Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

http://men.style.com/details/features/landing?id=content_9817

by browngeek • 17 years ago

85 92 17 years ago

men.style.com

pmorici• 17 years ago

His blog... http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/

Oompa• 17 years ago

Interesting individual, I could never do anything like this myself.

JacobAldridge• 17 years ago

Yes, I went through a similar thought pattern when I left high school - "I don't want to worry about money. Either I decide to never have money, or I'll put in the effort require to always have enough / too much."

Still working on the second choice. It's not easy, but I think the first option is much harder and never ends.

wmeredith• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure I could survive on the waste and charity of others as this guy does, but I wouldn't want to.

michaelneale• 17 years ago

Thousands do in major cities every day. Often there are mental health issues at play, but anyone can do it.

mynameishere• 17 years ago

Pretty good documentary

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dh4s78Db5OQ

JesseAldridge• 17 years ago

This guy has some cool blog entries along those lines:

http://www.nevblog.com/labels/Homeless%20Experiment.html

kragen13• 17 years ago

You know, I used to live in a city named after a guy whose fame was due to doing that.

ars2• 17 years ago

No kids?

mahmud2• 17 years ago

You don't need kids to survive like that, most adults I know can do it all on their own~

ars2• 17 years ago

Very funny :)

However, could he still do it if he had kids? The article seems to suggest this is a good way to live, but if you can't live this way, and have kids too, then meh.

He's not just an ordinary homeless guy - he wants a life without property (not money, any property), i.e. he's homeless guy with a principle.

So I evaluate the principle: is it a good one? So far, it seems no, it's not.

If he could have kids, then, interesting, maybe it's not for me, or for more people, but at least it's interesting. But if you can't live that way, and have kids too, then it's forgettable.

PS. I did not say if he could/couldn't. My initial post was actually a question, worded a little short asking if it was possible. Especially in light of the ending of the article, where it talks about natural selection. If you are really committed to this, then have kids too.

pj3• 17 years ago

It very well could be the knowledge he has gained while living without money that will go toward educating masses of people out of work in our increasingly struggling economy moving forward.

More people are losing jobs, homes, credit. Debt is increasing. How many people will know how to correctly identify edible cacti?

I was thinking of my grandmother who survived the great depression. She has so much knowledge up there in her brain. How to can tomatoes for the winter. How to store potatoes in holes to keep them fresh during the cold months. How to stuff the gaps in the logs of a cabin with mud to stay warm.

Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store.

I feel lucky. I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it. Many of my friends can't even eat meat with bones in it because it reminds them it was alive.

Xichekolas5• 17 years ago

> "Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store."

What? The only reason people would need to be able to hunt their own food in our society is if that society totally and utterly collapsed. And not just a collapse of the government... I'm talking mass-fatality pandemic, nuclear holocaust, or zombies. Something that wipes out any local community that could band together and support itself. If anything that drastic happens, the average gen X'er/Y'er has a lot more to worry about than finding food (which can be scavenged for a while)... like surviving the initial die out, or roaming bands of looters.

pj3• 17 years ago

Not where I live. 5% of my state suffers from "food insecurity" which means they dont know where their next meal is coming from.

I went on a field trip as a child through a state park and the game ranger warned us all, he said, "Don't poach deer kids. If you are hungry and your parents want to poach deer out of season, tell them to call me and we'll help."

He wasn't saying this as a joke. Many families here do procure a lot of their meat from hunting and fishing. A white tail deer can give you 100 lbs of meat. Thats $300-400. Rabbits, squirrels, quail, dove. Commonly eaten around here and much cheaper than the meat section at Wal-Mart.

Once, at wal-mart, I was checking out and a large family in front of us was buying chicken in ten pound bags and I could smell it -- it was cheap because it was rotten. It smelled foul. Thank goodness the check out lady smelled it too and told them to go grab a different bag. I think perhaps some had leaked out and tainted the outside of the bags.

I actually do think that some people may starve. I asked my grandmother what her thoughts about the current financial situation, remember, she survived the great depression and she said, "I haven't seen anything like this."

It's worse than we realize. Our faith in the system has collapsed. We don't believe in it anymore. That isn't something that can be fixed by flooding society with more imaginary paper money.

philwelch3• 17 years ago

You'd be surprised. My dad grew up in the Great Depression and during the war, though he implied that this kind of thing was the way of life before that in small towns: even if people had jobs, they still made their own clothing, had gardens, and hunted. People were remarkably self-sufficient. They had cars (one of the few manufactured goods they bought) but they maintained the cars themselves as well as their equipment. They even owned a little livestock.

So yeah, a lot of people are going to be lost if we ever get into an economic state where consumer culture breaks down.

Readmore• 17 years ago

+1 for zombies

jerf2• 17 years ago

"I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it."

What animals?

If society collapses to that point, deer will be hunted to extinction in a matter of months, if not weeks, with smaller critters probably not getting hunted to extinction after that, but certainly to the point you won't find them readily anymore. There's still too many people with the skill to do that for you to survive.

Thinking that you can Davy-Crockett your way out of a societal collapse is underestimating the number of people who can still hunt, or overestimating the amount of resources actually available. The brutality of such an outcome would be well beyond what I've seen any survivalist even faintly dream of, because if they looked at the truth (such as, "city folk are not a homogeneous mass of morons who would instantaneously starve to death, there'd still be enough to move out and cause trouble") they'd realize that it isn't a matter of "ensuring survival" so much as "incrementally increasing my odds of survival from the low single-digit percentages to the high single-digit percentages", which is way less fun to fantasize about.

What this guy does is not scalable. wmeredith is exactly right. There aren't a whole lot of lessons to take away, except perhaps that we need less than we think we do, but that's hardly news anyhow.

erlanger6• 17 years ago

You forgot about the firearm aspect of survivalism.

dasil0032• 17 years ago

Depends what your particular survival skills are, how fast society collapses, and where you are when it happens.

kragen13• 17 years ago

You know, when I'm trying to get code to be scalable, making it need less (less memory, less CPU time, less bandwidth) is a pretty key technique. I think that's true of human life too: if we can get by on less, more of us can survive.

PStamatiou• 17 years ago

Sometimes I like to think I do.. I have some passive income streams that pay rent.

Xichekolas5• 17 years ago

Money is merely a means to decouple the promise of payback from the promiser.

Without money, you have to trust Joe to help you can tomatoes next fall since you helped him plow his field. With money, Joe can pay you to plow his field, and you can pay Sally to help you can tomatoes (because Joe moved to another town).

dasil0032• 17 years ago

Sure, but the emergent effects of money on society--especially with computerized banking--are quite a bit more significant than the fundamental innovation. Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.

Xichekolas5• 17 years ago

Well yeah. My comment was originally much longer, pointing out some of the things that money enabled.

But I was responding to his view that 'money is an illusion'. I was trying to point out that it's not an 'illusion' (whatever that means), and we didn't just make it up for fun or so some people could be rich and others poor. It serves a fundamentally valuable purpose.

endtime• 17 years ago

>Computers are merely for shuffling 1s and 0s around.

If you're going to say that about computers, you might as well say it about people. As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, but same story.

NonEUCitizen• 17 years ago

but with money, in each instance, the recipient has to pay 1/3 or so to the government.

mhartl• 17 years ago

The subject of the story confuses money and wealth. He is not the first to do so, nor will he be the last.

erlanger6• 17 years ago

If everyone did this, he wouldn't have a thing to eat. I'm not knocking it, but it's something to think about.

But that brings us to a more important point: Why does this guy have to forage to survive without money? Shouldn't he be able to save up, buy a few acres and grow his own resources? Nope, because of the absurdity known as the property tax (er, I mean "protection racket").

pj3• 17 years ago

Right! It's impossible to own land in America. You merely rent it from the government.

But also, he uses the library for internet access. I wonder if he considers that "government dole."

mikeytown2• 17 years ago

Not entirely true, If you own patented land then I believe that is tax free forever; at least under current US law.

natrius• 17 years ago

I have no problem with people having to pay to maintain ownership of their land. Land ownership is a useful farce. Every land owner is in possession of land that was "stolen", for lack of a more precise word. If we're going to protect people's right to claim land according to the "finders keepers" rule, we should ensure that the owner is making good use of that land. Property taxation helps to do that. (With many side effects, like exacerbating gentrification. That could be fixed, though.)

mjgoins• 17 years ago

If everyone in the world was an investment banker, no one would have anything to eat. Ditto hackers, unless they were hackers with an eye towards agriculture.

madmanslitany• 17 years ago

I don't think this is valid in the context of what the parent was saying about this guy; hackers and investment bankers are specialized professions which contribute to society in their own specialized way and specialization makes life better for everyone overall by enabling civilization.

The subject of the article is hardly a specialized professional and while it's minimized to some extent, he even admits he sometimes mooches off of friends for meals and is basically a scavenger. He's contributing nothing to society and leeching off of its resources despite being able bodied and intelligent.

Some might argue that his commentary on culture is useful in an artistic sense by pointing out flaws in our society, but there are better ways to do this without being a bum living in a cave. I don't like getting worked up over things in a "Something is wrong on the internet!" sense, but articles about guys like this make me kind of angry. There's nothing noble, nothing ideal here. This guy isn't worth praising.

robryan• 17 years ago

Hackers are more likely than investment bankers to come up with a mostly automated agricultural system.

akeefer• 17 years ago

The first principle you mention is, more or less, Kant's idea of the categorical imperative (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categorical_imperative)

Perhaps not the end-all be-all of moral reasoning, but certainly very influential (and there's a mammoth body of analysis and discussion around it), and personally I find that it's always a worthwhile perspective to consider.

hyperbovine2• 17 years ago

Property tax rate in Moab: 0.00%

Effective tax on a $100,000 property in Moab: $0

Effective tax on a $500,000 property in Moab: $0

Effective tax on a few acres to grow his own resources: $0

Sound of another anti-government nutjob scuttling back to the drawing board in search of a new red herring: priceless

http://propertytax.utah.gov/taxrates/taxarearates2008.pdf http://www.moabcity.org/business/index.cfm

erlanger6• 17 years ago

Yes, let's all pretend that there are no federal levies on property.

> anti-government nutjob

Cavalier assumptions coupled with ad hominem FTW.

seldo2• 17 years ago

So, um, he's a homeless guy who lives in a cave. Congratulations, homeless guy, you have somehow managed to convince everybody that instead of a homeless guy, you're a cultural revolutionary. NB: you live in a fucking cave. Forgive me if this doesn't sound like the future of mankind.

erlanger6• 17 years ago

Another example that with this government (and most) it's their way or the highway. I'm with you -- there's nothing ideal about it. But it's certainly noble.

nir2• 17 years ago

"NB: you live in a fucking cave. Forgive me if this doesn't sound like the future of mankind"

Forgive me if I say this sounds like a Reddit comment :) Why so negative? He doesn't harm or tries to convert. There is a difference between him and most homeless in that he actually chose this lifestyle, is able to quit it if he wants, and seems to be generally pretty happy with it.

seldo2• 17 years ago

It did occur to me as I typed it that it would get downmodded for the belligerent phrasing, but I was post-gym and blood sugar was low, which makes me grumpy.

I think the reason it irritates me is, as others have mentioned, that he doesn't really live without money. He just lives without his own money, and relies on the kindness of strangers to provide him with things he needs. He's not self-sufficient and he's not bartering for everything he needs. He's just an eloquent beggar.

hyperbovine2• 17 years ago

There was a this American Life a while back about two guys who chose to be homeless in NYC for a while. IIRC the gist was: it sucks. I was shocked.

Yeah not sure what the media's fascination with voluntary homelessness is.

ido2• 17 years ago

"Forgive me if I say this sounds like a Reddit comment"

Forgive me if i say this makes you sound like an asshole - why do people on HN feel the need to belittle reddit in much the same way reddit users belittle digg users?

I wonder where on the net an even more "intelligent" site's users are using "hacker news comment" as a derogatory term?

krisneuharth• 17 years ago

This story reminded me of a grown-up version of the children's book "My Side Of The Mountain" for some reason. I love this kind of story because it reminds me that we could all do well to learn to live with less, and that there are some that do.

erlanger6• 17 years ago

On the other hand, I found On the Far Side of the Mountain to be depressing.

korch• 17 years ago

I highly respect what this guy is doing, even though I don't yet have the guts to live like this myself. As Tyler Durden said, "the things you own end up owning you." The best I can do is smugly re-read Thoreau while sitting in a Starbucks and twittering from my iPhone in debt up to my eyeballs.

What I appreciate most about guys like this is how they make us face the mirror. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, American culture is so hyper-materialist that great numbers of us cannot even conceive of this guy's reasoning. Commercial interests can't have good, little fear-driven, obedient consumers dropping off the grid now can they?

The spiritual dimension to his lifestyle choice also deserves consideration. The article says he lived in a Buddhist monastery in Asia for several years up until 1999. He's obviously not even comparable to the typical crazy, drug-addled de-humanized homeless people we encounter in our day to day lives in our own urban zoo cages.

Arun2009• 17 years ago

Reminded me a little of Diogenes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope).

As Buddha said, suffering ends when our craving for material things ends. We don't have to be as extremely hardcore as the dude above, but following this philosophy in a limited pragmatic manner I think can be very liberating.

kragen13• 17 years ago

You're right! I hadn't read about Diogenes in detail before. Thanks for the link! It does sound like they have quite a bit in common.

rjett• 17 years ago

Interesting article but it would have been even more interesting if the author had chosen to go more in depth about his daily activities and how Suelo copes with loneliness and boredom. IMO, these problems would be much more difficult than the physical hardships he faces.

zackattack3• 17 years ago

Loneliness and boredom are not real issues. They're issues fabricated by the mind. With presence, they disappear. That's the whole point of his lifestyle: presence. The reason he dislikes money is because money indicates a distaste of the present and an obsession with the future.

I recommend reading Eckhart Tolle's The Power of Now for more information.

sethb• 17 years ago

Loneliness is definitely a real issue.

The fact that this guy keeps a blog and Eckhart Tolle expects an audience shows the value they place on social contact.

kragen13• 17 years ago

You should read his blog. It sounds like he's pretty social and has a lot to think about.

blhack• 17 years ago

Money is a unit of work. It is an almost universally accepted abstraction of the "worth" of somebody's time.

You could replace "dollars" with "bananas" if you wanted to, it is irrelevant.

jasonlbaptiste• 17 years ago

This is far from surviving. This is coming up with excuses and going to the extreme. Anyone with a psychology background want to diagnose this?

c0nsilience• 17 years ago

"Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."

Spoken like a man who doesn't know how to manage money. Good article, though. It shows what copping out looks like.

known• 17 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subsistence_techniques to live without money.

Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

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