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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.

— Kurt Vonnegut

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.

— Robert A. Heinlein

The key to a happy life is to let go of your status anxiety, get out there, and really start living. There’s an effectively infinite number of things to learn, books to read, places to go, people to meet, landscapes to explore, cuisines to taste, animals to see. There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money.

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> There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money.

You say that, and yet

> places to go

Travel is expensive.

> people to meet

If you live in a small town and want to start meeting people radically different from the people you usually meet, you should probably move to a larger city. Large cities are expensive.

> cuisines to taste

Eating out is expensive.

> things to learn, books to read

These are perhaps the ones that require the fewest resources, and even these require enough of a work-life balance that you're not completely exhausted by the time you finish at your third job. Depending on how your economic circumstances are, a healthy work-life balance might not pay the bills.

Now, for the upper middle class readership that HN is most likely composed of, sure, the costs of all these activities are negligible. But I think it's a stretch to say that a homeless person on the street should "get out there and really start living." To do that, they need enough money to get to a stable situation first, and the sort of money that's trivial for us to come by is not always so trivial for everyone else...

I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.

Comfortable, fast, safe, travel is expensive. Just traveling itself is relatively cheap, you just need a backpack and shoes.

You really don't understand. You need to be able to take more than a day off without getting evicted/loosing your car or eating oats most days. Go tell people that they don't need a home, their job and it's meager benefits like healthcare, and they should just be more stoic.

I just counted "a sufficiently stable life that it's still there when you return" as part of "safety" and "comfort". If traveling is a priority for you, you can live the life of a wandering monk, with the associated downsides.

Sure, the bills and the mortgage will miraculously pay themselves if we set our minds to it. Joking aside, those quotes resonate with most people I suppose, but the cold hard reality is that wageslavery is a very apt term to describe the current state of things.

The mortgage is definitely part of the status anxiety I mentioned. People need a house because they’re surrounded by peers buying houses. Let go of all that and life opens up for you.

Backpacking through Europe is cheap. Backpacking through Southeast Asia even cheaper. Incredible food awaits and it’s very very cheap.

OK I will let it go, but what will my wife and kids say when they are evicted from the apartment and I'm nowhere to be found because I have no signal in Southeast Asia? Maybe some people buy houses because of peer pressure, but most just like to have a roof over their head when it is cold or rains outside. I know I do.

So it isn’t really about wages, it’s about kids. You chose to start a family and accept the responsibility that comes with that. It’s not forever though. When the kids move out you and your wife could sell the house and hit the road, if you wanted to.

Why wouldn't your wife and kid be backpacking with you? Kids are small, they fit in the overhead compartment.

It would be hard to explain to the school why are they missing classes. With all the appeal of the vagabond lifestyle, I'm not sure that is where their passions lie.

All of this is available and not expensive. Easy? Maybe not.

You don't want to do it? That's your choice.

Depends on how you define expensive. For starters it carries an enormous opportunity cost and associated risks. If you mean living on the street and depending on the generosity of others can be started with close to zero cash, you are absolutely right.

I think that worldly, well-rounded individuals never have to worry about how to make ends meet.

An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.

Does this imply that anyone who struggles to make ends meet is not worldly and well-rounded? If so, how might they become worldly and well-rounded so that they can pay their bills? Is there an online course they can take between shifts of the part-time, minimum-wage jobs they work to keep a roof over their head? And how will the knowledge they can absorb in these less-than-ideal circumstances enable them to compete with far better-prepared people on the job market?

Easy.

They can:

- work their way up the ladder in their current job. (If not possible, look for another job where it is.) - find a job with upward mobility that doesn't take much training and is quick to start. Welding, plumbing etc. And prioritize training for it. Then transition.

When either of these are reached you can rinse and repeat. And hopefully while doing so, learn how business/life works because you are actively working to engage with it to improve yourself.

Worth mentioning that the first quote is directly from Vonnegut in an interview, whereas the second is spoken by a character in one of Heinlein's novels.

I like those quotes!

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