How Covid Transformed Me into a Gardener and Business Owner

When things turned dystopian in March 2020, I was in the middle of a big life change which ultimately led me to create a business coaching families to grow their own chemical-free food. After a decade of international development consulting scouring the African continent to make Africans’ lives more connected to the global economy, and incidentally also more precarious, I had already been slowly seeking an escape route from the abstract world inhabited by the professional managerial class. Covid didn’t create my rupture with this world. It confirmed it.

At the origin of my class betrayal was an intellectual epiphany. In the years leading to 2020, I had spent considerable time immersed in Christopher Lasch’s critique of progressivism. He explained that Narcissus, obsessed by his psychic comfort, is an individual who rejects any genuine notion of limits, of rootedness, of responsibility to particular places and people, in favor of a utopian frictionless world. Alternating between a Promethean impulse to replace all natural processes with technological ones and a feminine desire for fusion with the natural world, Narcissus lives in a world filled with images designed to produce phantasies. He constantly oscillates between a grandiose sentiment of omnipotence and powerlessness. He is rapacious and destitute at the same time.

One of the central influences in Lasch’s work was American farmer, poet, novelist, and essayist Wendell Berry. In his 1977 manifesto The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, Berry wrote perhaps the most clinical description of what is Narcissus’ daily interior life and the most ruthless indictment of industrialism: