The Man Who Quit Money: An Interview with Daniel Suelo

http://www.becomingminimalist.com/the-man-who-quit-money-an-interview-with-daniel-suelo/

by bemmu • 11 years ago

34 34 11 years ago

grecy2• 11 years ago

Interesting read. I'm reminded of Chris McCandless [1] of Into The Wild fame. I was so inspired by Chris' story I quit my job, sold all my stuff and spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I made a trip to the now infamous bus in Alaska [2] during my trip.

While Chris and myself have never gone moneyless like the article, I find myself tending towards that every day. I now hunt all my own meat and fish, grow as much of my own vegetables as I can, work on my own car and bike, etc. etc. I try hard to not pay for anything I can do for myself.

I'm also once again disillusioned with work and consumption, so in a couple of months I'm heading out to drive around Africa for a couple of years, then all going well I'll drive Europe->SE Asia.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_McCandless

[2] http://theroadchoseme.com/the-magic-bus

urda2• 11 years ago

I was so inspired by Chris' story

I hope only up to and not including the part of starving to death after eating the wrong thing.

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

bglazer2• 11 years ago

Perhaps this is overly prying, but do you have a family?

grecy2• 11 years ago

No wife or children, no.

That being said, I met tons of people on the road traveling with their family for extended periods of time - tons of tons of people are driving around the world with kids. I had a pizza on the streets of Cartegena, Colombia with one French family and one of the kids said "We hate homeschooling..... we love worldschooling!"

Friends of mine paused their trip for a few months while they had a baby in Santiago, Chile, then kept driving :)

vinceguidry2• 11 years ago

This reads a lot less like a scathing critique of modernity as it does yet another affluent Westerner looking for self-actualization by excoriating everything that made him rich and idle. He thinks he's not rich and idle any more just because he gave away his life savings?

Whether he wants to believe it or not, he's the beneficiary of modern largesse. He doesn't take government handouts or whatever, but the only reason he can have the sorts of thoughts he's having about nature and religion is because he was a Western-style education and enough free time to develop a philosophy. He can dumpster dive, he can spend time on the Internet and at the library figuring out how to live off grid. It's easy to take for granted the careful, focused effort of millions of people over thousands of years to give him all of this. The knowledge he finds in the library isn't cheap, even though he's not paying for it.

Because I guarantee you, off-grid living wouldn't be nearly as much fun without it.

I don't mind if you want to go off-grid. I had ideas myself about doing that. I read about van-dwelling, building my own small house on a trailer, earthships. If that's what you feel you need to do, by all means go play in the dirt, get it out of your system. Just don't pretend it's morally superior just because you've failed to fully appreciate everything that brought you to that point to where you could renounce the modern world.

user24• 11 years ago

Great explanation of priviledge.

urda2• 11 years ago

I don't mind if you want to go off-grid. I had ideas myself about doing that. I read about van-dwelling, building my own small house on a trailer, earthships. If that's what you feel you need to do, by all means go play in the dirt, get it out of your system. Just don't pretend it's morally superior just because you've failed to fully appreciate everything that brought you to that point to where you could renounce the modern world.

This is such a great statement. These articles when they come around make finance, business, and work seem like such an "evil" thing, and should be beneath people. But god forbid you tell them how dumpster diving and just being a vagabond can also be a burden to everyone else in society.

shillster2• 11 years ago

He's only a burden in as much as the fall in his personal consumption reduces the overall demand for things he might have purchased. In other words, its no sweat off of anyone's brow. Being individually resourceful doesn't increase the burden on anyone else.

Andrex2• 11 years ago

Wish I could save HN comments, but I can't so I'll reply instead. Great stuff.

Folcon• 11 years ago

You can you know? Just upvote it, you'll find it in your profile next to saved stories.

balabaster2• 11 years ago

You say he's living off-grid, but I don't recall a single point in the article that he suggests such a thing. I do recall him suggesting that he mostly lives in caves and scavenges and eats roadkill. This may play a small part in off-grid living, but this is not off-grid living.

He has a library card and he uses modern technology... and yes, without modern society, he wouldn't have that technology to use and to learn. But we've been learning from our ancestors, friends and communities free of charge for thousands of years. There is little difference here, except that with the advent of the internet, we can learn from millions of our ancestors and peers, all around the world instead of just those in our local community.

I say good for him. I'm fascinated by off-grid living, but this is not it. You do everyone a disservice by implying that living entirely without money, without anything and living off-the-grid are one and the same.

People who live off grid may not use monetary transactions in the modern sense, but they do use a form of money - they barter in goods, services and goodwill. That may not have a physical currency, but it is a currency nonetheless. They trade with their communities, their families and their friends. This is how off-grid communities work, this is how modern society works - it's just that instead of trading goodwill, we trade this bit of paper with the slogan "In God We Trust".

The piece of society that clearly isn't good for the soul is this constant march of consumerism and planned obsolescence. The promotion of quantity over quality, where nothing lasts, everything is cheap and disposable and everything we do is done to the point of destroying our environment. The sooner we find a way to get off this treadmill, the happier our environment will be and the happier everyone is going to be.

I take my hat off to this guy, he's found a way out of it, he's happy, his soul is satisfied and he wants to help others to find their way to that satisfaction. So perhaps instead of judging his moral superiority, perhaps appreciate what he's found that so many of us struggle to find and many don't.

Perhaps take a lesson out of his book, look around you, ask yourself what you're truly happy with, ask yourself what would happen if you lost it all, and wonder if any of it matters. He did, and he realized that none of it mattered... and now, he's happy.

When those around us die, we pause, we realize that we've not been living in the moment, enjoying what truly matters in our lives, forming emotional attachments to meaningless things to a meaningless life - that's why we coined the endearment "the rat race" and we resolve to stop churning on this treadmill and appreciate what truly matters... before we get right back on the treadmill and go back to doing the same things we did.

So... yeah... not sure what my point is. Perhaps be happy that he found happiness and is striving to help others find happiness too. This modern need to exponentially accumulate shit just because the media has groomed us to do so has seen ever increasing rates of depression and suicide and finding anything that will combat that and bring people emotional or spiritual satisfaction can only be good.

duncancarroll• 11 years ago

"Money only exists because two or more people believe that it does."

Er.. I get the point he's trying to make here, but I think what he's not seeing is that currencies basically spontaneously emerge out of the necessity of conducting trade. So, sure, you can try to pretend the construct doesn't exist, but you're just closing your eyes to the problem because you don't happen to like it.

RodericDay• 11 years ago

Do you have a source for that? The origins of money?

jayfuerstenberg• 11 years ago

I wouldn't want to be a dumpster diver anymore than the next person but I applaud this person for actually having a view outside of rampant consumerism and following through on it.

icebraining2• 11 years ago

Meh, Ted Kaczynski went farther.

ucaetano3• 11 years ago

"he lives in the caves and wilderness of Utah"

- Which are wilderness regions because the entire population moved to cities.

"scavenges roadkill"

- Which exists because people built roads and people drive there.

"pulls food from dumpsters"

- Which exists because people built the dumpsters and throw food into it.

"sometimes fed by friends and strangers"

- No comments.

The headline should be: "The Man Who Quit Money But Depends On It".

drivers99• 11 years ago

I actually read [the first third of] the book "The Man Who Quit Money." He only accepts what is freely given as long as there are no strings attached. For example, he doesn't take from soup kitchens because the workers there are required to do it as part of their jobs. I'm not sure what part of that you think he's ignoring. He's not trying to live as if the rest of the world doesn't exist, but to prevent others from controlling him via money and vice versa.

ucaetano3• 11 years ago

So he didn't quit money, he quit being controlled by money. But still relies on people who make money to survive.

CPLX• 11 years ago

Which are wilderness regions because the entire population moved to cities.

I was with you on the other parts but this doesn't really make sense. You can blame modernity for many things but creating more wilderness doesn't seem like one of them.

ucaetano3• 11 years ago

What do you think would happen if the entire population left the cities and moved to the countryside?

aetherson• 11 years ago

Mr. Suelo is certainly free to pursue his own happiness in whatever way he wishes to. But his personal decisions do not provide a compelling template for changes to any significant fraction of the population. We can't all -- we can't even 1% of us -- live in caves and eat roadkill. Heck, my wife and I can't do that if we want to have our daughter and not face, say, greater than 10% risk that my wife will die in the process.

And the rest of what he's saying seems to be, "Just treat each other like you would family; do things for no reward and take what you need." That's not a novel approach. It doesn't scale up well. The major experiments with trying to scale it up resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century.

vaadu• 11 years ago

How do people in these situations deal with the government? Obamacare has mandates and one commenter mentioned a minimal existence with a motor vehicle, which means license, insurance, inspection and registration requirements. All requiring money which means some source of income.

In some places living completely off grid is illegal - you are required to be connected and pay for utilities.

jarin• 11 years ago

If you make less than $9,500/year you're exempt from the Obamacare penalty.

cholmon• 11 years ago

"When I left home for college, I studied other religions and found that all the world's major religions teach giving up possessions and doing not for the sake of reward. If all the separated witnesses are saying the same thing, it must be true."

That's kind of...simplistic.

carapace• 11 years ago

The important truths are all very very simple.

"He who works for the fruits of his labor is a miser." ~Krishna, in The Gita

The Man Who Quit Money: An Interview with Daniel Suelo

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