> As we walk through the city, Johnston offers a small disclaimer, putting out in the open what he calls his one “debatable” act of spending, post-31st birthday. If you count a gift card that someone gave him back in 2012, which he used on Big Macs and coffee, then, he says, he’s been money-free for only nine years.

This raises a point that article doesn't address: what is "money"?

If Johnson trades those cigarettes he makes from tossed butts for food, is he using money? Cigarettes have been used as currency in some special situations like war time.

Likewise, if Johnson accepts a product created through the use of money, isn't he in fact using money, if only indirectly?

Then there's the big question that never gets asked or answered: what happens if every single person on earth lived like Johnson? Money is fundamentally a way to fulfill future needs and wants. Abandoning money is really abandoning a path to build a future deliberately.

Storing grain, smoking meat, or building a shelter serve exactly the same purpose as money in this context. They are ways to make the future more predictable. They also have the interesting property that they can be traded for other ways to make the future more predictable. And that leads to the main problem that Johnson seems to be trying to solve: how to stop focusing on optimizing one's future through the accumulation of things that can make the future more certain.

What does a world of people who have abandoned the idea of making a future for themselves actually look like?