Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I do like the term "settled society", as there is a strong temptation to see people who don't do this as having settled for something adequate.
Travelling only changes your location, it doesn't change who you are. Who I am is someone who has trouble meeting people, but found that travel provided more opportunity for social interaction and people more willing to be open with me.
There's also a difference between being a "traveller" and just being a guy with no home and no stuff. The article seemed to be more about the latter.
My experience hanging out with backpackers is that they seem to get laid (by other backpackers) rather frequently. Of course, the ones who are traveling with committed partners have a lot more sex (with each other, mostly) than the ones who are just hoping to meet random promiscuous MOTAS. But there's a lot of scope for people to travel together for a few days, weeks, or months before becoming committed partners.
And sometimes travelers will stay in a city for weeks or months and meet more people.
I think it depends largely on how easily you make friends.
There is nothing inherent in being a traveler that makes them "weird", though they may be unusual because of their unusual life. I can't see why either having or not having stuff is relevant.
Travelers make great friends who I miss when they are not around.
I hate to sound negative, but I find that some of the worst bores are people who can't stop talking about their last journey. Having been around the world a few times myself, I often have to bite my tongue to stop myself from telling too many "that reminds me of this one time in [random city X]" stories, as people do get bored of hearing them, and they're rarely as interesting to others as they are to the people who were there.
[1] This means not only listening and popping in with comments and questions here and there, but actually trying to imagine the feelings you would have experienced had you been there; or even more interestingly, understanding how the storyteller felt in the context of his or her own life (this requires knowing the person rather well).
[2] The intent is really the main thing here. Some people approach storytelling about their adventures as a way to brag. The "right way" to do it is to tell the story in a way that the listeners can imagine themselves there. This changes the context from "I'm cooler than you," to "I had a great experience that I'd like to share with you."
I did a decent amount of backpacking back in the day, and I remember the initial adjustment to be pretty tough and very lonely if you're not already a very outgoing type. Initially I hated it, then eventually I loved it, but some may not.
Listen and weep:
http://brandonovak.com/nudie-novaks-sexcapades
"When he was a homeless heroin addict, Brandon banged a waitress INSIDE OF A DUMPSTER."
How does this scale when no-one has free crash space to give...?
It's like those TV shows where a family give up the corporate rat race and go and run a B&B or a vineyard in the country, who are their customers apart from corporate workers? It's not a revolution if only a small percentage of the population can ever do it.
Housing is currently relatively illiquid because the demand for liquid housing is minimal. There's a big gap between "the place you live for years at a time" and "the place you vacation for a week or two" because that's what the market demands. The backbackers hostel only came into existence when airfares became affordable and young people started travelling internationally. Same with Spanish resorts and the package holiday, same with seaside B&Bs and the railway. If technology allows it and people demand it, we'll see it appear quite quickly.
Your second point is the same faulty logic that presumes "we'll always need people to actually make things/sweep the roads/other menial labour". Mechanisation and automation supplants the need for most of those workers, freeing them up to do work better suited to humans - usually in the service industry. The majority of westerners work in the service industry already, it only stands to reason that they will become more skilled and more specialised. There is absolutely no reason why we can't have a huge number of people running small B&Bs or vineyards or boutiques or cafés. The trends behind this article make it clear that we can't expect to continue running an economy on selling 'stuff', the future economy is clearly based on cultural and social experiences.
Because if you have two B&B owners who simply swap to go on holiday, or two vineyards who simply drink each other's wine, then you've invented a perpetual motion machine.
Accountants, lawyers and bankers all perform services. Not fun services, but services nonetheless. They're no different from a musician or a masseuse or a bicycle mechanic.
Corporations generate lots of wealth and engage in lots of transactions, but so do the aggregate of small businesses and sole traders. There's nothing magical about a big company versus a small one.
The big change in the economy is that a) stuff has got very cheap and b) lots of people can do useful work from anywhere with WiFi. The basic rules are exactly the same, but the economy of 2030 will be barely recognisable, just as the economy of 2010 would be barely recognisable in 1990. As we generate more and more intangible wealth, tangible wealth becomes less and less important to the economy.
If you think that a service-based economy is a "perpetual motion machine", you really need to do a bit of reading up on economics. Wealth is wealth, it doesn't matter how you generate it as long as you do.
So this is why I say, the dream of dropping out of the rat race and doing that necessarily must remain a dream only for the majority.
I'm not sure the assumption that he's consuming less is accurate though. He's consuming differently but he's still earning, he's still eating and drinking.
He owns a keyboard, two ebook readers, a Mac and a rucksack full of designer clothes, a bike. The fact he's a DJ and the fact he has two ebook readers suggest that he still buys music and books (just digitally rather than physically). All of this ploughs revenue back into the economy.
In addition he has no kitchen so he likely eats out more, no car so potentially uses public transport more, maybe pays for a PO Box for mail, cell phone bills are higher than landline bills.
He's changed his pattern of consumption but he's not ceased it.
The only way in which it doesn't scale is that he tends to sleep on friends couches. Replace this with cheap bed and breakfast accommodation and it would seem to scale fine.
You seem to be under the misapprehension that the money a lawyer earns in exchange for his time is "real money", whereas the money earned by a fashion designer or an organic honey grower or someone who restores vingage fixed-gear bicycles is somehow not real money.
The economy only demands productivity. It cares not one jot whether that production is hamburger buns or brioche, whether it is kalashnikovs or designer garden tools. All that matters is that enough people will pay for what you do. It should be self-evident that artistry is highly marketable.
The real growth in the current economy is beauty. Apple is testament to that - their products are made by Quanta and Foxconn like everyone else's, but they are worth more by simple merit of being beautiful. Every year the metal and plastic and glass is worth less and the design and styling worth more, that's why we in the west no longer manufacture very much at all. The taste of Steve Jobs and the imagination of Jony Ive is worth more than any factory machine.
For every bohemian running a boutique B&B, we merely need 20 other people who make or do something that other people like. They don't have to wear a tie or work in a tall building, they only need to be productive.
Our friend the DJ, he has an external source of economic value - his friend's surplus (i.e. they can afford to rent more space than they need, so he can stay there). If his friends have no surplus of this kind, his model collapses. So really, his lifestyle is only possible because it is subsidized.
Our hypothetical B&B owner - there are shows about this nightly on British TV, always the same pattern - has made some money typically through selling his house in the UK at the right time, quit his job, bought a dilapidated farmhouse in rural France, done it up, and is now waiting for yuppie holidaymakers to come stay. He has no skills that are relevant in the local economy. He depends specifically and entirely on people who live the lifestyle he left behind for his business. Now I am not saying that what he does has no economic value. I am saying that to trade, you need to have a) something to trade and b) someone to trade with. The people he trades with are people with jobs in big cities who want to escape to the country. If these people have also dropped out to live an idyllic lifestyle, what demand is there from them for his service?
I dunno, think of a world where everyone's say a chicken farmer. How do they create value by trading chickens with each other?
Indeed given that he has no home and therefore no kitchen it's likely that he eats out more and is more dependent on other services and spends considerably more in some areas than he would otherwise.
He's not as culturally interesting as Mark Boyle for instance: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2009....
But without someone to sell to, there's no money in this system, and therefore no way to get goods and services you need that can't be met within your microeconomy. So, not everyone can be a programmer, just as not everyone can be a bohemian.
To survive, a person needs more than just wine and a B&B. That doesn't mean that a closed economy is a perpetual motion machine (and therefore can't exist), as the world economy proves.
I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond.
I am taking a wild guess; The past 400.000 years of evolution in which our bodies and minds adapted to a nomadic lifestyle may still resonate in our genes. Only since a few thousand years were a majority of my ancestors bound to one place and this short period is unlikely to have had any genetic impact. A lack of constricting possessions is surprisingly rewarding (constricting in terms of hard to move). I suspect that this reward is universal to humans which would imply some kind of genetically predetermined preference. But it is just a wild guess.
Yet I feel with my son's first birthday approaching this lifestyle will be hard to maintain.
I only ask because this is something I'm very much interested in doing myself, but I'm very apprehensive about making a big change like this due to job/money concerns.
But I'm worried by the first move. Where I live I got a lot of job opportunity but I don't know if I will be able to find a job in another country quickly enough and it doesn't work very well remotely.
If you have a popular web service or a iphone app you could do it.
Since you just got your degree, my honest advice is this: 1) Be slow to accumulate stuff. 2) Exploit the location where there are a lot of jobs, but do it in a way that doesn't tie you down for 4 years. Do consulting or contracting, or become a co-founder of a startup that is a virtual company such that the company isn't tied to this location. You need some good work experience, which you might have gotten while getting your CS degree, but if not, get it, and get some savings to boot. 3) Start practicing it. Start working away for a week at a time.
Unless you're independently wealthy you can't really spend your time without any work, so the challenge is working while you're a nomad.
You might find this useful: http://microship.com/bike/index.html
Like anything else, it is best to work into it a bit at a time. It might be worth trying a 3 month consulting gig and then, after saving that money, try 3 months on the road as a nomad and see if you can earn money consulting that way. This way the initial gig covers the expenses if the nomadic lifestyle turns into a vacation where you just spend money.
But for us, paramount to being able to do this is the ability to earn our expenses. Most startups look at burn rate, we are keeping a keen eye on revenue vs. living expenses.
isn't that a little counter intuitive? you're hardly portable.
I find _not_ having enough space to be psychologically expensive. Nothing better than going for a walk through your own house, knowing it's all yours and nobody can invade it. But hey, different people have different preferences...
Just because space is expensive doesn't mean you should have none.
If you think space is psychologically expensive, why not phrase it in your own words?
And that's not to mention the number of single-purpose devices each of these replaces: the smartphone is an alarm clock, watch, point-and-shoot camera, GPS, and MP3 player. The reading devices replace a printer (if you have access to a Kinkos when you really need a hard copy). The laptop replaces a TV, DVD player, and desktop computer.
What's changed here is the medium but what would really be interesting is if there were a significant cultural shift but I don't see that - he still seems to be as much a consumer as he ever was.
I'm not debating that, but is it necessarily a bad thing? I don't interpreting your comment to say that it is, but it raises the question. The wonder of the internet and "consumer culture" is that we now have access to the creative output of millions of people we otherwise wouldn't. As long as I can choose my level of participation, I like having it there.
Consumption isn't necessarily bad but waste is. Maybe that's an interesting point - it may be that because so much of his life is digital he wastes less though I suspect it's not that straight forward. Perhaps there is no physical waste but we shouldn't underestimate the tiny drip drip drip power consumption (in theory for eternity) for on-line services and backups.
And minimalism in this sense may actually make things worse. Having shelf after shelf of physical books / records / CDs is a reminder for many how much stuff they've got that they never read or listen to. I certainly know people who download (illegally in the case I'm thinking of so the definition of consumer is questionable) more music and more films than they will ever listen to or watch and certainly more than they would ever have if they had to physically store them.
Rambling now but I suspect it's not as simple as it might appear at first glance.
I should also point out that I needed the iPad for my job, as I develop apps from time to time.
I also don't want to sound too creepy but he has a awesome apartment: http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266 and http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299
It's great in theory when you're healthy, in your early 20's to early 30's, when you are independent and have no dependents, when you are living in a climate that is favorable, and when you're living in a city.
If any of those circumstances are not met you'll be either in a lot of trouble or you're most likely going to change.
Those that don't have the option to change we call street people.
And living off other people's couches and/or fridges and such does not make you an independent.
I can see a good reason for doing with 'less stuff', but this extreme is simply not realistic on anything but the smallest of scales.
It'd be tough if all your friends decided to do it tomorrow and you'd all want to sleep on each others' no longer existent couches...
In the future when nobody has enough money to buy a house or a bunch of stuff in the first place we'll probably be seeing more nomadic seniors.
Those couples that I've met that did the 'RV thing' after their pension typically saw it as a way to do all the traveling that they had missed out on while in their working years, a way to reward a lifetime of hard work.
I used to read Steve Roberts digital nomad site for some time and I found links to familes living on sailboats and travelling but it seems those links are gone. The above was the first one I found on google.
The one thing I cannot move on from is my book collection. I love books and I have two bookshelves with 285 graphic novels and novels (according to my LibraryThing account). And I am starting to make use of sites like Project Guttenburg to read public domains works (using FBReader).
I'm also fond of my textbooks, which haven't yet been satisfactorily digitized, and my motorcycles and associated tools and parts, which haven't been successfully digitized either.
All the DVDs are already ripped to a couple of hard drives, the disks but in DJ CD files and the cases thrown away - that saved a 6' bookcase.
But honestly I think biotech could progress to the point to where biological aging is neutralized. Cells break down and make copying failures for only a few specific reasons. I think the biological will be preserved and merely augmented with better human-machine interfaces.
Also cloning yourself or making a digital backup from yourself isn't that much different from having kids. Both are to ensure the survival\existence of data whether its encoded genetically or not.
For me I think this works best after you've done the kids thing, if you plan on doing that. But I strongly agree with the premise here: people are naturally nomadic
Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city.
We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things we couldn't take with us.
I run a virtual machine on my laptop and under it I have a server that acts as our "intranet server" and so all of the collaboration tools, etc run there. I also start servers periodically while developing something that will eventually run in the cloud to test it out before running it online.
We're geared to be able to work full time without access to the internet. We're expecting to be in places where there is no internet. However, for the past 3 years that we've been traveling we've had pretty much full time internet access so far. When we're without internet we use an ad-hoc wifi network so we always have our "local network" with us.
Other than what fits in the backpacks we just have a couple boxes in storage. The most stressful experience has been going over all of our stuff and getting rid of it until we fit in the laptop. That took several months of work and because many of the possessions had a history it was not easy.
But now, we can go anywhere anytime we want, just about. It is very liberating!
Am willing to answer most questions....
But the intention is to be able to be fully productive with only an occasional or intermittent internet connection.
Really developed countries: We have internet where we stay. This is more common than we expected.
Developed countries: We use mobile broadband for occasional net connectivity on demand, and use email and SMS to notify us about important events. So far all of our services are manage hosted so I've never gotten a "the server is down" message.
Undeveloped Countries: Plan is to check in once a week with a cybercafe or wifi hotspot.
GSM is a global standard and so, with an unlocked iPhone you can get pre-paid SIMs with dataplans.
Fortunately for everyone Apple is now selling unlocked iPhones as a matter of course in countries with multiple iPhone carriers, like Canada, France, Germany and the UK.
I'd be very hesitant to choose anything where I have to manage the host myself.
Has this assumption proved true so far? How true? What was your origin city, and where have you been? I'm quite interested in this strategy, it would be so nice to pair low-cost living with travel.
Which cities have worked out well or poorly for you?
I'm probably traveling a bit heavy right now (mbp 17, 7d and lenses, kindle dx, iPad, outdoor, business, and casual clothes, global blackberry) and going for value luxury (50-100 per night for a 2br 5 star hotel suite, or a nice condo rental). I think that will increase my productivity and happiness, but I'll try the lowest cost option later this year. The people in student or backpacker places are definitely more interesting than at the oriental or peninsula. Mainly Asia and au/nz for now, and Europe probably next, and then maybe a couple months of USA.
1) Music and Movies. About the easiest as ripping CDs and DVDs is not that hard.
2) Photographs. There was a time when I shot on film, and so for all the images taken before then, they needed to be scanned. Scanning paper photos on a flatbed is not too bad, but scanning negatives is very slow and a very hands-on process. But it does produce the best results.
3) Books. This is the hardest. I stopped buying books about 5 years ago because ebooks weren't really ready to meet my needs then (I hate the kindle) and only started buying again now because the iPad does.
But all these physical books. Scanning them is really a pain. Most of them just got tossed. We had huge collections of old instruction manuals that are long out of print and obsolete as well.
Unfortunately, the books were an almost total loss. We flatbed scanned a few pages here and there and that's it.
4) Storage and backup. We've iterated several times in our strategy here. This is something to consider very carefully. The solution isn't the same between even the two of us, so you'll have to find your own.
But keep at least 2 copies of everything in such a way as you always know what the prime copy is.