This was really great to read. Recently, I read Ted Kaczynski's "Industrial Society and its Future", aka the Unabomber Manifesto. The idea of anarcho-primitivist living is actually really attractive in theory, and this is a great example of someone actually living this lifestyle in practice. It seems tough. I'm not so sure I could essentially live a life of vagrancy and dumpster diving. Maybe I have been overly socialized and sold ideas that status and comfort are more important than freedom from "wage slavery". But I think author also concedes that there is a spectrum for everyone, and just doing your best to reduce reliance on society will be to your benefit.
At least for me, a step in this direction would be to go thrift shopping from here on out for clothing, and to learn how to repair clothing. Also, living in SF, there is a bakery nearby that puts their unsold baguettes for free on the street every night. I shouldn't think of myself being above picking some of those up. I guess the idea is just to live a little more sustainably and produce less waste.
Thrift shopping is one way I deal with the ethical dilemma of overseas wage slavery. If possible, I try to buy things used. Stuff like furniture, clothes, and decor often can be found in excellent condition used, sometimes even substantially cheaper.
I do not try quite so hard with performance gear (I'm an athlete) or food. The amount of time and risks are just much higher for both of those categories. For example,
trail runners are just destroyed after 500 miles, but often look the same as a pair with 50. Also electronics, I'll definitely pay full price for RAM, hard drives, etc.
The two main problems are: his notion of freedom, which is too simplistic (almost akin to absence of conditioning) and his rose-colored view of an imaginary past which dis not exist ever (past without technology in which life was a kind of perpetual paradise).
Otherwise, the reading is interesting.
But being free is something in the heart, as so many mystics of all religions living in labour camps have taught us.
I don't think Kaczynski offers very good solutions; they're unbalanced and far too extreme: he throws out the baby with the bathwater. But I do think he correctly identifies several severe pain points in our society that not enough people are talking about; I think that's the real value of Kaczynski's work.
I think it's unfortunate that Kaczynski resorted to such extreme measures to publish his work, which I think has put many people off (not too dissimilar to how the IRA put off many people from the Catholics' rightful cause, or the PLO/Hamas in Palestine, etc.)
Please, let's not keep up this nutty craziness of crediting a deranged terrorist for ideas that he stole outright from serious anarcho-primitivist theorists and scholars who have never engaged in the slightest sort of politicized violence. It's just disgraceful.
Please, let's not build the habit of disregarding ideas because we don't like the mouth they come from. If an idea is good it's good, if it's flawed it's flawed. Ideas should be able to stand or fall by their own merit. I'm not going to defend the Unabomber's actions, but I don't agree that we should disregard every thought he ever had because he's a terrorist; that's a cop out and not a convincing one at that.
It's also reductive, as the situation with Kaczynski is a hell of a lot more complex than "deranged terrorist". We aren't doing anybody any favors, least of all ourselves, by reducing history and people to the simplest headlines that don't represent any of the nuances of reality.
If they were doing it as a publicity stunt to get their contributions noticed? Then yes, I think there is a good argument for doing so because of moral hazard. Doing otherwise incentivizes undesirable behavior in the other people who have made similar contributions but haven't achieved infamy.
What better way to understand the flaws in the system than understand the gripes of those who were driven truly to the edge? He didn't exist in a vacuum. Most "deranged terrorists" you have to really read between the lines of what they're saying to see how the system failed them, because it's easy to place blame in the wrong places, but he was smart and eloquent (which deranged people can be). Looking at what he got right, what he got wrong, and how he fails at a solution is important - if ignored then people coming to it will see nothing to refute it, just a lot of people avoiding looking at it. In a sense the Unabomber manifesto is a visible symptom of some invisible systemic problems.
You don't have to agree with the conclusions to see value in something - heck, I see Marx discussed in republican think tank pieces occasionally because they agree with some parts of his analysis, even if they disagree fundamentally with his proposed solutions.
Maybe; but I'm not familiar with anyone who has stated the case so well, although he obviously had predecessors as anyone has. Perhaps a failing on my part, but there's probably a reason that his writings have endured in spite of the person. Either way, I think it's a mistake to dismiss ideas merely on account of who either proposed or popularized them. I think the ideas can be divorced from the person.
Or more contemporary; personally I think Donald Trump was a horrible president and all-round horrible person. But I also think he occasional said some things where he was actually right, and not everything he did as president was wrong either. Too often do I see people dismiss things merely on account of "Trump saidit!" I understand the sentiment, but you risk not addressing problems merely on account of who brings them to attention, which at best means the problem continues to exist, and at worst ignoring them makes them worse. This can be very dangerous.
At any rate, if you know of better authors to read, then please, let us know.
I would just add Neil Postman's Technopoly as a much easier read.
I have never been able to get through either of those Ellul books and have tried several times. I am not even sure if it is Ellul himself or translated French thought in general I find so painful.
Checkout The Burnout Society, The Disappearance of Rituals, and The Palliative Society.
It's difficult to know if the language stems from a "lost in translation" problem, but I enjoy the writing tremendously, especially for its mind-expanding quality. It's like a gateway drug.
The writing is aphoristic - like reading an anti-David Foster Wallace - phenomenological minimalist vs. metafiction maximalist but with similar insights and mind-changing impact.
It took me several hours to read a 12 page chapter because of the need for lookup, learning, references, and reflection.
To me, Dabrowski's positive disintegration plays a significant role in helping to frame the discussion here since "dropping out" can be easily mapped onto one of Dabrowski's levels in the positive disintegration framework.
Regardless, the tension between the individual and society plays a significant role in the work of these three authors.
Many years ago, I was poor enough to live this way for a while. It's not as bad as you might imagine, as long as you live some place with good dumpsters and know how to find them. Really, the worst thing about it was that if your resources are sufficiently scarce and unpredictable that you're motivated to learn how to live this way, then you most likely have a bunch of other unpleasant problems, like food and shelter insecurity, and you are probably suffering a lot of stress and anxiety because of it.
Also, hunter-gatherer societies are societies; they offer mutual aid and support and close relationships. Our society works differently, and if you're stressed enough to learn dumpster diving, then there's a good chance that you need more social support and close relationships than you have readily available.
Yes, I found that to be true back in the 1980s. Some were better than others. There was even one I knew of where the employees were fairly organized about how they packed their dumpsters, so that it was easy for people to find and retrieve the discarded food that was in good shape.
This isn't easy and to be done well, involves a sewing machine. But there is another way: have someone repair your clothes for you! It's usually quite cheap and very effective.
I have very few items of clothing and usually wear them for 5-10 years, sometimes longer for things I don't use often (like a winter coat).
> This isn't easy and to be done well, involves a sewing machine
My mom taught me to sew when I was young. I find it generally easy, no sewing machine required. I repair most of my clothing with a $10 sewing kit from Walmart. Every couple years or so I go and buy some more thread and maybe needles. Any clothes that get too far gone to repair go to the scrap pile, which I'll use for patches, or maybe rags in the garage. T-shirts generally aren't worth the effort, but just about anything else I can usually sew up in about 30 minutes or so by hand. Might not look great but these clothes turn into work clothes after I repair them.
Have you considered the wages and working conditions of the humans that manufactured that cheap new pair of jeans? We’re not talking about saving you money, we’re talking about you accepting certain trade offs (inconvenience, possibly increased cost or needing to learn a new skill), so that you can feel better about avoiding contributing to human suffering in sweat shops.
Another perspective is, if you are buying jeans that are not economical to repair - considering buying better quality jeans! With some research, you might even find high quality jeans made by people earning a living wage under healthy working conditions. Jeans you might love for a decade or more (good for the planet too!).
If you’re not open to these trade offs, I totally get it, most people aren’t - but this thread is not for you.
I grabbed an old, used sewing machine in grad school to repair some things. Sewing is one of the simplest "practical" skills, I'd encourage more people to learn the basics. I have taught a bunch of people in about a day, at least enough to make very simple garments and patch more complicated ones.
The real downside of it, now that I'm older, is that it's very time consuming, especially for larger projects. Sinking a couple hours into getting set up, measuring, cutting, sewing, etc is just hard to fit in. Clicking a couple buttons on Amazon and getting it off my to do list is often a lore more important.
Being older I feel myself drawn to the shortcut of buy something and throw out/donate the old. Time is precious. Yet I try to remind myself of the growing mountain of landfill that I've been building with every trip to the garbage can.
(Typing this from a thrift store parking lot where I'm trying to avoid buying more new clothes.)
This resonates. It’s kind of like a carbon footprint lifestyle inflation. For me, I’m using more paper towels around the house than what I allowed myself to use when I was younger.
Honest question to the environmental experts here: what’s the best way for me to throw money at this personal problem? Carbon credits? Donations to particular nonprofits? Other ideas?
Sewing machines are often free on Craigslist, or at least cheap. If you're living frugally you should join a Hacker group or tech shop as these will almost always have an industrial sewing machine and free laptops/electronics/parts.
My buddy does maintenance-meditation (Maintetation?) where he hand repairs an article of clothing every morning. There is a zen to repairing your bike and clothes with minimal tools.
> What I recommend instead is to separate your money from your love. Get the most low-stress source of income that you can find, and then do exactly what you love for free. It might eventually make you money or it might not. "Do what you love and the money will follow" is mostly false. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make any money from it -- but you still need money."
But he also has an important caveat: "But if you make an effort to combine your income and your love, you are likely to end up compromising both, making a poverty income by doing something you don't quite love, or no longer love."
I love photography and for a while (approx 20 years ago) considered moving to it as a full-time job. But it quickly became obvious that the actual shutter-clicking would be a tiny part of running an overall photography business (and then smartphones and Alamy happened and the bottom dropped out of stock photography). So I'm glad I stuck with my mainstream job. It paid well enough to live and afford expensive lenses and the wildlife trips where I could put them through their paces. And from my current 60-year-old perspective, it also paid for retirement savings and pensions which I wouldn't have now if I'd tried to be a wedding photographer, say.
The other thing that is sometimes overlooked is the importance of health. If you drop out and then get very ill, and have a very seat-of-the-pants lifestyle, things can get dark and uncomfortable very quickly.
Not to say which is the right approach, just pointing out that it's worth considering how different future-yous will look back on your decision now. One who prioritises memories over possessions. One who isn't healthy and feels the cold. One who wants children. Etc
I've thought that some IT jobs might fit the bill, particularly if one only needs to work a small number of hours each day.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a gas station, which was mostly low-stress and even had a lot of down time that I could use for reading. But the pay was terrible and I had no benefits.
It probably depends on what you're used to and how you handle stress.
I'm a web developer and find it incredibly low-stress in comparison to my previous lives. No back-to-back double shifts, no risk of working a full day and not getting paid for it, no abusive management, no rampant substance abuse at work, no "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean", no pressure to come into work when you're sick, no getting written up or even fired for being <5minutes late to work, no punitive scheduling... I could go on.
I see people complaining about the software industry and I really don't get it. This shit is so comfortable, easy and straightforward in comparison to the kind of work most people have to do.
Wish I read this (with preface) before I "dropped out" and experienced the descension he outlines.
> Do not drop out. Instead, try to stop yourself from committing suicide until you can find a job that is so non-hellish that it does not make you suicidal
Immediately after quitting my job, I rode a high of investing my time in all of those things I loved. A year later the best I could do was ping pong back and forth between the same set of things, giving up before receiving any rewards. Eventually I found myself in bed overwhelmed by my meaninglessness, trying to rationalize why I should not kill myself.
It took getting a job, which I don't even like, to help drag me out of the gutter.
I have fantasies of specific jobs that are completely out of my industry (IT). They pay a lot less. Finding meaning in that is how I would pursue it if I had the cash.
It sounds like you took time off to find yourself but came up short with the long-term job plan, doing what you loved?
I, too, fantasize about leaving IT and just working behind a bar.
But just like in engineering, every path has its own set of trade-offs. And part of the pay trade-off is that while I can live comfortably on smaller pay, I can earn my financial independence WAYYY earlier on tech bucks, then suddenly pay becomes a non issue.
I came up short in finding something that felt worth my time/energy, even if it didn't pay.
Part of it is as the author suggests, that it can be hard to sustain a love for something that you're also trying to make economically viable. They are to some degree competing concerns (not everyone loves entrepreneurship).
But also there's value in something being scarce. Which is why in the first few months I was "working" 40h weeks on projects that I had only been giving 3-5h/week before.
But eventually having 100% of my own time became status quo, and that fire was gone.
If you are considering skilled manual labor, you might find it interesting to read the comments from current and former plumbers and electricians and others in this thread. The tldr is your body will wear out much faster than your mind will.
I always wonder if people like this guy have some resources like family money in the background that can rescue them if things go wrong. I could imagine myself dropping out and living a simple life but I have no safety net in the background so I would fear problems if there are serious problems like health. And the older you get the more difficult it is to turn things around on your own.
I think this very similar to risk taking as entrepreneur. It's much easier to do if you know that in case everything goes to hell there is a backup plan. You may never use it but it relieves a lot of *justified) anxiety.
It's all documented on his blog/website, but basically yes. A few years after writing this, he received an inheritance that allowed him to buy a subutban house and stash away enough to secure his (still very frugal) lifestyle. I'm sure a financially stable family made it easier even before then.
He caught quite a lot of flack from some former followers when the windfall happened. But he has always maintained that his goal isn't ideological purity pr proscribing something anyone can follow, but maximizing his own free time using whatever reaources he can.
I assume the windfall didn’t come as total surprise but he knew that it would be coming one day. He should have named his article not “how to drop out” but “how I dropped out” and also disclosed the full picture.
> I think this very similar to risk taking as entrepreneur. It's much easier to do if you know that in case everything goes to hell there is a backup plan.
It's really hard to get past the idea of a safety net, but I think that net is mostly an illusion -- although a very helpful one which also has real world non-illusion benefits but those benefits end up being for things that are outside of our direct control.
For example:
Person A has 3 million in the bank that's tucked away in case disaster strikes, how it got there isn't important but it's there.
They decide to quit their job that provides income to work on a "passion project business" where the goal is to do what they like while also making money (ignoring the advice in the author's drop out article). They don't make anything substantial for 1 year but eventually and gradually turn it into a $500,000 / year business over the next 3 years.
You could read that and be like "wow it's so easy for them, with FU money sitting in the bank they could tolerate the risk and even if they failed it's not a problem at all" and I think to a high degree that's right. If you do the same thing but as Person B and have $100,000 in the bank this changes everything. Technically you could live on that for a few years ($30k / year is very achievable if you're single while still living comfortably in most places in the US) but there's this idea that if your business fails that 100k is gone and now you have $0 savings where as if Person A failed they probably made more than 100k in interest off that 3 million in the worst case scenario.
So where does that leave us?
There's no doubt that Person A is in a better position, but I think if you decouple the safety net from any decision making around running your business for those 3-4 years and both people executed on their idea as if they had 3 million in the bank then maybe the outcome would be the same which means the safety net never gets used in which case it's an illusion. I think folks without the safety net might make hasty decisions or give up sooner because their decisions are tied into money instead of letting things unwind on their own terms, they never get to mentally free themselves of obligations because they're still always on the clock.
This gets further amplified if we introduce Person C who has $0 savings and instead takes out a business loan from the government or a bank, they are geared up for failure because they have to pay that loan back or face serious consequences where as Person B "only" drained their savings. I would love to hear some stories of folks being successful in this case.
To wrap things up, I understand that it's much more than an illusion because there's definitely not a 100% success rate here, Person A could have just as easily tanked that business and they're in a much better spot than the person with 100k, but what this really boils down to is having more chances to try. Since success isn't guaranteed in either case (big safety net vs not so big safety net) and independent businesses can either succeed or fail on their own I think our only choice is to accept reality for what it is and roll the dice.
> Some of the happiest people I know have dropped out only a short distance.
One of the greatest problems with the concept of “just dropping out” is the attachment to the idea of happiness. Happiness being one of the most oppressive demands of society and yet the narrowest of requirements.
Would be interesting to live in an environment where happiness wasn’t the primary goal. That seems like true freedom and entirely compatible with dropping-in or out.
As my Grandpa (child of the great depression) said in his typical ineloquent yet wise way: "Back in my day, when we weren't happy we were fine with it!"
In the last few years I've tried to shift from seeking happiness to seeking meaningfulness as the first order pursuit.
Happiness is like a red herring for meaning, or it's a side effect of a meaningful activity. Or it's something you seek when you experience a dearth of meaning.. not sure. But it's certainly just one or a narrow set of experiences that make up being human.
Definitely, agree. And before someone argues with the expected rebuttal, I think there’s a difference between chasing happiness and rationally acting upon your wants.
In the US at least, “the pursuit of happiness” is such a fundamental concept, people really aren’t challenged to question it.
I first discovered Ran's site (through this essay) around 15 years ago, and it's been a big influence on me. I ended up following most of How to Drop Out more or less by accident.
I think it's generally good advice for a certain type of person. Someone who resonates with this part: "If you have the mental focus and self-discipline to be successful in the dominant society, but you don't like it, here's how you can change your value system to reduce your need for money and status, and gain some benefits of industrial civilization without being in a position of forced obedience."
It's true like someone said that it's basically a crustier version of FIRE, but probably more achievable for most people.
Cool to see a link to Ran's writing on here. I've followed his blog for something like 12+ years. I'm pretty sure his writings were some of my first exposure to the ideas of dropping out, primitivist philosophy, and FIRE (were people calling it FIRE back then)? I kept coming back to his site because he always seemed to offer viewpoints on things I'd never considered or seen others say. He could distill long articles down into a few articulate ideas that really made me think in new ways and turned my brain on.
He had quite an influence on my own personal journey in life. I was already becoming quite dissatisfied with a life in tech, cranking out code for companies I didn't care about, when I found his blog in my mid 20s. I got pretty hooked on a lot of the more hardcore philosophy around dropping out, primitivism, homesteading, etc. I also became fixated on the idea of saving/investing and retiring early, and that formed my main life goal for nearly a decade.
I did manage to FIRE and mellowed out a lot on the more radical ideas of dropping out, and developed a more balanced view towards tech instead of disdain for it. The world is complicated, and the idea of just dropping all tech and going back to the past sounds so silly and infantile to me now, but I guess it comforted me in a time of existential dread. Anyway, not sure why I'm launching into a story of my life here, just felt nostalgic seeing this link up on HN today.
To me, learning to live on the cheap to drop out, and planning to FIRE are essentially the same thing: removing the "work" part from life, because you don't love it, or divorcing what you do on the weekend (work of love that brings no money) from what you do during the week (stuff you hate but brings money)
Personally, I love working and doing interesting things, and being with other people and society itself!
So my personal plan is the opposite of FIRE: work until I die regardless of what happens on the side like payouts, because I enjoy what I do: stopping what I do just because something happened on the side would be like punishing myself, then waiting to die out of boredom? Doesn't seem like such a bright idea to me!
Maybe it's different if you don't like modern society, or maybe other people, or the idea of work itself?
"To those in the West who are more familiar with the concept of ikigai, it’s often associated with a Venn diagram with four overlapping qualities: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for."
Oh, the ethos is old indeed, much older than that.
Paul Lafargue's "The Right To Be Lazy" was written in 1883 and, if we're to make an abstraction of the formulations ever so typical for that time and the historical context, as well as the strong ideology that underpins the work, it makes for an entirely interesting read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-ri...
Nice essay. I wonder where does helping family come into play here?
Let’s say your family is poor and could use extra help. It seems selfish to deliberately take a lower paying job when a higher paying job could help your loved ones.
Also what happens when you meet someone and want to start a family? Although the author may be ok with certain constraints in living, their spouse and children may have different preferences. In that situation it also seems selfish to pursue this low income life.
All in all the essay seems to work well for people who are okay with living alone and apart from their family and loved ones.
Heh I think about this, I could have paid off my student loans but instead I helped my families the last two years and ongoing. It's like this tax but I just push myself to make more. It's a good cause I mean I literally got them a well one time in their village you know that sucks not having immediate access to water... but then it spreads ah man. You get over a hundred requests on FB all these people finding out who you are/asking you for money. Anyway I ended up deleting my FB account and just keeping in contact with my blood family on another account.
Side note Wise is the least PITA way to move money and no these people don't know how to use crypto.
thanks for a different perspective on this. I think the idea of "dropping out" is largely by and for "children of empire"--whatever their socioeconomic background
Yeah I'm unfortunately a nice guy/hard to say no. I sometimes wish I was more of an ahole just so I didn't burden myself. So yeah, I'm not trying to really say karma or whatever, even though I myself can't pull it off.
Just talked to them again (once a week on my dedicated FB phone for mental separation). I think it's worth it (supporting them every month), I mean it's definitely having a positive benefit on their lives. I would just buy another device/toy when they could get food/bills for a month kind of thing.
But yeah I battle that thing of "my money". Granted I still want to not be poor eventually. And buying something nice for yourself isn't a bad thing.
> Also what happens when you meet someone and want to start a family? Although the author may be ok with certain constraints in living, their spouse and children may have different preferences. In that situation it also seems selfish to pursue this low income life.
I'd expect lifestyle to be one of the things people take into account when considering starting a life together. So if the potential spouse had different, incompatible, preferences, I'd expect the couple to not get to the point of starting a family.
The question still stands for the kinds, though, but I'd expect this to always be the case. Kids practically never get a say in their parents' choices and have to make do.
Interesting article, but I couldn't help but feel that much of it wasn't really 'dropping out' but more of relying on others. These passages in particular struck me as basically taking something from the system without paying into it:
> If you're charming, you can find a partner or spouse who will "support" you by permitting you to sleep and cook someplace without asking for money.
I couldn't tell how tongue-in-cheek this was, but clearly you're relying on your partner not to 'drop out' in this case.
> I stopped buying music and books (exceptions in exceptional cases) and got in the habit of using the library.
Who pays for these music and books if you don't contribute almost anything in taxes?
One of my favorite websites. Ran has changed the way I think about a lot of things, especially urban living vs rural homesteading. Well worth reading through the archives, watching the short documentary about him on youtube, or grabbing a copy of his old zine “Civilization Will Eat Itself”.
My favorite and most entertaining essay to read. Reading his other later writings it looks like his views are not rigid and are always evolving. The blog as been quite impressionable on me since the mid to late 2000s as a university student.
These sorts of articles don't help me as much as they might, because my motivation to work isn't really 'doing what I love', it's more 'making the changes I want to see'.
At least for me, a step in this direction would be to go thrift shopping from here on out for clothing, and to learn how to repair clothing. Also, living in SF, there is a bakery nearby that puts their unsold baguettes for free on the street every night. I shouldn't think of myself being above picking some of those up. I guess the idea is just to live a little more sustainably and produce less waste.