Leatherman (vagabond)
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group of scouts: a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch (beginning with walking to fetch the relevant supplies). Now when I am back to work, I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym, because there is not time to do both.
I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
In my life, this has forced me to quit on a bunch of things I would have continued otherwise, and to lean down things like my workouts and so on. This isn't necessarily bad, I like that I can now do 80% with 20% of time/effort, but still, would be nice to have more slack.
Doable, but it’s about what you prioritize and care about.
Honestly, this sounds like an armchair fantasy.
It sounds great on paper– tech jobs pay $150K, so just find a remote job and work half-time. Boom, less taxes and you still have $5K/mo plus tons of time!
IME though, 99% of jobs want to own you full-time. There are almost no roles where you can be part-time. The other alternative, independent contractor or Upwork, is also very difficult to start, even if you have good experience and skills.
A lot of writing glue code to build dashboards and things.
Nowadays, a lot of AI work to improve attorney and paralegal efficiency, etc.
Law firms have software devs and/or IT on staff, or they contract it out. Contracting rather than a W2 is also an option.
It’s not “fun.” But it pays well and is often doable remotely / part-time.
I've had two experiences with people like that:
- At one place I've worked at (big corp), the QA department was full of contractors. One of the contractors was only working 9 months per year - they spent all summers in Australia. Everyone knew about that and accepted this. The contractor was great, and no one had problems with that (I am sure not having to pay them anything while they were away helped :) )
- At other place, a small startup, we had a team member who was in a band. He'd work for us for a few months, help us to finish a project and make sure customer is happy.. and then disappear for a few more months to tour the US. Again, he was a great programmer, and we always welcomed him back.
I am sure that not every place is like this (for example my current workplace is pretty bureaucratic and would not be happy with this arrangement), but things like this definitely exist.
>I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
Trust me mate. Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD. I am homeless for 3 months now and it's absolutely devastating for my soul and morale.
Having no "safe harbour" takes away all enjoyment from "freedom". I was an avid hiker as well in the past :)
Why? Stay strong my friend.
And that’s before you get to the fact that each night you need to find a place to sleep and nobody wants it to be near them.
It’s immensely depressing, and hard to stay resilient.
Yes this is soul destroying - the psychological effects are brutal. Not having any little place as a 'base'.
I was homeless in Europe for a few weeks and it really crushes someone. I can see why so many rough sleepers take alcohol / drugs. Just to numb everything. I used to drink a few cans every night before trying to find a place to sleep.
Another crushing thing: as a commenter below said - on average people look down at you as if you were dirty etc. I found that so hard too.
I wish you the very best wherever you are ... really hope your situation will get better somehow please God...
(edit: oh just realised something - not implying the OP takes any substances or anything... just talking in general how I had to resort to alcohol in my situation)
It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that makes the poison. Things are very different when they become your life and there's no safety net. It's why almost anyone can walk a line drawn on the ground where mistakes are totally forgiven, but very few can walk a high rope with no safety net.
Yet of course - my kids and grandkids who were raised in suburban environments ALL romanticize farming...
The problem to me when I see this kind of life suggested as something people should try to do is that it isn't universalizable. There are only so many restaurants in any given city that need artisan vegetables. There is only so much land near such cities that can grow it. Even if all people who try are equally able, very few would succeed in doing this.
Another words, farmers back in that time would pretend they were busy all day. But actually spent a lot of the time "out in fields" bullshitting hunting, hanging with their friends at the river, or having fun building random shit in the workshop out of leisure rather than necessity. I didn't have the heart to tell the women in my family he probably didn't come home sooner because he didn't want to hear nagging or whining children, because it was blatantly obvious to me what the situation was.
It's much better to examine one's motivations for romanticizing the farm. Is it escapism from reality and the suffering endemic to it (in which case, you are only multiplying it by avoiding it)? Is it pride (too good to work)? Is it an impulse toward "immanentizing the eschaton"? Does your current job suck? Is the environment bad? Is it because you're living your life in a meaningless way?
Worth exploring.
There's a balance of course, but I believe most people would benefit from harder lives (in the natural/physical sense). Modern life being more comfortable and easier is actually bullshit. If your life is driving through traffic hours a day to go to a place to sit in front of a computer by yourself to send out messages by chat and email, that is a very hard life. You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
It does when it applies to your life. (Edit to reply to your edit) A bit of physical activity doesn't make your life harder. A lot of it might. And almost only hard physical activity is pure punishment, even literally used as such in labor camps.
> the safety nets are often illusions
Safety nets are sometimes illusions, they are mostly helping. Like an airbag they only need to work once to prove their worth.
> see: insurance, for one example
Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you.
Do you know many people who wish for a hard life? For the homeless life? To not have any sort of insurance?
> There's a balance of course [...] You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
The balance.
This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my house flood from a burst pipe on the top floor, had my HVAC condenser struck by lightning, had a city dump truck crush my parked car. Insurance has saved my ass so many times that I could pay a hundred grand a month in premiums for the rest of my life and still come out ahead.
People are so headline fixated that they only ever see the claim denials and think that's all that ever happens.
Insurance is the rent-seeking middleman that exists between you and them for no purpose other than to shave a percentage off forthemselves.
I agree that the providers themselves, along with the basic science and engineering that made their work possible in the first place, deserves the bulk of the credit, but nobody was attacking physicians and scientists here.
For what it's worth, in plenty of other Reddit-style "everthing sucks and I'm pessimistic about technology" threads, I'm out there touting these same stories as examples of science and technology making the world better, as many of these procedures either weren't possible or had far worse success rates as recently as 20 years ago. This just wasn't one of those threads.
I'm not sure what to make of the non sequitur to reddit threads though.
The people who do the job should get a lot of the credit. But none of them do it for free. Insurance is there to make sure you can pay those people for what needs to be done in the aftermath of very unlikely but very high impact events. A lot of people pay very little so a few people don’t have to pay a lot.
The industry has a lot of failings but this doesn’t wipe out the utility of the service.
I’ve experienced plenty of my own claim denials. In fact, I had to stop treatment of my chronic condition due to the last one. This is certain to cause my knees to fail in a few years.
You think they only exist in headlines? Then get your own head out of the news and talk to real people.
Some people even go camping for recreation.
It hits me every summer like clockwork tbh - leaving a nicely typed 2 minutes notice on my VP's desk and just taking my chances as a traveling beach bum. Akin to wanderlust, I'm filled with the urge to just go off into the unknown.
In my heart of hearts I know I'm a soft city boy though. I wouldn't last a week.
I was fired from a city job.
Started hitchiking and living outside. Eventually worked on a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, worked the oil fields in the Dakotas, fought in a civil war in another country, hiked state-long parts of the PCT, hung out with tree-dwelling hippies in the doug-fir forests etc.
I would live that life again in a heartbeat if I didn't have a child to support, which was pretty much the end of my adventures. If you're single you can pretty much work day labor 25% of the year and have plenty enough to live inna-woods. The reason why most 'homeless' people seem so miserable is they are too mentally ill or drug ridden to do some fairly basic things to make their lives living outside 100x better; if you are sober and able bodied and able-minded it is a cakewalk.
> I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
The film Sullivan's Travels from 1941 is a film that explores the concept of this romanticization. It's a good movie whose storytelling and comedy still hold up today. I think more people should be aware of it.
Trivia: This is also where the movie O' Brother Where Art Thou got its name.
I was intentionally homeless for 4 months, just riding my bike all around western Europe, just setting up my tent in a random woodland every night. I didn't have a safe harbor, except for the knowledge that I could get a job and rent an apartment if I wanted to.
It was not hard at all. In fact, I loved every minute of it. I lived/worked on a farm and slept on a bed for 2 weeks(WWOOFing), and I could not wait to get back out on the road again.
You can have money or food supplies and still be a homeless traveler. While it is common to assume homeless is broke, sometimes adventure and not being strapped to a certain, civilized life is the goal. I'm always amazed how far legs can take you.
If you have money it's not homelessness but adventure and hiking.
Homelessness is a forced state without an easy way out.
What sounded wonderful to me was this sentence: 'One store kept a record of an order: "one loaf of bread, a can of sardines, one-pound of fancy crackers, a pie, two quarts of coffee, one gill of brandy and a bottle of beer"'
This was a time when food brands weren't really a thing, the store probably had one type of bread, one type of (local) canned sardines, one type of crackers, etc. Each shop had a different variation and "menu", so to speak, all completely unique to each other. These days there is no difference between grocery stores, they all sell big-brand stuff and only convenience/price is the differentiating factor. No wonder only Walmarts are left.
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to myself. My gear was stolen within days, I got beat up and nearly stuck with dirty heroin needles at least 3 times, almost arrested twice, and yeah .. it just generally sucked. I was not prepared for the hardship.
6 months in the Australian desert after that experience definitely made me appreciate the Australian desert a lot more than I had previously, and I will never, ever try this experiment in an American city again.
Its not the street that'll get to you. Its the street life. If I were the only homeless bum in the area, I would've done better I think - but it was all too easy to filter out to skid row after having been chased out of pretty much every 'sanctity' spot I could find, under bridges and in the Griffith Park area - whether by cops or by other homeless people. It was pretty stupid of me, in hindsight. I really didn't need to do it, I was just trying to push my boundaries before heading into the Kimberley region to eat snakes and lizards. That was, by comparison, a far better experience than the reptiles of LA. Would not recommend.
I would spend my days in serious anticipation of the night sky, a glorious spectacle which majesty is yet to be matched by any human thing I've seen since then.
It was awesome and something I do hope to do again before I perish. Probably the most impactful event in my life was waking up on a dry creek bed surrounded by camels, who had come in the night to sleep at my side, sharing the warm creek stone bed.
Catching snakes for tucker was fun too. ;)
I found it quite rewarding, personally. Stripping all the material world of 15 years of life in California took me just a few days, semi-naked, thirsty and hungry, walking barefoot among the spinifex and wattles. Definitely a life-changing experience I would do again and again.
I think about this a lot when it comes to AI automation for coding.
Yes, it's nice if an AI can speed up the sort of semi-mindless parts of programming. But I strongly suspect that I need those spans of time for my mind to do the background processing necessary for the actual intellectually challenging parts of the job.
I've written two books and anyone who has done that will telling that writing is exhausting. It's an act that is almost purely intellectual with very little menial labor. And it is so utterly draining that it's hard to do for more than a couple of hours a day.
I don't relish programming turning into that. I like the easy refactoring and bug fixing tasks because they provide a respite between periods of very deep thinking while still keeping me mostly focused on the overall problem domain. I suspect I would be an overall worse engineer if I lost those.
I hear you. For about two years I got to live in a rural area, on the sea side, 45 minutes drive from the closest highway. 5000 people villages was a 15 minutes drive.
Chopping wood to then heat the house, having animals pass in front of me while I'd be reading HN under the porch before going to bed.
Walking just for the sake of walking from the house to the sea and then back.
Heny Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2690-i-went-to-the-woods-be...
That and the quote about cities being about mystification.
(3 minutes elapsed)
Ah, found it (first read it for someone posted here on HN btw):
Thomas Merton's Raids On The Unspeakable: "I am alien to the noises of cities, of people, to the greed of machinery that does not sleep, the hum of power that eats up the night. Where rain, sunlight and darkness are contemned, I cannot sleep. I do not trust anything that has been fabricated to replace the climate of woods or prairies. I can have no confidence in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first made deadly and then made safe with other poisons. There is nothing in the world of buildings that is not fabricated, and if a tree gets in among the apartment houses by mistake it is taught to grow chemically. It is given a precise reason for existing. They put a sign on it saying it is for health, beauty, perspective; that it is for peace, for prosperity; that it was planted by the mayor’s daughter. All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man."
Thankfully I still go to that place where I used to live, several times a year. Sky is so clear I can many stars.
Once my kid shall turn 18, I plan to go back live there.
I don't think us humans were meant to be stacked in cities and high-rises like ants. It's just like communism: great theory but wrong species.
> I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym
Wife does her gym at home: proper stuff in gym gear. Mostly just simple exercises: no crazy gear besides a few weights. No driving to the gym so twice the time saved. No need to shower at the gym or seat all sweaty in the car.
She does 20 or 30 minutes each day.
It is telling that society regularly outlaws afflictions like homelessness or situations like vagrancy instead of targeting the specific instances of bad behaviour that ought to be the problem.
The bad behaviours you want to be outlawed are in fact already outlawed. It's just super hard to catch and convict on those. While it's a lot easier to prove someone is sleeping rough.
First: We hide the symptoms behind a veneer of illegality which allows us to ignore the underlying causes.
Second: We intentionally write laws which has a proportionally negative effect based on social and medical class of citizens. A class which is already facing hardships.
”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
Interesting character for sure, this leatherman.
Yes, I agree that HN is the place to discover the most interesting, coolest and weirdest stuff on the internet but unfortunately, sometimes, these posts don't get enough traction in their first minutes and once they got pushed to the second page of newest submissions, they are technically dead!
Fortunately, HN had introduced what's called pool, or second chance, where the mods of the site periodically watch for past submissions and pick what they believe is interesting then throw it to the front page and see if it sticks by having users upvoting it.
Leatherman story was one of those cases. I submitted it three days ago without getting a single upvote and was surprised to see it made it to the front page this morning.
The mods didn't put it on the front page themselves but instead emailed me with an invitation to repost.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-w...
but it seems too new... I'm sure it was more than a year ago I read about it...
EDIT: that's definitely not the one. The one I read was by an author who had had a life-long obsession with the Leatherman and wanted to retrace his steps, on his own, and he had a family. It was a haunting piece.
EDIT 2: actually, looks like it is the article. I didn't scan far enough. I guess March 2025 feels a really long time ago.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes#Running_highligh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrianism
Crazy things like people walking 1 mile every hour for 1000 hours, grabbing bits of sleep within those hours.
It’s 100% commitment.
And we already have Galvanic cells and Voltaic piles, so it wouldn't have been the first battery named after its creator.
Any why?
“The more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I like him”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_a_Super...
One work which touches on this is Louis L'Amour's autobiography: _Education of a Wandering Man_ which is a great read.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1kqv2yd/pov_manual... pardon the subreddit it was the best video I could find shortly.
The Holy Fools were semi-religious figures who acted strangely or pretended to be mad to challenge social norms and express spiritual truths.
They were common in Russia at one time and called: "yuródivyy"
In the West, some examples would be Francis of Assisi and Benedict Joseph Labre.
edit: In the USA I'd nearly call Johnny Appleseed one of the 'Holy Fools' and even Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
This fellow also stays with friends.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/podcasts/the-daily/old-le...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-w...
Seeing his picture and then reading this I fully expect that he's still walking the route as a zombie and always has been a zombie.
Thankfully the standard of living has been high enough for long enough for most people, that certain sacrifices are culturally unimaginable, but they are still there.
Freedom is not free.
If you refuse to make long-term commitments to other people and to society, you will loose the benefits of their commitments to you. Even ignoring other people, if you refuse to make long-term commitments to yourself or a certain goal, commitments that will require you to do lots of things you don't feel like doing, suspending your freedom, you will never build anything meaningful, anything that makes life worth living.
That's what being civilized is all about, collectively maximising our long-term freedom, instead of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of others freedom, instead of pursuing freedom in the present at the expense of greater freedom in the future. It's made us so much better.
Everyone still has the option to unplug from the matrix and go do whatever they feel like, good for you. But do not expect help if you don't help others, and do not expect much goodwill if you refuse to engage in our collective pursuit of making things better for all of us.