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.
> 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.
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.
It's wasted potential. The modern world and all its conveniences and all its resources didn't just come about. It was built up, out of nothing, by people who saw how shitty the world looked then and wanted to live in a better one. A better world is not being built by dumpster divers. It's certainly not being built by dumpster divers managing to convince other people that dumpster diving is somehow noble.
Every age had its dumpster divers, its people who, rather than to throw their weight behind efforts to create better institutions, to better understand the world around them, decided a better world wasn't worth the hassle. That this world, with all these things that all their ancestors spent their lives building, is stupid and should be renounced. These people are absolutely a burden, and should not be listened to.
It made sense in a weird sort of way when the Jains were doing it, religious renunciation is sometimes the only way you can make a political statement without getting killed, but it didn't take long until they had made their point but kept on doing it after it stopped actually being noble.
Yes, there's a lot of crappy things about the world. Roll up your sleeves and help fix them!
I wouldn't be so quick to cast anyone off, especially someone who undertakes personal initiatives such as this to ensure their own survival. The "economy" might suffer if more people adopted this attitude, but its hardly the end of the world. It is not our position to judge if this person's potential is wasted or not, you can't really be any more subjective.
I think this guy would probably take issue w/ your use of the word better. If one man's better is another man's worse, perhaps "better" exists only in your head.
Also, this quote comes to mind:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
The fact that there are dumpster divers points to there being wasteful behaviour in our society. If the shit being thrown out is of use to someone, it should be recycled and reused instead of filling landfills of waste, only to be replaced with the next thing the media tells us we need. If we weren't being wasteful, there would be no dumpster divers.
The dumpster divers are doing the environment a favour. They are recycling what would otherwise be needless waste.
The modern world's conveniences were built up by people who saw how shitty the world looked and wanted to change it. Yes. I agree 100%. The modern world's conveniences are amazing, useful and provide us with a far greater standard of living. What is shit though is the constant treadmill of planned obsolescence, designing for a shelf life, goods that are designed only to last as long as their warranties before they are replaced. We used to live in a society where things were made to last for a lifetime, to be passed on to our heirs when we're gone. Heirloom furniture that can be passed down for generations over hundreds or thousands of years. This has been replaced by pressboard furniture that we're lucky if it lasts for 5-10 years before it's thrown out and replaced. That is what's shit about society, accumulation of the same shit quality stuff, paying over and over again to replace things that don't last. Things that could and should last, just because of what? Planned obsolescence.
He found something he didn't like about society and he found a way to fix it. He helped fix it by not contributing to it any more. In addition to this, he is living on the waste of society - the bits that weren't good enough for you and were heading to an eyesore of a landfill somewhere that got carved out of the landscape damaging the environment.
It's funny how the hip thing right now is "reduce, reuse, recycle". If you're the guy showing a viable way for every family to do this without any emotional discomfort and you're a hero. But the second you dig through other people's trash and do the same thing, you're a pariah.
The fact is capitalist society does have a problem, we're extraordinarily wasteful and we're chasing constantly unattainable happiness. It's unattainable because our happiness is based on the constantly turning wheels of capitalism. We spend money emotionally because the media feeds our need to buy stuff because: "We deserve it", "it'll make us look better", "it'll give us a 6 pack", "it'll help us lose 50 lbs in 6 weeks", "it'll make us more desirable to the opposite sex", "it'll make us feel better", "it'll do whatever it is we need it to do to make us feel better than the last thing we were told to buy that also promised to make us feel better but only worked as long as we didn't realize this other shinier more expensive thing came out."
So someone who can come along that can take the waste and repurpose it into something useful and spare the environment in the process is noble. That's not to say that you're not noble, perhaps what you throw out is genuinely of no use to you, perhaps the bit you didn't throw out was genuinely useful to you and you used it for a noble purpose. Perhaps instead of throwing it out, you could trade it with someone who has use for it that has something that would be of use to you?
And nobody suggested renouncing all of our ancestors work... but renouncing the bits that don't work is healthy. We no longer allow slavery in the West; women can vote; we offer support to those trying to quit drugs, alcohol and smoking; same sex marriage is starting to become widely acceptable; we can touch a piece of glass in our pocket and talk to whole communities of people scattered to the four corners of the earth, the list goes on. There is much about society that we can be really proud of. But there's nothing wrong with renouncing the bits that don't work, nor is there anything wrong with taking steps to mitigate them in your own life and being vocal about them to help mitigate them in other people's lives.
"Be the change you want to see in the world" - Gandhi
True, but only on a limited basis. It's not scalable, and in keeping with the GP's point, it's important not to draw too grandiose a claim out of this. It doesn't take too many people trying to do this before it would stop working and become much less like "scavanging off an affluent society" and much more "nature, red in tooth and claw". To those who are willing to do this, god-speed, but you haven't found a universally better lifestyle that all should look at in awe and agree that it's a trenchant criticism of the unnecessary nature of the rat race of society or something; you've just found a niche that works for you, but you're still consuming the output of the "rat race" and you really shouldn't forget it.
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.
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.
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 :)
Interesting! I've always wondered how people managed to have families while traveling the world.
I very much prefer to travel alone, because being stuck miles from home with an unhappy partner is a special kind of hell. It can also be quite lonely to be alone on the road though.
"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.
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.
> 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.
"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."
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.
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.
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.
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.