In praise of spite
November 2024
My wife and I recently launched a new venture, Spite Farms, and when I shared it I got a response from a kind and thoughtful reader. Loosely paraphrasing, the remark was that “spite” doesn’t entirely seem like “me.”
I take this as a compliment, and it makes total sense. I am a natural born cheerleader. I help people overcome impostor syndrome and exhaustion to write nonfiction books, I’ve got a whole book about ignoring criticism. Even my snarkily-titled book, Your Website Sucks, takes on a tone of encouragement. But spite is also central to my personality.
One of my core values is authenticity. The Spite Farms manifesto is an exercise in authenticity, and the gist of it is “we’re healing a patch of earth not because it’s our calling in life (it’s not) and not because it will save the world (it won’t), but because it’s the best we can do in a rather grim situation.”
The best we can do, despite the fact that small scale agriculture will not, cannot remove all the plastic from the rainwater (or our bloodstreams). Despite the fact that it won’t bring back all the wildlife we’ve lost or have an appreciable impact on the degradation of earth’s topsoil—at least not as long as the small farmers and their customers continue to support trillions of dollars in fossil fuel subsidies and the endless expansion of the world’s largest polluter.
But we do it anyway. We do it in spite.
The alternative I see is to ignore the above issues entirely, or—a popular route among my peers—to acknowledge them but align ourselves with the grifters who insist that they’ll all be magically solved once we start colonizing space and build a slightly fancier text completion engine. These options strike me as absurd. I’m not sure who actually believes these fairy tales and who’s embracing them cynically for personal gain, and I guess it doesn’t matter.
Now if you need me, I’ll be mulching. Joyfully, and spitefully.