★ “Mark Zuckerberg’s new challenge: Eating only what he kills”

Zuckerberg via Fortune:

To start, let me give you some background on what I’m doing. Every year in recent memory, I’ve taken on a personal challenge — something to learn about the world, expand my interests and teach myself greater discipline. I spend almost all of my time building Facebook, so these personal challenges are all things I wouldn’t normally have the chance to do if I didn’t take the time.

Last year, for example, my personal challenge was to learn Chinese. I blocked out an hour every day to study and it has been an amazing experience so far. I’ve always found learning new languages challenging, so I wanted to jump in and try to learn a hard one. It has been a very humbling experience. With language, there’s no way to just “figure it out” like you can with other problems — you just need to practice and practice. The experience of learning Mandarin has also led me to travel to China, learn about its culture and history, and meet a lot of new interesting people.

This year, my personal challenge is around being thankful for the food I have to eat. I think many people forget that a living being has to die for you to eat meat, so my goal revolves around not letting myself forget that and being thankful for what I have. This year I’ve basically become a vegetarian since the only meat I’m eating is from animals I’ve killed myself. So far, this has been a good experience. I’m eating a lot healthier foods and I’ve learned a lot about sustainable farming and raising of animals.

I started thinking about this last year when I had a pig roast at my house. A bunch of people told me that even though they loved eating pork, they really didn’t want to think about the fact that the pig used to be alive. That just seemed irresponsible to me. I don’t have an issue with anything people choose to eat, but I do think they should take responsibility and be thankful for what they eat rather than trying to ignore where it came from.

This is fantastic. There are reasons to disagree and hate what he has chosen to do. The first would be that only the rich can have such wild fantasies such as this or feel such entitlement about how they live as being special. The other is that he should just be a vegetarian and stop trying so hard to make killing for food a religious experience.

The truth is, Mark posted this to his personal Facebook page for friends and one of those friends leaked it forcing him to make a statement. Would he be doing this if he wasn’t wealthy? Maybe not. A lot of people can barely afford the cheapest ground beef at a grocery store, much less being able to kill their own chickens and send them to a butcher.

The fact that Mark is trying to better himself outside of technology is a good thing. The more he can connect with being human, the better he’ll be able to lead us into our next connected generation which Facebook will end up ultimately owning. Just as I have been living off the land more and more lately, I think this is great for Mark and will hopefully lead as an example for the rest of us.