty and poetry in it.

Where did you take your first horticulture class?

At the New York Botanical Garden. They claim to have the world’s largest botanical library and I wanted access to all those books. It wasn’t just the skills I was looking to learn—I also wanted to engage my intellect and literary interests.

How and when did you begin putting your new skillset to use beyond your backyard garden?

I started volunteering at The High Line. I got really lucky, because I applied to volunteer at many different gardens around New York City, and only The High Line accepted me. A few months after I began volunteering, I applied for an open seasonal gardener role, got it—and then worked both my computer job and the seasonal position for the whole summer.

How did you make it work to have two full-time jobs? That sounds extremely exhausting.

It was all about timing, location, and the fact that I had a supportive manager at my computer job. My garden shift would start at 6:30AM, and end at 2:30PM. I blocked out my tech-job calendar during that time so no one could book meetings with me until after that. Luckily, the office was literally right over The High Line, so it was a quick commute.

I was imagining you gardening with your work laptop just to the side, on Zoom meetings while secretly weeding, or something. [Laughs]

I would never take my laptop into a garden. [Laughs]

But really, my two-jobs approach was strategic. Anytime you start something new, it’s going to take time to get to a point where you feel secure in it. I wanted to have the safety net of my previous job to carry me through to that point. I like to think of that first summer as a bridge.

I’d also been at the computer job for so long that I did my work on autopilot. And, in my experience, a computer job is mostly meetings and emails. When I was put on a more complex project towards the end of doing both jobs, it started to get harder to balance. That’s when I realized the computer work was holding me back from realizing my full potential as a gardener. I had reached the other side of the bridge.

Was your attachment to the tech job all financial, or was there also part of you that was a little bit torn on whether or not you’d really leave it?

It was probably 99% financial. I am almost completely certain I will never go back to it, but I am still holding on to that network, just in case things get too insecure. If I’m ever unable to support myself, I’m going to need to remember that I have these other skills I can activate.

I’m a strong believer that a job is not an identity. My slow and methodical transition was about ensuring I was secure, rather than feeling any attachment.

Did you need to downsize your apartment or do anything else to make it easier to have a smaller salary?

Absolutely. I started by projecting what my cost of living would be for the next five years, and flagged expenses I could cut to bring that number down. While I still worked at the computer job, I began phasing out anything that cost more money than it was worth. I got rid of my car, streaming services, and anything that could be supplemented by affordable alternatives—like taking the train, borrowing books and movies from the library, and cooking a lot of soup instead of eating out so much.

I turned this process into a massive spreadsheet, where when I cut out an expense, I got to turn that row green. The more green my spreadsheet became, the closer I felt to my gardening future.

It seems like you’re following through on this fantasy that a lot of people have of quitting their job, cutting out all the unnecessary stuff, and getting offline. So tell us: Once accomplished, how does it feel?

It feels overwhelmingly satisfying. It was difficult to figure out how to make such a radical career change, but I realized it was completely necessary because the way we work, who we work for, and where we work fills such a large percentage of the time we spend on this planet.

Going through this upheaval has helped me discover that it’s actually much easier to simplify your life in order to do something you love, than it is to be miserable at a job you don’t like, spending all your earnings on things to cope with that. My new life now is very local and offline, making it simpler and slower. Incidentally, living this way has less of a negative impact on our planet, too.

So, you did it—you’re a full-time gardener now. What exactly does your new job entail?

Yes. A few months ago I was promoted from a seasonal position to a year-round gardener position at The High Line. I’m now the caretaker of one section of the garden, five days a week, in any weather. I get to water plants, move dirt, prune trees, diagnose ailments, cut off spent flowers, and watch pollinators. The only tradeoff has been my early-morning schedule, which makes it harder to align my social life with most other people.

It’s such an interesting process getting to know a garden, and there’s a steep learning curve of figuring out what each plant needs. Have you already achieved a level of intimacy with your part of The High Line?

Not yet. I haven’t been through a full growing season, but I’m looking forward to watching its personality evolve into the fall and winter.

Whenever I’m gardening, I feel like I’m just reacting to what seems to need attention. But when it’s a real job, how do you structure your time? How do you keep track of everything that needs doing?

I have to both react and plan, and most importantly, adapt. I can’t control what’s happening out there. It’s nature and I’m just a participant in it, not the controller of it.

For planning, I lean into spreadsheets again. One spreadsheet contains all the different tasks I need to do, with a suggested time of year to do them. I use it to plan, but I always know that something like weather, irrigation breaks, or a fallen tree could postpone my plans. Also, things grow and wilt at alarming rates. I will leave on Friday feeling good about everything, and come back on Monday to find that something’s suddenly overgrown or dead. It’s a complex ecosystem of living creatures interacting with each other, and I have to be ready to adapt to the good and bad outcomes.

Do you ever miss your computer?

Not at all. I rarely use it anymore, and I’ve become really delayed at responding to messages. When I had a computer job, people had access to me every second of the day. Now that my attention is immersed in the real, tangible world for the majority of my day, I’m no longer digitally accessible 24/7. I do, however, talk to my friends on the phone way more—something I didn’t realize was missing from my previous life.

A lot of people struggle with being sick of the digital world, and sick of sitting at a computer all day doing work that might not feel very meaningful. Do you have any advice for someone who might feel stuck in this way?

Well, I want to acknowledge that I had the privilege to make this decision. I am a single person. I don’t have children, or family obligations, or immense debt or health issues that require me to prioritize financial security. Also, my time in tech allowed me to invest in this decision.

Our current employment system traps us mentally, even when we can make a change. It’s scary to give up security. Even so, when I announced I was leaving, several coworkers asked, “How can I do this, too?” But my plan isn’t going to be the same one that works for them. So, my advice was: Pay attention to anything that makes you feel good in your body, mind, and spirit—something that nurtures these three aspects of your being. Is there an alternative life out there for you that would fulfill these three pillars?

When I made the decision to become a gardener, I was hesitant to tell my family because I thought they would judge me after the years I struggled to pay off my student loans for an education in a field I was now voluntarily abandoning. But instead, they were incredibly happy for me. That judgment was self-imposed, and I had to unlearn my bias that making less money equates to being less successful. It’s a shame that when we’re young, we’re usually encouraged to pursue a future in a small subset of “successful careers,” and rarely encouraged to imagine alternative definitions of success.

Unlearning those deeply ingrained mindsets is always a long process.

It is. But to take a leap, all you need is the conviction and the confidence to try. Also, keep reminding yourself: “If this doesn’t work out, I still have my old skillset.” Taking on a new lifestyle or job doesn’t erase everything from your past. If things get too hard, or if something happens and you need to activate your old skills, or your old network, you can.

But, if you have the opportunity to try, it’s worth making the leap. I made the radical change necessary to live in a new way, because I couldn’t just complain about the system forever without doing something big and scary. And now, here I am. I love being a gardener. This is the best thing I’ve ever done.