How to Drop Out (2004)
ranprieur.com
ranprieur.com
At least for me, a step in this direction would be to go thrift shopping from here on out for clothing, and to learn how to repair clothing. Also, living in SF, there is a bakery nearby that puts their unsold baguettes for free on the street every night. I shouldn't think of myself being above picking some of those up. I guess the idea is just to live a little more sustainably and produce less waste.
I do not try quite so hard with performance gear (I'm an athlete) or food. The amount of time and risks are just much higher for both of those categories. For example, trail runners are just destroyed after 500 miles, but often look the same as a pair with 50. Also electronics, I'll definitely pay full price for RAM, hard drives, etc.
Isn't this essentially a hunter-gatherer life? Our brains are really good at this.
Also, hunter-gatherer societies are societies; they offer mutual aid and support and close relationships. Our society works differently, and if you're stressed enough to learn dumpster diving, then there's a good chance that you need more social support and close relationships than you have readily available.
This isn't easy and to be done well, involves a sewing machine. But there is another way: have someone repair your clothes for you! It's usually quite cheap and very effective.
I have very few items of clothing and usually wear them for 5-10 years, sometimes longer for things I don't use often (like a winter coat).
Have you considered the wages and working conditions of the humans that manufactured that cheap new pair of jeans? We’re not talking about saving you money, we’re talking about you accepting certain trade offs (inconvenience, possibly increased cost or needing to learn a new skill), so that you can feel better about avoiding contributing to human suffering in sweat shops.
Another perspective is, if you are buying jeans that are not economical to repair - considering buying better quality jeans! With some research, you might even find high quality jeans made by people earning a living wage under healthy working conditions. Jeans you might love for a decade or more (good for the planet too!).
If you’re not open to these trade offs, I totally get it, most people aren’t - but this thread is not for you.
The real downside of it, now that I'm older, is that it's very time consuming, especially for larger projects. Sinking a couple hours into getting set up, measuring, cutting, sewing, etc is just hard to fit in. Clicking a couple buttons on Amazon and getting it off my to do list is often a lore more important.
(Typing this from a thrift store parking lot where I'm trying to avoid buying more new clothes.)
Honest question to the environmental experts here: what’s the best way for me to throw money at this personal problem? Carbon credits? Donations to particular nonprofits? Other ideas?
Personal disengagement from the heat engine.
Ran Prieur - discussed in another thread on HN, or [1]
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My mom taught me to sew when I was young. I find it generally easy, no sewing machine required. I repair most of my clothing with a $10 sewing kit from Walmart. Every couple years or so I go and buy some more thread and maybe needles. Any clothes that get too far gone to repair go to the scrap pile, which I'll use for patches, or maybe rags in the garage. T-shirts generally aren't worth the effort, but just about anything else I can usually sew up in about 30 minutes or so by hand. Might not look great but these clothes turn into work clothes after I repair them.
My buddy does maintenance-meditation (Maintetation?) where he hand repairs an article of clothing every morning. There is a zen to repairing your bike and clothes with minimal tools.
The two main problems are: his notion of freedom, which is too simplistic (almost akin to absence of conditioning) and his rose-colored view of an imaginary past which dis not exist ever (past without technology in which life was a kind of perpetual paradise).
Otherwise, the reading is interesting.
But being free is something in the heart, as so many mystics of all religions living in labour camps have taught us.
I think it's unfortunate that Kaczynski resorted to such extreme measures to publish his work, which I think has put many people off (not too dissimilar to how the IRA put off many people from the Catholics' rightful cause, or the PLO/Hamas in Palestine, etc.)
Maybe; but I'm not familiar with anyone who has stated the case so well, although he obviously had predecessors as anyone has. Perhaps a failing on my part, but there's probably a reason that his writings have endured in spite of the person. Either way, I think it's a mistake to dismiss ideas merely on account of who either proposed or popularized them. I think the ideas can be divorced from the person.
Or more contemporary; personally I think Donald Trump was a horrible president and all-round horrible person. But I also think he occasional said some things where he was actually right, and not everything he did as president was wrong either. Too often do I see people dismiss things merely on account of "Trump saidit!" I understand the sentiment, but you risk not addressing problems merely on account of who brings them to attention, which at best means the problem continues to exist, and at worst ignoring them makes them worse. This can be very dangerous.
At any rate, if you know of better authors to read, then please, let us know.
The interesting bits of Kaczynski's manifesto are a less-well-written rehash of Ellul. Ellul's writing was found in Kaczynski's cabin.
People know about Ted and not Jacques because Ted lived in a cabin and killed people, and Jacques was a college professor in France.
I have never been able to get through either of those Ellul books and have tried several times. I am not even sure if it is Ellul himself or translated French thought in general I find so painful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byung-Chul_Han
Checkout The Burnout Society, The Disappearance of Rituals, and The Palliative Society.
It's difficult to know if the language stems from a "lost in translation" problem, but I enjoy the writing tremendously, especially for its mind-expanding quality. It's like a gateway drug.
The writing is aphoristic - like reading an anti-David Foster Wallace - phenomenological minimalist vs. metafiction maximalist but with similar insights and mind-changing impact.
It took me several hours to read a 12 page chapter because of the need for lookup, learning, references, and reflection.
I'd also read Thomas Szasz, The Second Sin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Szasz
Similar to Han, but a generation earlier, his work was influenced by Foucault.
Finally, I'd have a look at Kazimierz Dabrowski.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazimierz_D%C4%85browski
To me, Dabrowski's positive disintegration plays a significant role in helping to frame the discussion here since "dropping out" can be easily mapped onto one of Dabrowski's levels in the positive disintegration framework.
Regardless, the tension between the individual and society plays a significant role in the work of these three authors.
It's also reductive, as the situation with Kaczynski is a hell of a lot more complex than "deranged terrorist". We aren't doing anybody any favors, least of all ourselves, by reducing history and people to the simplest headlines that don't represent any of the nuances of reality.
There are lots of things which feel good but can be bad (like saying yea to a child’s desire) and vice-versa (like saying no to a child’s desire).
OH wait
I would definitely be into this, but it's practically useless at 6'6". But I do try to keep the clothes I have for as long as possible.
I love photography and for a while (approx 20 years ago) considered moving to it as a full-time job. But it quickly became obvious that the actual shutter-clicking would be a tiny part of running an overall photography business (and then smartphones and Alamy happened and the bottom dropped out of stock photography). So I'm glad I stuck with my mainstream job. It paid well enough to live and afford expensive lenses and the wildlife trips where I could put them through their paces. And from my current 60-year-old perspective, it also paid for retirement savings and pensions which I wouldn't have now if I'd tried to be a wedding photographer, say.
The other thing that is sometimes overlooked is the importance of health. If you drop out and then get very ill, and have a very seat-of-the-pants lifestyle, things can get dark and uncomfortable very quickly.
Not to say which is the right approach, just pointing out that it's worth considering how different future-yous will look back on your decision now. One who prioritises memories over possessions. One who isn't healthy and feels the cold. One who wants children. Etc
I've thought that some IT jobs might fit the bill, particularly if one only needs to work a small number of hours each day.
When I was a teenager, I worked at a gas station, which was mostly low-stress and even had a lot of down time that I could use for reading. But the pay was terrible and I had no benefits.
It probably depends on what you're used to and how you handle stress.
I'm a web developer and find it incredibly low-stress in comparison to my previous lives. No back-to-back double shifts, no risk of working a full day and not getting paid for it, no abusive management, no rampant substance abuse at work, no "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean", no pressure to come into work when you're sick, no getting written up or even fired for being <5minutes late to work, no punitive scheduling... I could go on.
I see people complaining about the software industry and I really don't get it. This shit is so comfortable, easy and straightforward in comparison to the kind of work most people have to do.
I don't really want to harvest food from a dumpster.
This reads like "FIRE as explained by a crust punk". In broad strokes, we agree. In the specifics, we differ substantially.
> Do not drop out. Instead, try to stop yourself from committing suicide until you can find a job that is so non-hellish that it does not make you suicidal
Immediately after quitting my job, I rode a high of investing my time in all of those things I loved. A year later the best I could do was ping pong back and forth between the same set of things, giving up before receiving any rewards. Eventually I found myself in bed overwhelmed by my meaninglessness, trying to rationalize why I should not kill myself.
It took getting a job, which I don't even like, to help drag me out of the gutter.
I have fantasies of specific jobs that are completely out of my industry (IT). They pay a lot less. Finding meaning in that is how I would pursue it if I had the cash.
It sounds like you took time off to find yourself but came up short with the long-term job plan, doing what you loved?
https://reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/sm54ri/anyon...
But just like in engineering, every path has its own set of trade-offs. And part of the pay trade-off is that while I can live comfortably on smaller pay, I can earn my financial independence WAYYY earlier on tech bucks, then suddenly pay becomes a non issue.
I came up short in finding something that felt worth my time/energy, even if it didn't pay.
Part of it is as the author suggests, that it can be hard to sustain a love for something that you're also trying to make economically viable. They are to some degree competing concerns (not everyone loves entrepreneurship).
But also there's value in something being scarce. Which is why in the first few months I was "working" 40h weeks on projects that I had only been giving 3-5h/week before.
But eventually having 100% of my own time became status quo, and that fire was gone.
I think this very similar to risk taking as entrepreneur. It's much easier to do if you know that in case everything goes to hell there is a backup plan. You may never use it but it relieves a lot of *justified) anxiety.
He caught quite a lot of flack from some former followers when the windfall happened. But he has always maintained that his goal isn't ideological purity pr proscribing something anyone can follow, but maximizing his own free time using whatever reaources he can.
Btw Hi Ran, I know you read HN!
> I think this very similar to risk taking as entrepreneur. It's much easier to do if you know that in case everything goes to hell there is a backup plan.
It's really hard to get past the idea of a safety net, but I think that net is mostly an illusion -- although a very helpful one which also has real world non-illusion benefits but those benefits end up being for things that are outside of our direct control.
For example:
Person A has 3 million in the bank that's tucked away in case disaster strikes, how it got there isn't important but it's there.
They decide to quit their job that provides income to work on a "passion project business" where the goal is to do what they like while also making money (ignoring the advice in the author's drop out article). They don't make anything substantial for 1 year but eventually and gradually turn it into a $500,000 / year business over the next 3 years.
You could read that and be like "wow it's so easy for them, with FU money sitting in the bank they could tolerate the risk and even if they failed it's not a problem at all" and I think to a high degree that's right. If you do the same thing but as Person B and have $100,000 in the bank this changes everything. Technically you could live on that for a few years ($30k / year is very achievable if you're single while still living comfortably in most places in the US) but there's this idea that if your business fails that 100k is gone and now you have $0 savings where as if Person A failed they probably made more than 100k in interest off that 3 million in the worst case scenario.
So where does that leave us?
There's no doubt that Person A is in a better position, but I think if you decouple the safety net from any decision making around running your business for those 3-4 years and both people executed on their idea as if they had 3 million in the bank then maybe the outcome would be the same which means the safety net never gets used in which case it's an illusion. I think folks without the safety net might make hasty decisions or give up sooner because their decisions are tied into money instead of letting things unwind on their own terms, they never get to mentally free themselves of obligations because they're still always on the clock.
This gets further amplified if we introduce Person C who has $0 savings and instead takes out a business loan from the government or a bank, they are geared up for failure because they have to pay that loan back or face serious consequences where as Person B "only" drained their savings. I would love to hear some stories of folks being successful in this case.
To wrap things up, I understand that it's much more than an illusion because there's definitely not a 100% success rate here, Person A could have just as easily tanked that business and they're in a much better spot than the person with 100k, but what this really boils down to is having more chances to try. Since success isn't guaranteed in either case (big safety net vs not so big safety net) and independent businesses can either succeed or fail on their own I think our only choice is to accept reality for what it is and roll the dice.
One of the greatest problems with the concept of “just dropping out” is the attachment to the idea of happiness. Happiness being one of the most oppressive demands of society and yet the narrowest of requirements.
Would be interesting to live in an environment where happiness wasn’t the primary goal. That seems like true freedom and entirely compatible with dropping-in or out.
In the US at least, “the pursuit of happiness” is such a fundamental concept, people really aren’t challenged to question it.
In the last few years I've tried to shift from seeking happiness to seeking meaningfulness as the first order pursuit.
Happiness is like a red herring for meaning, or it's a side effect of a meaningful activity. Or it's something you seek when you experience a dearth of meaning.. not sure. But it's certainly just one or a narrow set of experiences that make up being human.
I think it's generally good advice for a certain type of person. Someone who resonates with this part: "If you have the mental focus and self-discipline to be successful in the dominant society, but you don't like it, here's how you can change your value system to reduce your need for money and status, and gain some benefits of industrial civilization without being in a position of forced obedience."
It's true like someone said that it's basically a crustier version of FIRE, but probably more achievable for most people.
He had quite an influence on my own personal journey in life. I was already becoming quite dissatisfied with a life in tech, cranking out code for companies I didn't care about, when I found his blog in my mid 20s. I got pretty hooked on a lot of the more hardcore philosophy around dropping out, primitivism, homesteading, etc. I also became fixated on the idea of saving/investing and retiring early, and that formed my main life goal for nearly a decade.
I did manage to FIRE and mellowed out a lot on the more radical ideas of dropping out, and developed a more balanced view towards tech instead of disdain for it. The world is complicated, and the idea of just dropping all tech and going back to the past sounds so silly and infantile to me now, but I guess it comforted me in a time of existential dread. Anyway, not sure why I'm launching into a story of my life here, just felt nostalgic seeing this link up on HN today.
To me, learning to live on the cheap to drop out, and planning to FIRE are essentially the same thing: removing the "work" part from life, because you don't love it, or divorcing what you do on the weekend (work of love that brings no money) from what you do during the week (stuff you hate but brings money)
Personally, I love working and doing interesting things, and being with other people and society itself!
So my personal plan is the opposite of FIRE: work until I die regardless of what happens on the side like payouts, because I enjoy what I do: stopping what I do just because something happened on the side would be like punishing myself, then waiting to die out of boredom? Doesn't seem like such a bright idea to me!
Maybe it's different if you don't like modern society, or maybe other people, or the idea of work itself?
I would recommend this alternative approach instead: embracing ikigai: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ikigai
From https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20170807-ikigai-a-japan...
"To those in the West who are more familiar with the concept of ikigai, it’s often associated with a Venn diagram with four overlapping qualities: what you love, what you are good at, what the world needs, and what you can be paid for."
Paul Lafargue's "The Right To Be Lazy" was written in 1883 and, if we're to make an abstraction of the formulations ever so typical for that time and the historical context, as well as the strong ideology that underpins the work, it makes for an entirely interesting read: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-lafargue-the-ri...
[proceeds to mention someone from 1883]
The obvious "old" example would be Diogenes from ~400 BC. But there are older still outside of the Western tradition.
Let’s say your family is poor and could use extra help. It seems selfish to deliberately take a lower paying job when a higher paying job could help your loved ones.
Also what happens when you meet someone and want to start a family? Although the author may be ok with certain constraints in living, their spouse and children may have different preferences. In that situation it also seems selfish to pursue this low income life.
All in all the essay seems to work well for people who are okay with living alone and apart from their family and loved ones.
I'd expect lifestyle to be one of the things people take into account when considering starting a life together. So if the potential spouse had different, incompatible, preferences, I'd expect the couple to not get to the point of starting a family.
The question still stands for the kinds, though, but I'd expect this to always be the case. Kids practically never get a say in their parents' choices and have to make do.
Side note Wise is the least PITA way to move money and no these people don't know how to use crypto.
Can't save the entire world but can do something.
But yeah I battle that thing of "my money". Granted I still want to not be poor eventually. And buying something nice for yourself isn't a bad thing.
They are pulling bones out of a puffer fish [0]
I always wondered how non-computer-savvy people are supposed to use crypto in this situation. It's so complicated to explain, let alone actually use.
We heard sane for thr other 3 large competitors.
My guess, all thise gamblers moved to crypto for their fix when pandemic closed sports.
For them, typing the credit card in and shady exchange and betting on ABC is the same as typing their credit card and betting on sports team.
> If you're charming, you can find a partner or spouse who will "support" you by permitting you to sleep and cook someplace without asking for money.
I couldn't tell how tongue-in-cheek this was, but clearly you're relying on your partner not to 'drop out' in this case.
> I stopped buying music and books (exceptions in exceptional cases) and got in the habit of using the library.
Who pays for these music and books if you don't contribute almost anything in taxes?
What a bunch of bunk.
If you're reading this, you likely have an amazingly cushy job by historical standards.