The Man Who Quit Money: An Interview with Daniel Suelo
becomingminimalist.com
becomingminimalist.com
Whether he wants to believe it or not, he's the beneficiary of modern largesse. He doesn't take government handouts or whatever, but the only reason he can have the sorts of thoughts he's having about nature and religion is because he was a Western-style education and enough free time to develop a philosophy. He can dumpster dive, he can spend time on the Internet and at the library figuring out how to live off grid. It's easy to take for granted the careful, focused effort of millions of people over thousands of years to give him all of this. The knowledge he finds in the library isn't cheap, even though he's not paying for it.
Because I guarantee you, off-grid living wouldn't be nearly as much fun without it.
I don't mind if you want to go off-grid. I had ideas myself about doing that. I read about van-dwelling, building my own small house on a trailer, earthships. If that's what you feel you need to do, by all means go play in the dirt, get it out of your system. Just don't pretend it's morally superior just because you've failed to fully appreciate everything that brought you to that point to where you could renounce the modern world.
This is such a great statement. These articles when they come around make finance, business, and work seem like such an "evil" thing, and should be beneath people. But god forbid you tell them how dumpster diving and just being a vagabond can also be a burden to everyone else in society.
Every age had its dumpster divers, its people who, rather than to throw their weight behind efforts to create better institutions, to better understand the world around them, decided a better world wasn't worth the hassle. That this world, with all these things that all their ancestors spent their lives building, is stupid and should be renounced. These people are absolutely a burden, and should not be listened to.
It made sense in a weird sort of way when the Jains were doing it, religious renunciation is sometimes the only way you can make a political statement without getting killed, but it didn't take long until they had made their point but kept on doing it after it stopped actually being noble.
Yes, there's a lot of crappy things about the world. Roll up your sleeves and help fix them!
The dumpster divers are doing the environment a favour. They are recycling what would otherwise be needless waste.
The modern world's conveniences were built up by people who saw how shitty the world looked and wanted to change it. Yes. I agree 100%. The modern world's conveniences are amazing, useful and provide us with a far greater standard of living. What is shit though is the constant treadmill of planned obsolescence, designing for a shelf life, goods that are designed only to last as long as their warranties before they are replaced. We used to live in a society where things were made to last for a lifetime, to be passed on to our heirs when we're gone. Heirloom furniture that can be passed down for generations over hundreds or thousands of years. This has been replaced by pressboard furniture that we're lucky if it lasts for 5-10 years before it's thrown out and replaced. That is what's shit about society, accumulation of the same shit quality stuff, paying over and over again to replace things that don't last. Things that could and should last, just because of what? Planned obsolescence.
He found something he didn't like about society and he found a way to fix it. He helped fix it by not contributing to it any more. In addition to this, he is living on the waste of society - the bits that weren't good enough for you and were heading to an eyesore of a landfill somewhere that got carved out of the landscape damaging the environment.
It's funny how the hip thing right now is "reduce, reuse, recycle". If you're the guy showing a viable way for every family to do this without any emotional discomfort and you're a hero. But the second you dig through other people's trash and do the same thing, you're a pariah.
The fact is capitalist society does have a problem, we're extraordinarily wasteful and we're chasing constantly unattainable happiness. It's unattainable because our happiness is based on the constantly turning wheels of capitalism. We spend money emotionally because the media feeds our need to buy stuff because: "We deserve it", "it'll make us look better", "it'll give us a 6 pack", "it'll help us lose 50 lbs in 6 weeks", "it'll make us more desirable to the opposite sex", "it'll make us feel better", "it'll do whatever it is we need it to do to make us feel better than the last thing we were told to buy that also promised to make us feel better but only worked as long as we didn't realize this other shinier more expensive thing came out."
So someone who can come along that can take the waste and repurpose it into something useful and spare the environment in the process is noble. That's not to say that you're not noble, perhaps what you throw out is genuinely of no use to you, perhaps the bit you didn't throw out was genuinely useful to you and you used it for a noble purpose. Perhaps instead of throwing it out, you could trade it with someone who has use for it that has something that would be of use to you?
And nobody suggested renouncing all of our ancestors work... but renouncing the bits that don't work is healthy. We no longer allow slavery in the West; women can vote; we offer support to those trying to quit drugs, alcohol and smoking; same sex marriage is starting to become widely acceptable; we can touch a piece of glass in our pocket and talk to whole communities of people scattered to the four corners of the earth, the list goes on. There is much about society that we can be really proud of. But there's nothing wrong with renouncing the bits that don't work, nor is there anything wrong with taking steps to mitigate them in your own life and being vocal about them to help mitigate them in other people's lives.
"Be the change you want to see in the world" - Gandhi
Also, this quote comes to mind:
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
- George Bernard Shaw
He has a library card and he uses modern technology... and yes, without modern society, he wouldn't have that technology to use and to learn. But we've been learning from our ancestors, friends and communities free of charge for thousands of years. There is little difference here, except that with the advent of the internet, we can learn from millions of our ancestors and peers, all around the world instead of just those in our local community.
I say good for him. I'm fascinated by off-grid living, but this is not it. You do everyone a disservice by implying that living entirely without money, without anything and living off-the-grid are one and the same.
People who live off grid may not use monetary transactions in the modern sense, but they do use a form of money - they barter in goods, services and goodwill. That may not have a physical currency, but it is a currency nonetheless. They trade with their communities, their families and their friends. This is how off-grid communities work, this is how modern society works - it's just that instead of trading goodwill, we trade this bit of paper with the slogan "In God We Trust".
The piece of society that clearly isn't good for the soul is this constant march of consumerism and planned obsolescence. The promotion of quantity over quality, where nothing lasts, everything is cheap and disposable and everything we do is done to the point of destroying our environment. The sooner we find a way to get off this treadmill, the happier our environment will be and the happier everyone is going to be.
I take my hat off to this guy, he's found a way out of it, he's happy, his soul is satisfied and he wants to help others to find their way to that satisfaction. So perhaps instead of judging his moral superiority, perhaps appreciate what he's found that so many of us struggle to find and many don't.
Perhaps take a lesson out of his book, look around you, ask yourself what you're truly happy with, ask yourself what would happen if you lost it all, and wonder if any of it matters. He did, and he realized that none of it mattered... and now, he's happy.
When those around us die, we pause, we realize that we've not been living in the moment, enjoying what truly matters in our lives, forming emotional attachments to meaningless things to a meaningless life - that's why we coined the endearment "the rat race" and we resolve to stop churning on this treadmill and appreciate what truly matters... before we get right back on the treadmill and go back to doing the same things we did.
So... yeah... not sure what my point is. Perhaps be happy that he found happiness and is striving to help others find happiness too. This modern need to exponentially accumulate shit just because the media has groomed us to do so has seen ever increasing rates of depression and suicide and finding anything that will combat that and bring people emotional or spiritual satisfaction can only be good.
While Chris and myself have never gone moneyless like the article, I find myself tending towards that every day. I now hunt all my own meat and fish, grow as much of my own vegetables as I can, work on my own car and bike, etc. etc. I try hard to not pay for anything I can do for myself.
I'm also once again disillusioned with work and consumption, so in a couple of months I'm heading out to drive around Africa for a couple of years, then all going well I'll drive Europe->SE Asia.
I hope only up to and not including the part of starving to death after eating the wrong thing.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
That being said, I met tons of people on the road traveling with their family for extended periods of time - tons of tons of people are driving around the world with kids. I had a pizza on the streets of Cartegena, Colombia with one French family and one of the kids said "We hate homeschooling..... we love worldschooling!"
Friends of mine paused their trip for a few months while they had a baby in Santiago, Chile, then kept driving :)
I very much prefer to travel alone, because being stuck miles from home with an unhappy partner is a special kind of hell. It can also be quite lonely to be alone on the road though.
Good luck in your travels!
Er.. I get the point he's trying to make here, but I think what he's not seeing is that currencies basically spontaneously emerge out of the necessity of conducting trade. So, sure, you can try to pretend the construct doesn't exist, but you're just closing your eyes to the problem because you don't happen to like it.
- Which are wilderness regions because the entire population moved to cities.
"scavenges roadkill"
- Which exists because people built roads and people drive there.
"pulls food from dumpsters"
- Which exists because people built the dumpsters and throw food into it.
"sometimes fed by friends and strangers"
- No comments.
The headline should be: "The Man Who Quit Money But Depends On It".
I was with you on the other parts but this doesn't really make sense. You can blame modernity for many things but creating more wilderness doesn't seem like one of them.
That's kind of...simplistic.
"He who works for the fruits of his labor is a miser." ~Krishna, in The Gita
And the rest of what he's saying seems to be, "Just treat each other like you would family; do things for no reward and take what you need." That's not a novel approach. It doesn't scale up well. The major experiments with trying to scale it up resulted in the deaths of tens or hundreds of millions of people in the 20th Century.
In some places living completely off grid is illegal - you are required to be connected and pay for utilities.