On the experience of being dirt-poorish, for people who want to be

I know several families like this, generally hippies with an educated middle-class background, but without the desire to sacrifice themselves for money and it's trappings (and benefits). Their kids are intelligent and interesting people, and as far as I can see, have been given life as an open canvas, not as a paint-by-numbers exercise, which so many others experience.

This is true, but the author doesn't pretend otherwise, or hide this fact.

That you accuse him of being selfish I think says more about you than him. I went to a Waldorf school once upon a time, so I knew a lot of kids who grew up in a similar-ish way - lots of siblings, little money, low tech and with unconventional and somewhat iconoclastic parents who had rejected the middle-class lifestyle (which they, like OP, could easily have had access to through relational capital). None of those kids that I know of have done especially poorly. Most of them have turned out very different from their parents, from becoming social media celebrities to getting involved with MLM-like schemes. But I don't think any of them are bitter about their upbringing, or alienated from their "selfish" parents.

I think that's an unwarranted fear considering he's got more time for his kids than most parents.

His upbringing/mental health is probably not without flaw, but seriously whos is? We've got such narrow minded ideas about what a healthy life looks like nowadays. I blame advertisement.

And snobby. He spends a lot of time rationalizing how his choices are morally superior.

Labeling themselves as poor is an ignorant and immature bid for attention. It’s like a trust fund kid seriously talking about how they made it through their travels with “just a backpack”. It could literally be a joke.

I would love to tell them to grow up. Sitting on 200,000 is rich even in Sweden. Sounds like they’re just lazy as shit.

Nearly half of which is welfare!

> Each month the very generous Swedish government gives us no less than 600 dollars in child allowance. We also have some other incomes from book sales and irregular jobs. And we do have savings, larger than we like to admit, which in good years give capital income and in less good years give a cushion to take from. All in all our seven-person family has around 1400-1500 dollars in monthly expenditure

Author does not get it whatsoever. Being dirt poor means having no savings, or being in debt in which case you have negative savings. You have no or barely any money coming in from the government, not $600 a month just in child benefits. You don't have passive income in book sales or investments. If anything is broken, you cannot afford to fix it, including things like your utilities and appliances. You are one wrong decision from ending up homeless, which in turn is one wrong decision away from death. Subsequently, every decision you make is run through a lens of extreme anxiety. Your entire life is a fight for survival and you have no-one to turn to. That is dirt poor.

"Still you'll never get it right

Cause when you're laid in bed at night

Watching roaches climb the walls

You can call your Dad and he'll stop it all, yeah."

This author has multiple safety nets. Until they're stripped away, he has no idea what dirt poor looks like.

Choosing to live with low consumption is laudable. I grew up in a thrifty household, though nowhere near so thrifty as the author's, and using less was much better for all of us. However, spending very little money but having a safety net and the opportunity to leave is the opposite of being trapped.

It's like a controlled retreat versus a rout. When you're choosing to be poor you have time and slack to make the choice. You might choose to live in a nice but remote house in the forest, which you may actually own outright (the article has no mention of rent or mortgage), and collect wood and grow your own food. When you're forced out of your shitty apartment because you lost your job or your landlord kicked you out on some flimsy pretext, as has happened to a few of my friends, then you've got two options: either find someone to give you a bit of breathing room by loaning you money/space on the couch/etc., or get an even shittier apartment for a worse price.

Poverty is the wrong word for this. Someone else in this thread said it better than I can come up with: poverty is lack of options. If this lifestyle is a choice it isn't poverty. I agree with that. No matter how simple you choose to make your life, if you've got options you're doing good.

unfortunately we train most kids to be dependent on government conventions, and dont provide the tools, and opportunity, to live independently of this regime. this is a dependency trap.

considering your comment, i identify as tech-agrarian.

That is the whole point of work and taxes, and I think some people fail to see the connection between work and everything that is around them. Not that I think we should all be wage slaves, but some humility when living off the work of others would seem fair.

Society is not involved in this. Actual society only exists with everyones spare time and only connects to others in there spare time.

Nobody chose to be part of this machine, they all march at gunpoint of each other. If they had a choice, they would abandon the whole thing, be the cog, that with a last pling vannished into some dark corner.

To project emotions on this machinery is miss guided. The cattle farm feeding robot, does not appreciate the subjective warmth emotions those it feeds project on it. To bring morals into the whole affair as a engineer, is a lack of judgment.

Its a machine, nothing more nothing less.

I grew up in an isolated farming town and now live in London. Don't get me wrong, I _probably_ won't live here for the rest of my life, but I'm never moving back to my hometown. Not because it's uniquely bad, but because there was _so much_ stuff I wanted to do as a kid that I couldn't.

Like join a martial arts club. Or be a regular at a comic book store. To go to gigs, learn an unusual instrument, visit a zoo, and yes, try sushi.

The internet helped. Amazon helped quite a bit. But we're social animals, and having _your_ people around helps so much. And it's hard to do that when you live in the sticks.

This comes across as a shallow understanding of food, culture and the makeup of cities. Cities are often very multi-cultural, all over the world, and not just for food. All races can enjoy that diversity and a somewhat fairer playing field (depending on exactly where you live).

And that's stupid as stupid can be, and it's not theft. Around these parts of the world (Eastern Europe) that used to be customary practice for hundreds of years, maybe even more, meaning people taking the falling branches for heating purposes over the winter.

Of course, as modernisation set on around these parts of the continent (thanks, Brussels) then all that became highly illegal, so that highly-equipped policemen were set up to patrol the foresty areas and confiscate the equipment used for said "theft" from what are mostly very poor people, which in many cases involved them confiscating a very weak horse and a barely functioning wooden cart. But hey, modernisation!

This whole subject makes me very angry because it is so reactionary, as you've got poor people supporting the brunt of the law while the wood multinationals (or whatever their PR name is) are profiting from it because they can afford to cut exponentially more wood in a "legal" manner. And yes, we do own a small piece of forest in my family (my brother does, in fact), so I should be all-in for the camp of "damn poors are stealing our branches from the forrest we own!". I am not.

One of the very few positive aspects of all this is that these type of police-imposed reactionary actions coming from the very top have created a new sense of community in my brother's village. Nowadays almost the whole village is again on the lookout for patrolling police vans, as the villagers communicate with the people who are in the forest to take wood as to the policemen's whereabouts and instruct them when it's safe to pass.

And then city-based laptop class people complain how come the "populists" are winning more and more votes.

If you live near the Flathead National Forest in Montana in the US, for example, you can cut firewood for a campsite without a permit. You can also get a free permit that allows you to cut 4 to 12 cords of wood per adult per year.

I don't know anything about firewood laws in Sweden or the rest of Europe. From first glance they look quite a bit more restrictive.

I once experienced this on the board of a kindergarten. There was a public debate about whether kindergartens should have computers or not. The kindergarten I had my kids in thought not, for good reasons. When talking to the other parents, with some those reasons clicked immediately. But many were simply not able to digest them. They were stuck thinking about their own situation as parents and the fact that their children were using tablets at home. Big parenting identity crisis, no constructive discussion possible.