Life in Matt

In May, I went to Switzerland. I spent a few days in Interlaken, staying at a hostel and exploring the area, before making my way to Matt—a small town southeast of Zurich—where I lived and worked on a farm.







Farm life was an interesting experience. I did things that I had not done before: I shoveled dried chicken feed out of a chicken coop into a wheelbarrow. I helped build a fence for cows on the side of a mountain. I cleaned spiderwebs off the ceilings of a barn.



The manual labor was rewarding. I gardened and cleaned a fair amount, and it was nice to see, every day, the work I did with my hands. It was very different from the previous two months I spent living in Manhattan.



In Switzerland, I gained a better sense for how connected the world is these days. This was my first trip outside of the U.S. in a while, and only my second time outside of the country ever, so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect.







The family I stayed with has an alp in the mountains near Matt where they take their cows during the summer. Since it was May, they were getting ready for the summer season, so I spent two days helping clean up the house on the alp. The area is called Oberseiz—roughly eight to twenty people live there in the summer. One person lives there in the winter, some middle-age man who worked as a helicopter pilot in Alaska; he likes the solitude.



As of two years ago, there is WiFi on the alp. Franz likes to listen to the global radio there. So I was mopping down the floors of the room where Franz and his wife Yvonne make cheese in the summer, and then all of a sudden I heard Get Along by Kenny Chesney start playing, and I just stopped. And then the song finished and Meant to Be by Bebe Rexha started playing, and I was like, no way. This is what I listen to at the pool every summer, this is what comes on on WMZQ, the country station the lifeguards always play. So there I was, some thousand feet above sea level, in a house on a mountain in the Swiss Alps, broom in hand, listening the Bebe Rexha sing if it’s meant to be, it’ll be, baby just let it be.



I had another striking moment like this when I was in the Interlaken region. I was taking a cable car up to Murren, some thousand feet off the ground, when I got a Discord notification from a friend in California about some ML paper. For some reason, that was so funny to me. I guess there’s no escape these days unless you’re really intentional.







I learned things about myself on this trip. The tldr is: I wasn’t sure if I was the type of person who would be able to live that sort of quiet and simple (but not easy, it’s hard work) life in a natural place. And now I know I can’t do that, at least at this stage. While the farm was beautiful and I enjoyed working and getting to know the family I was staying with, I’m ambitious in the way that draws me to cities and makes me excited to be around other young people who are working hard.



Also, I started to think a lot more simply after this trip.



Looking over this writing, I think this reads as the blandest string of thoughts I have written so far this year. But . . . down with word celery. I think simple thoughts these days.



I think that's the biggest thing I gained a greater appreciation for after living and working on the farm: the value of simplicity.