How Mark Boyle Lives on $0 a Year

Over at credit.com I reviewed the book Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomics Living, by Mark Boyle

[I]n 2008 Mark Boyle decided to try living for a year without money. His self-imposed rules were simple: he would close his bank account and not spend or receive money (including checks and credit cards). He would live off-grid—that meant he would produce his own energy for illumination, heat, food preparation, and communicating with the outside world. He sold his houseboat and used the proceeds (a few thousand dollars) to set things up. This included buying a $300 solar panel to keep his laptop and cell phone charged (he accepted incoming calls, which he could do without subscribing to a cell phone plan.) He obtained an old trailer for free from a woman who wanted to get rid of it. He made a deal with an organic farm to let him park the trailer on the land in exchange for a few hours work each day. He built a compost toilet near his trailer to harvest the “humanure” for his gardening needs. He set up a solar shower, which consisted of a black plastic bag and a rubber hose to bathe with. For heating the trailer he bought a wood-burning stove made from an upcycled propane tank, and for cooking he built a “rocket stove,” designed to produce high-heat using small pieces of wood. A bicycle provided transportation.
He started his year of moneyless existence on international “Buy Nothing Day” (the day after Thanksgiving, which is the biggest shopping day of the year). And he wrote about his experiences in his book, Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomics Living.

Read the rest

Mark Frauenfelder is the founder of Boing Boing and the editor-in-chief of MAKE and Cool Tools. Twitter: @frauenfelder. Come and hear Mark speak at the ALA conference in Chicago on July 1.

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Brainspore

Book royalties will be paid in the form of toilet paper.
- chellberty
  
  no need solar shower also works as a bidet.
- Guest
  
  You can always use phone book pages.
http://profiles.google.com/alfredopeine Alfredo Jara

He sort of started from scratch, because he took a lot of stuff from his “previous life”, such as notebook, cell phone, clothing, house apparel, etc, which is somewhat unfair. Now he should start with nothing but the clothing he is wearing. That would be quite something.
Djinn PAWN

So in order to live for $0 a year you need a few thousand dollars to get set up… oh and a few more thousand to have already purchased a cell, laptop etc.

So living on $0 is easy as long as you have already had enough money to make it that way.
- BBNinja
  
  “oh and a few more thousand to have already purchased a cell, laptop etc. ”
  
  A laptop and a cell phone costs a few thousand dollars? :/
Kauri Kaljuste

I really don’t think, that it’s really that big of a deal, because he did have a few thousand $ for preparations. It is a real challenge to live like that, no doubt, but he should have started with no money and ended with no money. (or you know, just put the money away for that time and NOT USE IT! Even for preps.)
Maybe next time? (it includes not using the things already bought)

+ I was too late to post it ;)
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1045256144 Charles Milner

So he demonstrated that it’s possible to live like a homeless person. I bet that is very re-assuring to the homeless people reading this blog.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  So he demonstrated that it’s possible to live like a homeless person. I bet that is very re-assuring to the homeless people reading this blog.
  
  We have readers and commenters who are homeless.
  - Guest
    
    It’s true!
- Guest
  
  :/
http://twitter.com/michaelsayyes michael b

Funny how vast swaths of humanity live nearly like this every day, and yet we find it necessary to “experiment” with it. Maybe it is our consumerism addled brain cells make us perceive this as and exception, rather than the rule, at least for many on dear planet Earth.
ZikZak

Experiments like this are wonderful for prompting discussion and introspection about what it means to be a consumer, and what alternatives there may be.

But they’re also hopelessly naive. The limited scope (for a year) carries with it the promise that this is only a temporary arrangement. So the strategies and insights aren’t really useful for implementing in one’s life long term. Anyone can freeload off others for a period of time, but eventually the gift economy will run dry unless you’re contributing back. Anyone can subsist for a while on their existing resources, but eventually your tools and possessions will wear out, and then shit gets real.

And the fact is, there are plenty of people on the planet who live on $0 a year, and who have done so for their whole lives. There are entire cultures which have done this sustainably for generations. But they don’t get books published about their lifestyles. Why is that?
- http://profiles.google.com/kevintkeith Kevin T. Keith
  
  Maybe it just has a different point from the one you assume. It’s a demonstration project, intended to be provocative, as you note. It’s not a full economic program. A limited project doesn’t have to be naive – being limited is part of the plan. It isn’t intended to answer every question.
  
  There are plenty of books written about people in small-scale economies. As to why this one is particularly of note, it’s because it depicts someone living a subsistence lifestyle in the midst of a technologized economy. It’s written for people in our society, who have forgotten that small-scale is even possible. Obviously nobody needs to remind hunter-gatherers that such a lifestyle exits, but people in the US do need to be reminded that they don’t have to sell their entire lives to the cash-based rat race. That’s a reasonable point to make, isn’t it?
  - brillow
    
    So he’s saying you don’t have to live in the “rat race” if you want to sell your stuff and can find someone to give you a free house and some people to let you park it on their land?
    
    Is the solution to hyperconsumerism learning how to mooch off of people? Does this book posit any solutions? Or is it just “Gee Whiz!”
    
    Is this book the socioeconomic equivalent of the vinegar/baking soda volcano?
- obeyken
  
  In fairness, ZikZak, there are lots of books on lots of cultures, the entire discipline of anthropology, etc.
Mister44

Yeah… billions of people do this every year. In America it is even easier because there is a plethora of junk people will give away that you can use. AND we have access to fun things like solar panels. Try the same thing in a country where they pick through mine dumpings for pieces of coal, or sift through landfills for anything they can eat/use.
http://twitter.com/mulveyr mulveyr

I hate to be a Debbie Downer, because willingly simplifying your life like that is no mean feat. but without other people giving him significant items for free ( i.e. a trailer, or land that would certainly be way, way below market rates for the amount of work specified in the blurb, etc ), it never would have worked.
http://profiles.google.com/kevintkeith Kevin T. Keith

The comments above are well-taken, but what is their point? Yes, we know that billions of people live on a few dollars a day or less; yes we know it’s possible to live outside the technologized economy and that many homeless people do. But I take it that the point of this book was how far it’s possible to remain connected to mainstream society in the Western world and still radically reduce consumption. I presume he’s not encouraging homeless people to acquire a trailer and a laptop; he’s encouraging people who do have material comforts to adopt a less wasteful life, and re-think their ties to the corporate prison. He doesn’t spend money AND he’s not homeless – that’s the point. I gather, too, that he’s not advocating complete dismantling of the cash economy – just questioning how far you have to commit yourself to it. Take it for what it is, and chill out.
- brillow
  
  The point is that the book has no point. We get it! Consume less! Live simply! Don’t be a slave to consumerist culture!
  
  Tell me something I haven’t heard before.
  - tempbot
    
    “Consume less! Live simply! Don’t be a slave to consumerist culture!”
    
    But please buy my book.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      How dare he write a book about his experience!
      
      Seriously, does anything in the piece suggest that’s what’s happening? Have you read the book already? Is it really as cynical a ploy as you describe?
      - tempbot
        
        I sincerely doubt it’s a cynical ploy. For all I know he’s offering a pdf download (that you can totally get for free by going to a wi-fi hotspot and downloading it to your pre-no consumption lifestyle laptop). Still, I do enjoy taking the piss.
jackbird

The comments remind me of reading Walden in my high school English class and carping on how Thoreau went to friends’ houses for dinner, etc.; in the process more or less completely missing the point of the book.
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  The comments remind me of reading Walden in my high school English class and carping on how Thoreau went to friends’ houses for dinner, etc.; in the process more or less completely missing the point of the book.
  
  Many people would rather hurl themselves into the Crack of Doom than admit that other people might do things that are more interesting or daring than they themselves would ever attempt.
  - Jonathan Badger
    
    Actually, I think exactly the opposite is true — most people don’t bother pointing out that emperors have no clothes. Thoreau is made out to be a secular saint of self reliance when he was basically a moocher. Which is fine, but not daring or interesting at all.
http://fungibleconvictions.com/ Andrew Whitacre

What is it that gives me the oogiebuttwiggles about fertilizing my garden with my own humanure, but not so much if it was other people’s?
CH

If you are accepting phone calls, then you are subscibed to a phone service and on the grid. It says that he didn’t have to subscribe to a phone sevice plan, but I don’t see how he was able to do that (hmm, perhaps it works different in the US than it does in my country *shrug*).

About ”humanure”… it’s a good idea to have a composting toilet, no matter if you use the compost or not, but if I’m not totally wrong you need to let that compost sit for quite some time (a year or two), especially if you are using it in your garden. I wouldn’t have used it if it was less than a year old.

The big thing, I think, if you want to live ”for free” is getting clean water. The site is down atm, so I don’t know how he did it, but I would guess he got it from the farm on whose land he lived.

Edit: Hmm, now that I think about it, I want to know how he was able to get enough food. Sure, you can forage and garden, but the garden doesn’t grow in a blink of an eye and it would still be a bit limited. But, I guess if you live in a place with year round gardening it would be possible… if you have something to tide you over until it starts to produce. Guess I will have to wait for that article to come back up to get some answers. :)
- evanplus
  
  Maybe it was a disposable tracphone that he pre-paid for or had friends pay for. Either way you’re right- without a phone service, you can’t accept incoming calls.
  
  You *can* make emergency calls from any cell phone whether it’s actually serviced or not, though, maybe that’s what he meant and the report misinterpreted it.
kittnkat

it always amazes me how so many of the commentors on here just show up to put absolutly everything down, no matter how life-changing or banal it is…what’s up with you people? Are you stuck working miserable corporate jobs in beige cells?

If you’re that bitter you gotta do something about it, life is short, and bitching only makes things worse. Go out and do something, other than be a critic, and if you do something truly amazing and some boring jerk criticizes you, then you’ll see how important it is to change the world and not be petty and small and crabby, but be curious and hungry and alive.

Expand ur world troll there’s more to life than the dankness under ur bridge.
- http://www.geekforce.com Hugh Johnson
  
  The more you complain the longer god lets you live.
  
  (but I totally agree with you)
  - Dewi Morgan
    
    Bad apostrophe usage!
    
    There, that should get me at least another five minutes on this earth :D
- Mister44
  
  A valid point – but some times people get tired of everyone and their dog thinking what they are doing/into is important or interesting. It is exceptionally annoying when it entails, “Hey everyone, look what I did!*”
  
  *And by did, I mean had an idea about doing, and I sorta did it, but I had a lot of extra help that I didn’t really spell out in the beginning.
  
  I think the value of Mr. Boyles book is not that one can live on nothing – but that one can live with less.
- rafterman
  
  Uff ta, you talk a lot.
  - kittnkat
    
    yeah, especially since I should be doing about a thousand things right now…none of which include causing trouble on boingboing.
- obeyken
  
  Thank you, kittnkat. I’m going to change my life now because of what you said.
- Navin_Johnson
  
  Libertarian trolls with Galt envy?
- Spriggan_Prime
  
  “Are you stuck working miserable corporate jobs in beige cells?”
  
  That would be most of America. …at least those who are lucky to still have jobs right now. Wouldn’t that make you a bit bitter about a smug writer who had the luxury of ‘selling his house boat’ for start up capital to live like a bum for journalistic fodder. This is not new, nor did it change the world.
mat catastrophe

This is brilliant and will be absolutely useful when The Owners get tired of even throwing us scraps and we all *have* to live this way!

But, seriously, while this is – um – admirable and all, we need to be concerned about getting larger pieces of the pie out of the hands of the oligarchs and less time trying to be what they want us to be: moneyless paupers.
- SamSam
  
  But, seriously, while this is – um – admirable and all, we need to be concerned about getting larger pieces of the pie out of the hands of the oligarchs
  
  I think the idea is that we shouldn’t be thinking of the size of our slice of the pie as the value in our life.
  
  You can have a perfectly happy, productive, meaningful life with hardly any of the pie at all, especially if you stop worrying about how much the “oligarchs” have.
  
  (I assume we are talking about metaphorical pie here. No one said you can have a happy life without actual pie.)
  
  A nice little video on no-growth, or “plentitude,” economics: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/plenitude-economy-work-less-play-more.php
- Antinous / Moderator
  
  But, seriously, while this is – um – admirable and all, we need to be concerned about getting larger pieces of the pie out of the hands of the oligarchs and less time trying to be what they want us to be: moneyless paupers.
  
  How about moneyless non-paupers? A barter economy (which is at least partly what this project addresses) is a good way to get money resources out of the hands of the oligarchs.
http://imcravingpresidency.tumblr.com/ SedanChair

He sold his houseboat and used the proceeds (a few thousand dollars) to set things up.

*BZZZZZZZT* DISQUALIFIED thanks for playing
Orthodoxcaveman

“On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food.”

“For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.”

After reading hilarious lines like these I was convinced they were written by satirist Chris Morris.
brillow

Hey Kids! Do something weird for a while, like go without a cell phone for a day! Then write a book and watch the cash roll in!
- kittnkat
  
  it doesn’t matter, at least he did it, maybe someone else is gonna do it better based on what he did…it’s like when someone makes a painting and some dude goes “I could do that” oh yeah? Why dontcha!!!
Garmt

Wait, I read this book! Only then it was Walden and it was more philosophy and less readable.
Navin_Johnson

It’s funny how many commenters consider this utterly illegitimate and cynical. I guess you have to start off by being thrown out into the snow completely naked on a freezing January in order to “keep it real”…………….. and don’t tell anybody about it either.

Thumbs up to this dude.
http://www.facebook.com/evan.rappaport Evan Rappaport

A single healthy guy, with no kids, no doctor checkups, no dentist, whose clothes don’t wear out, and you take housing and food off the table, sure that’s doable for a year. If the vast majority of your income is disposable and you choose to not make or spend it then what is your point? You want to prove that you can go a year without eating in a restaurant? It’s a completely unrealistic scenario proving nothing, to bait people into getting outraged and buying a book.
awjt

If you live near a library or a community college, you can probably get free Internet access, and therefore skype. So you don’t really need to own the technology to use it.

You can heat water with a fire under a steel barrel and rig up a dip-bucket on a pulley to take hot showers that last longer than 30 seconds. If you use a straight razor [or a shovel], you don’t have to buy a bunch of shit to keep yourself cleaned up and presentable now and then.

You can grow a lot of your own food, and you can build a VERY comfortable hut out of rocks, mud mortar & sticks… and roof the place with scrap wood and cut up, flattened aluminum cans and plastic bottles.

You can barter for a ton of shit, just ask. You can forage and live close to the land.

Or you could scrap all that annoying country livin’ by just showering at work and sleeping in your car…

Believe me, I’ve thought this through. This is not hard to do. And it’s fun, actually.
http://halfbakedmaker.org Robert Baruch

I hate to sound like a libertarian (I’m really more of a hopeful post-scarcity singularitarian), but as a counterpoint to the book: I am able to obtain and use things that I don’t have the expertise to make myself because I do things in which I have expertise, and obtain trading tokens for that. I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with that. Admittedly that can lead to perversions of the system.

On the other hand, I don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with being Amish, either. And admittedly I’m having a hard time thinking of what kinds of perversions of the system can come from an Amish society. A shunning conspiracy, maybe. Or Amish wives with lovers on the side: they like two men a night. (Stolen shamelessly from Prairie Home Companion).
http://twitter.com/erg79 Evan G.

Oh good…another book that’s a memoir of a year-long gimmick.

I beg you, book editors: ENOUGH!
Emanuel Borsboom

David Arthur Johnston has been living without using money for over 7 years, and has dedicated the last several years to fighting for the right of all people, whether they have shelter or not, to sleep. He’s been incarcerated several times due to his refusing to even let someone else pay for his shelter (e.g. at homeless shelters). Since jail is also a place where someone else is paying for his shelter, he refuses to eat there, and has several times been close to severe health effects before being released. This is a man for whom living without money is not a gimmick, but something he is fighting for the right to do with his life. He, too, has a book out that’s been published by friends.
BBNinja

Do you guys really have to nitpick this to death? I mean…I get it…you do but still…I think you’re missing the point aka big picture.
AbleBakerCharlie

Memoirs of simple living like this, from “On Walden Pond” on down, are always in the business of managing two gently oppositional facts. The first is that the churning forces of modernity are not always in the business of maximizing the happiness of us hairless monkeys, and that some of those needs- congruence between skill of effort and the payoff, using your hands, seeing the outdoors, self-reliance, sociability- can be satisfied with simple or old ways of getting by, and to the extent they serve as useful reminders, they make for good reads.

On the other hands, such memoirs- again, from Walden on down, have been skirting and glossing over the fact the whole reason that modernity is awesome, and civilizations get built, is that doing all that, all the time, can really suck, and the products of other people, whether labor or technology, can enrich our lives (“enriching” in this case includes “making them possible,”) and that being able to do one thing you like to do, and in exchange get a thousand different things you’d like to have, and doing that seamlessly for money, is pretty damn awesome too, and to the extent they paper over that fact, they’re so much noisy axe grinding.

Now, I think some commentators have been a little unnecessarily harsh. Yes, he started with a nest egg of stunningly useful, bought and paid for items, on the one hand, and homeless people live essentially cash free all the time, (though basically by definition, they do not do so well, otherwise we have different names for them,) but living a comfortable, safe, satisfying life on a few thousand dollars worth of investment is still interesting, if not miraculous. Knowing that a clever person can both survive and improve themselves through periods of certain kinds of deprivation is both a comfort and a tool.

At the same time, amongst people I know who are actively engaged in these quasi-minimalistic lifestyles, the split between the happy and the miserable still exists, and it is mightily skewed towards the miserable. Not everyone is in the money-grubbing prison of going to the job they hate to pay for the house they never visit- some people have fun jobs and use them to buy sublime experiences, and meaningful goods, gifts, and to support causes, and to buy freedom from worry, and stoke their monkey fires by backpacking every month or two, or taking up woodworking, or acting in a play, or boxing, or whatever- and not everyone is so self-contained and skilled as to reap maximum rewards from being a freegan.

The good life and the free and simple life may have overlap, but one is not conditional on the other.
Navin_Johnson

I think this kind of stuff enrages the “Galt” dudes, because ‘lazy’ hippies and others actually experiment/succeed at doing it more than the types who are always threatening to.
- Mister44
  
  Actually, I think anyone with a true libertarian spirit would applaud his self reliance.
- Guest
  
  What DOESN’T enrage those Galt dudes? Srsly… :/
http://www.facebook.com/aelfscine Jon Bakos

So now he’s going to cash in on book royalties and tours, right? How touching.
EeyoreX

I think the reason so many people get ticked off by this book is because it’s based around a false premise of what money actually IS.

Instead of examining the superstition and “magical thinking” that really does exist around money, this book would seem to do the opposite and reinforce those superstitions. Money, in itself, is neither the problem nor the solution.

When this guy liquidates his assets and invests them in a barter/trade economy instead of having his accumulated value displayed in, say, dollar bills – he hasn’t actually altered or improved anything on any level. All he’s really done is to change his currency to fit the location. As has always been the habit of tourists.
Guest

Did this for 4 years or so… in NM… This guy had thousands (!!) of dollars to ‘start up’. I had 80 bucks, two solar panels (Volkswagen ones, salvaged) and a tent. No cell phone, no laptop, no internet access. And, no choice in the matter. Shit happens. So, not impressed. What does he, want a cookie? Or, a book deal… lol… yet another smug-ass white dude…
- Navin_Johnson
  
  You should have written a book about it.
  - Guest
    
    ‘Should’ve’? Hmm, it’s too late, huh? lol
    
    I don’t see why anyone would be interested, tbh. People live like this all over the U.S.- they generally don’t feel the need to pat themselves on the back about it in the form of a book/getting a book deal. This guy is cashing in, saying he made this choice- how righteous of him to choose that! I -and many other people- had/have no choice.
    - Navin_Johnson
      
      I don’t see why anyone would be interested, tbh
      
      Could be useful to others who either find themselves in that situation or want to live simpler by choice.
Brainspore

This guy is cashing in, saying he made this choice- how righteous of him to choose that! I -and many other people- had/have no choice.

I’m no theologian, but isn’t “choice” a prerequisite of righteousness? You can’t really brag about feeding the homeless if you did so at gunpoint.
- Guest
  
  Sometimes…? But, when you cash in on it like this guy has, it makes it more about profit and than being good/righteous/’sustainable’/etc. for its own sake… if you’re doing the right thing, there’s no need to seek rewards (like $MONEY$) for it. The only choice I made was to survive- I did not choose to be homeless.
  
  Follow your nose! It always knows! ;)
  - kittnkat
    
    Maybe he wrote the book for the people who don’t know that people live like that all over the US, maybe he wrote the book because he learned something he wanted to share, the last time I checked this is what books were all about.
    
    Unfortunately you were forced into that uncomfortable position, for whatever reason you haven’t written a book as far as I can tell, but maybe it’s a story that needed to be told and it took the circumstances of this fella, doing what he did to get a book written….does that dismiss his action? his choice? the opportunity to share? there is something to be learnt from every person, every situation, at least he’s started a conversation.
    - http://celesteagnes.blogspot.com/ Sekino
      
      It’s funny because I’m reading this thread and I agree with both positions. I agree with what you say, about how everybody’s experiences and perspective is interesting and has value.
      
      But I can see where people like DoctressJulia are coming from. It’s true that she could write a book- and perhaps profit from it- just as well as this guy did, and there is nothing wrong with him having done so. But writing such an account would be much more taxing an endeavour if the circumstances were negative and forced instead of a fun experiment.
      
      I thankfully never was homeless, but I did have to live in a tiny, decrepit bachelor with no electricity for nearly two years. I couldn’t afford paying both the rent and the electric bill. I had no phone, no computer, no ways to cook a hot meal (I tried getting a small Hibachi but there was a bylaw against using fire or gas grills on the porch/balcony). Anyways, to make a long story short, it was really shitty.
      
      Now maybe writing about it- and how I managed to get back on top of my game- would be useful to some, but it is not something I would ever want to do. While this guy’s experience, being well-planned and entirely by choice, is an achievement and a source of pride, my own experience was stressful and deeply humiliating. I have learned a lot from it, I can even joke about it now, but I wouldn’t want to rehash the whole episode in a book. Now that I have security, happiness and electricity, I much rather share my passions and the positive things I get to create and achieve. Because now I get to do it :)
fnc

I see it as a simple statement against a prevailing hysteria that pervades our modern culture, particularly strongly in the past few years.
cosyne

For the record, one reason stories like this tend to draw negative comments is the misleading subject line. It sounds like Mark lived for one year for $0, not that he is sustainably living on $0 a year. The latter has the potential to be very interesting, the former less so. Same thing with articles about getting really expensive things for really cheap which usually boil down to “1) find someone selling really expensive thing for really cheap 2) buy it.”
- SamSam
  
  Yes, that headline confused me a lot. It should be “How Mark Boyle lived on $0 for a year.”
  
  Mark doesn’t change his headlines, though.
  
  ===
  EDIT: Hey-o! I was… mostly wrong. From R’ingTFA: “The festival, along with his experiences over the year, prompted Boyle to make the decision to remain moneyless after the year-long experiment.”
  
  Of course, the irony of the experiment is perfectly crystalized in the next line: “He used the advance from the book to establish a trust to purchase a plot of land for a moneyless community.” Ahhh…. a trust for the moneyless community, eh?
billbard

It’s all fun and games until you need a bladder stone removed.
http://technoangina.tumblr.com Technoangina

I think what causes so much commenting ire is the unspoken premise of the book, consumerism is wrong. It’s an attack on people who enjoy living with more by using the byproducts of the consumerist lifestyle and proclaiming that you’re living a life of self-sacrifice. It has an air of self inflicted martyrdom and elitism, whether that was the intended purpose or not. The Dalai Lama lives a life with very little and is revered by many people, the same goes for Ghandi, and Mother Theresa, yet these people don’t draw the ire of commentators save a few outliers, so maybe there is more to the anger than there seems to be at first. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in the book “Blink” we have an amazing innate ability to distill incredible amounts of information into a single snap judgement and for much of our evolutionary past this has been a good thing. This book doesn’t show how someone can truly live without money, but how someone can take the hardships that people are born into and choose that lifestyle, retaining all the benefits of a privileged life as long as he has corporate sponsorship and the work provided by others to live off of. The fact is that he is not giving up a former lifestyle, he has an escape hatch in case things were too real, he lives in a society where there is a safety net created by the consumerist society this book rails against. He has written a book for the benefits of those who are looking for escapism that has a faulty premise, very akin to snake oil salesmen and other web charlatans. I myself already limit my lifestyle to that which is comfortable to me, but I feel no anger towards someone in their youth exploring other ways of living. I hope he learns something from this phase in his life, which will most likely pass. I also have no harsh words for critics of the book, there is a valid argument against the idolization of those who portray things as they are not. We need the conservative viewpoints to keep our experimentation focused on useful pursuits, but it’s also important to remember to not let dogmatism guide our future.
Tim Drage

“WAHH A GUY DID A THING I AM FURIOUS >___<#" – The Internet
bjacques

I’m with Technoangina. Shorter version:

Rent a flat above a shop
Cut your hair and get a job
Smoke some fags and play some pool
Pretend you never went to school

But you’ll still not get it right
‘Cos when you’re laid in bet at night
Watching roaches climb the wall
If you called your dad he could stop it all, yeah.

I wonder if some of the skepticism above is related to a similar adventure by a James O’Keefe type who lived rough for some months to “prove” that homeless people don’t have it so bad. Because every homeless person is a healthy, white, middle-class guy with a life to return to when the urban campout gets boring.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_BZPUF2EASKRBUSDXMNN4IRB5GA dahlia

i’m getting a little tired of these “first-worlder lives for a whole year in imitation of a huge portion of humanity and then writes a book” books. i admire them in one way, but they’re so self-congratulatory that they just annoy me. i do think they can serve to pass on some ideas that maybe the rest of us who don’t want to live like this can adopt — one idea here or there can make a bigger difference than we might think. but yeah, like someone said, it’s all fun and games until you get a kidney stone — or break a leg, or have a child, or mom gets cancer, or you get old, or just plain tired …
http://twitter.com/johngoad johngoad

This leads me to imagine an apocalyptic future of moneyless hipsters grouped behind the grocery store fighting over expired yogurt.
Navin_Johnson

Do you actually have a coherent complaint about what this guy did?