
Mad Mike, the homeless blogger who became a millionaire overnight - bootload
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/mar/24/mad-mike-homeless-blogger-millionaire
======
buro9
When I was homeless I met a guy also on the streets. He was given a council
flat (as I later was) and moved in.

When I visited him some months later, his place was a tip. He hadn't managed
to adjust to coming off the streets. His electric had been disconnected as
he'd failed to pay the bill (he received benefits to cover this), and he
cooked on a camping stove on the floor of the living room. There was trash
everywhere.

He just wasn't ready to come off the streets.

He had gone onto the streets after a nervous breakdown, brought on by divorce
from his wife (I think... I have some difficulty remembering who experienced
what). He'd lost it all, and was no longer mentally equipped to deal with
life. He remained charming, intelligent and good company, but just a shade of
whom he must've once been. Never saw him again, but his struggle to adjust hit
me hard.

I remember my own challenge with the adjustment. For a while I too lived in
just the living room... a thin mattress on a broken tile floor, a camping
stove and a walkman for company. But I'd seen that this wasn't what you do,
and that you had to form patterns, new routines, and spread out in the space,
compartmentalize living functions to different spaces and form new routines
around those functions.

I used to have a calendar on the wall to tell me what day it was (since I no
longer saw the rhythm of the world around me), and it would remind me when to
pay bills, or run chores. It was the little things that I now take for granted
that were difficult for me. Why go out? Why speak to anyone? The things I had
needed for so long (a dry warm space, the ability to bathe when I chose, a
safe place to sleep, food when I needed it) I now had in abundance, so _why_
do anything? Why even pick up the trash? Or make the bed?

I've believed since coming off the streets that it is less about physically
providing the roof over a head, and is more to do with providing the support
to help someone or targeting only those who are _ready_ to leave the streets.
Both sound horribly ambiguous and no doubt would leave space for a truck to
drive through if enacted as policy, but the essence is that a person who has
spent time on the street needs help to have an epiphany about caring for
themselves and their surroundings, about functioning in a new space.

~~~
imgabe
How do you tell when someone is ready to come in off the streets? If you've
been there a long time and have adjusted to it, I don't see how staying there
longer is going to make you more prepared for the transition. It sounds like
we need to provide help - counseling, therapy, etc. - to people coming off the
streets.

~~~
buro9
Good question. For which I have no answer.

But if the other replies are right and this is really just about habit
changing, then that is where the support and focus should exist.

Perhaps the key is to move people into shared temporary houses to build those
habits together before being moved on?

------
thektrn
What a misleading title! At first I thought he'd written a blog that earned
him a million in one night. Good for him though.

~~~
daddykotex
Exact same thoughts here!

------
bootload
_" “Abject poverty had kept my drinking reasonably contained,” says Mike, “but
with a full bank account I tend to drink until I get sick.” Instead, he’s
indulging in music. Mad Mike immediately moved his mom’s sofa, love seat and
ottoman out of the living room and replaced it with thousands of dollars worth
of brand new, gorgeous musical equipment:"_

Love the idea of this. Ditch the furniture for creative tools.

~~~
shrikant
When my wife and I moved into our first home (an unfurnished rental), we felt
it was larger than we really needed. So one bedroom became the living room,
one bedroom stayed the bedroom, and the actual living room was emptied of all
furniture.

What did we do with all that space? Plonked down a full-size ping-pong table
and became bloody good at the game over the next year or so. Good times.

------
Red_Tarsius
The article is very interesting, but what strikes me most is:

> _“Three out of five of our siblings have committed suicide. Mike’s mother is
> the third...”_

Is this only an unfortunate chain of events? Is there some biological cause to
the high number of suicides in his family?

~~~
kordless
Parents and their parents can fuck a family up beyond all recognition. It
might be hereditary or hereditary by causality. Either way, the suffering is
the same.

~~~
JonnieCache
This was voted the UK's favourite poem IIRC, and has been famously quoted in
court. There have been few truer words spoken:

    
    
        They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   
            They may not mean to, but they do.   
        They fill you with the faults they had
            And add some extra, just for you.
        
        But they were fucked up in their turn
            By fools in old-style hats and coats,   
        Who half the time were soppy-stern
            And half at one another’s throats.
        
        Man hands on misery to man.
            It deepens like a coastal shelf.
        Get out as early as you can,
            And don’t have any kids yourself.

------
facepalm
I wonder if the best investment advice would be to convert the 1,8 Million
into a pension, so that he can not just squander it away on a drunk binge?

Then again it's probably also possible to squander away the pension by getting
loans against it.

Some kind of Ulysses contract should be possible?

And what are the legalities of signing contracts while drunk - do they count?
Afaik people are not legally able to consent to sex while drunk, so perhaps
contracts/agreements should be impossible while drunk?

~~~
gms7777
IANAL, but from glancing around online, it looks as though you are in general
held responsible for contracts and agreements made when you are intoxicated.
The exceptions seem to be when the intoxication is not voluntary (i.e. if
you're drugged), or if you're so far gone that you can't understand what
you're agreeing to and the other party "takes advantage" of your intoxication.

------
hurin
I only scrolled through the article - but the guy's blog is pretty well
written
[http://madmikethehippiebum.blogspot.com/2014/04/captured.htm...](http://madmikethehippiebum.blogspot.com/2014/04/captured.html).

------
cubano
I've teetered on the brink of homelessness for a few years now due to very
poor life choices and an overbearing legal systems that convicted me, for all
practical purposes, for the act of doing drugs in private.

I am firmly convinced that homelessness and living that life of rejecting
convention has to do with deep-seated emotional scarring that should be much
more akin to brain damage than a failure of "will power" (whatever that really
means in a neuroscience way)

Cutting edge NS research[0] is proving again and again that we simply do not
make decisions the way we all (most?) want to believe we do, in a rational and
self-interested way.

This research has deep implications for all sorts of anti-social behaviours,
and, especially for me at least, addiction.

I feel this hard emotional tug to escape into oblivion almost every-time I see
others so easily create emotionally and sexually meaningful relationships,
where I seem to fail at it miserably and have for my whole life.

Recently, I commented upon an Autism post where some of the symptoms of this
disease (the inability to create and/or maintain social connections) shocked
me to the point of tears, and have been pondering the connections between
addiction and it ever since.

We can talk about habits and chances and everything, but if a person is just
tired of hurting internally and has the choice between another night of lonely
pain and escape, I'm hard pressed to blame them for escaping.

But hey, that's just me.

[0] [http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-
spotlights/neuroscien...](http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-
spotlights/neuroscience-of-decision-making)

~~~
blub
I think it's hard for a lot of people to create emotionally and sexually
meaningful relationships. Unless you've had out of the ordinary incidents like
being slapped, punched and so on, it's probably a lack of opportunities
combined with some bad luck and maybe a lack of understanding how
relationships can be "hacked" a bit to help them along.

My theory is that the way we form relationships is a combination of innate
ability (1) and learned behaviour (2).

(1) is common to each human and includes things such as interpreting facial
expressions, sense of touch, etc, even though I agree that conditions such as
autism can have a significant negative impact here. Still, you said you are
failing, which means you _are_ trying and you do express a desire to succeed,
so I am guessing that this is not what's preventing you from succeeding, but
rather it's something related to your beliefs and behaviours. Which leads me
to...

(2) this behaviour is normally learned as we grow up, as a combination of
advice from parents, your social circle and simply experimenting. But if one
has an unusual childhood, parents that teach them "wrong" things, is e.g.
bullied or simply has bad luck, they might end up either not knowing what to
do to form a romantic relationship or even doing the opposite of what they
should do. In which case they have to learn by themselves. Now I don't know
the particulars of your situation, but have you read available literature
about how human sexuality and relationships work? e.g: Pittman's Man Enough,
Miller's Mating Mind, Meston's Why Women Have Sex. This might be a starting
point in better understanding what's happening and why you find things
difficult.

~~~
cubano
I think my real issues are significantly different from what you may think
they are. I've read many behavior and relationship books over the years in my
quest to improve my life, but in the end, I seem to be unable to make those
"hacks" work in my life.

I've had all the opportunity I could really ever hope for. I was very athletic
and popular way, way back in high school, played in a relatively successful
rock band for a decade after that, and have a great sense of humor. I am tall
(6'3"), dark, but not very handsome :)

Put simply, at a core level, I don't really trust anyone, which turns out to
be a nasty self-enforcing attitude.

My earliest childhood memory is of being abandoned, by my Mom, at her sister's
house for months and being kept alone, stuck in crib and unattended for most
of that time.

I had no idea what was happening and vaguely remember crying until exhaustion
day after day, wondering where my Mom was and why she was doing this to me.

I am, personally, 100% convinced that this event, in MY case, led me to my
lifelong struggles with relationships and addiction, and that the trauma
caused by it created physical damage in the neuronic wiring of my brain.

The odd part is, it wasn't until my Mom talked to me about it a few years
before her passing that I was even able to remember it, but when she did it
all came back to me; the room, the crib, her scary and unloving sister, my
despair.

And listen, I am not trying to turn this into some sort of psycho-babble
nonsense...I so very much appreciate your caring words and in no way am I
trying to disrespect them or you.

~~~
blub
I see, I was making some assumptions that turned out to be incorrect. To be
honest, I also find it difficult to really trust someone, because there are so
many things that can go wrong.

I don't know any method of getting over this, I try to accept that I can be
betrayed and that it's going to be painful. At the same time, I am pretty sure
that I would survive and come out ok out of such a hurtful event. Not
necessarily stronger, better or even the same, but ok.

But there are no certainties and no methods to make oneself invulnerable. At
one point we maybe have to accept our humanity, that we hurt, we bleed and we
die and sometimes we can't do anything to prevent those things, so we might as
well enjoy life as we can.

------
quietone1
I see many, many homeless people everyday. Last week I was in a hurry and sat
down on the subway next to a homeless man. Within seconds I almost passed out
from the overpowering stench of his clothes and body. For some reason, perhaps
pity, I didn't want him to see me get up and move to the other end of the car.
So I sat there for an agonizing 10 minutes until my stop, and gasped for fresh
air when I emerged from the underground. I thought about it - what if I was
him, and all I wanted was to not smell like that. How would I do it? I'd need
a shower with soap, and new clothes - no way we could clean those old ones.
With no friends or support, I had no idea how I'd do it short of begging
enough for a bar of soap and then jumping into a chlorinated fountain in a
park. And then what? Maybe I smell better for a day or two and then it starts
all over again. I'll try to be less judgmental about the homeless, after
realizing that.

------
Rainymood
>“Three out of five of our siblings have committed suicide. Mike’s mother is
the third,”

Jezus christ that is simply terrible ...

------
comrade1
I always find it fascinating how quickly a family fortune disappears (although
in this case it sounds like it's on the lower end of the scale of wealth). It
usually only takes one or two generations.

One way of reducing the chance of this is to not split the inheritance. Even a
vast fortune is reduced to below self-sustaining levels in just a couple of
generations.

In my family I had a polish/Lithuanian aristocracy ancestor that owned some
towns and large landholdings (he had some sort of wood monopoly). In three
generations the families were still wealthy and in the aristocracy but were
living off their title more than their wealth.

Another friend of mine's family from India who's grandfather was some sort of
king has been splitting their lands up each generation. They recently sold off
the las of their lands that had the ancestral home, a couple of forts and
temples, etc and now are all just living pretty mundane suburban lives.

~~~
moe
_I always find it fascinating how quickly a family fortune disappears_

That's a good thing and the reason why e.g. the Inheritance Tax exists.

Inherited wealth sabotages the fundamental reward mechanisms of society and
ultimately harms it by bringing the wrong people into positions of power.

~~~
levosmetalo
While I agree here with you, it's not only the inheritance that saboatages
this reward mechanism. It's also the capital gains. If we were to value hard
work and real contribution, then income / salary tax should be much lover that
capital gains tax. We should just value human effort more.

~~~
armenarmen
the counter argument here is whether or not government wants spending rather
than saving/investing to be encouraged. Higher taxes on capital gains i.e.
investing discourages that, at least in principle (unavoidable pun)

~~~
pjc50
Capital gains taxation steers investing from mere asset appreciation into
actual productive investment - land improvement, machinery, building, etc. -
which is usually granted various sorts of tax break.

~~~
jessaustin
Rather, capital gains tax steers investments away from the taxing jurisdiction
and toward other jurisdictions. If the state wishes to maximize revenue, it
must be patient, and wait for the wealthy to die before demanding its cut. Of
course there are political reasons to do otherwise...

