Living without money
women.timesonline.co.uk
women.timesonline.co.uk
When your thought is proactive (rather than reactive) and deliberate there is little room for the emptiness that consumerism and facile distractions attempt to fill. What destine creates within is motion. Motion is life.
Hence: negative e-motion = less motion; positive e-motion = more motion. Get deliberate, get proactive, and you get happy, productive, efficient, and simple.
Security is an illusion of the Ego. The Ego being defined as that psychological complex that keeps the body and species alive (hunger, sleep, sex). Necessary, buy only to degree. The Self (psychological, physical, and spiritual whole) seeks growth through change (or, motion) - the life we live is all about keeping up with the Self and not getting bogged down in maintaining our security, let the need for security evolve with the circumstances...
In what sense?
> What destine creates within is motion
In what sense?
> negative e-motion
What is e-motion?
I'd like to interview her again when she gets really sick (not that I wish her to become ill). Also she seems to have children - maybe if she got really bad, they would take care of her in the end.
I suppose it would be interesting to see if she stayed with that conviction once she really is sick. But, she's 67 already, and has managed to stick to some difficult convictions already, so I wouldn't bet against her.
How much is enough?
"You Are Welcome to Kill Me, If You Will" http://www.angelfire.com/apes/hatrackman/
I actually own this book. I bought it in highschool because I felt I was putting my money into things that I didn't need to, and so I could save money quicker for the cool stuff.
----
I should add, I ended up making money by fixing broken things. A lot of the things weren't even broken! I'd take books to bookstores too. If the homeless only had a place to store broken goods, a place they could fix items, they'd have a resource they could pool into.
There's an idea.
Also, a bag of produce was always a great treasure. Great for compost.
She still lives with money, just not with the physical pieces of paper.
And more to the point, it's impossible to live "without money." Money is not a possession, it's simply a measure of wealth.
And this:
When something hurts, I put my hand on it and say to myself I have the power to heal myself and the pain goes away.”
Or rather it depends - for people like the woman in the article it is probably a good thing, because she excels at social interactions. If her world order would become the norm, the people less skilled in social interactions would lose out. So it is not fighting for a better world - it is just everybody fighting for a world order in which they have the best cards on their hands.
That said, if you open a PC repair service, the likelihood that the hairdresser in your neighborhood would come to you with PC problems seems high. If you don't offer repair services in your neighborhood right now, I wonder why not? My guess would be that your computer skills are probably more valuable than what you could earn with repair services (typically better paid than haircuts, so would you be willing to exchange 1:1?).
Yep, as an introvert, this is the part that would terrify me about adopting such a lifestyle.
Suppose I have chickens I sell at £5, outside forces reduce the value of that £5 such that chickens are now worth £10. If previously a haircut was £5, and is since I cashed up now £10 (inflated the same as the chicken did) then because I use money I've lost 50% of the value of my chicken; simply by using money. If I swapped that chicken for a future haircut then it wouldn't matter what inflation does or the charges banks put on transactions or how competitors try to low-ball the hairdresser out of existence. I get a haircut, they get a chicken.
Also, the equivalent to outside forces devaluating the money would simply be the hairdresser dieing or moving away - then he got your chicken for free, because you can not call in your future haircut anymore. At least with money, you can still go to another hairdresser.
It doesn't work that way. (Debate about the usefulness of taxes elsewhere please - the fact is atm the government wants our money/part of our production. It is not a result of the existence of money).
Also, you don't need to have a business if your exchanges are below a certain threshold, at least not in Germany. I am fairly certain it has to be similar in the US.
Barter economies are degenerate cases of market economies, where the transactions costs are higher due to the nonliquidity of the currencies actually being used. This is not a story about a beautiful proof of how money isn't necessary, it's proof that the money-based economy is rich enough to support not-100%-efficient sub-economies as effectively parasites on the main economy. Still true, but a lot less faux-beautiful. Money is still there, just swept under the rug so everybody can feel warm fuzzies about not using money.
Note that this is a separate issue from asceticism; market economies aren't incompatible with owning stuff, rather than stuff owning you, and bartering doesn't enforce asceticism.
Example: I can re-build volkswagen/porsche engines. While the market value for this is roughly 1.5k usd in labor I would gladly do it in exchange for you staining my arcade cabinet - a service with a roughly 300-500 usd value.. I would feel like I was getting a killer deal and so would you.
Is that "degenerate" because it is not optimizing exploitation or do you mean that in another sense of the word?
Incidentally, the model in that book will be mathematically degenerate in the other direction, at least for most of the book, because it goes to the opposite extreme of completely ignoring transactions costs for a while. Reality is, as usual, somewhere in between, but it is much closer to the market-with-money model than the everybody-is-bartering model.
So, I'm using it in the math sense, not in a moralistic sense.
If the phrase "market efficiency" is striking fear in your heart, remember that what that means in reality is that the barterers are closing themselves off to better deals and reducing their wealth vs. what they could be doing.
So, if that's true, why are they bartering? In the real world, money does involve a certain floor of transaction costs, imposed by the government for tax reasons. (I'm not saying I disagree with this, just that there are costs.) Things near the boundary of those costs can be worth just bartering, or selling "under the table". But it's effectively impossible to "barter" your way to a car or a house. (Yes, I know it's been done but it's generally a gimmick.) It can also be possible to barter between two people who simply have no money, in which case the reduced efficiency is a tradeoff you have no choice but to make. (One of the worst things about being poor is how it can lock you away from the very higher-efficiency economic transactions that you need to escape from poverty.) But like I said, it's not the awesome blueprint to a new economy (which I realize wasn't explicitly said in the article), it's a special case that has little general application.
In respect to money being a measure of wealth, was he "theoretically" becoming wealthy and acruing "good will". Later by changing his mind and asking for favors from his neighbors he could "cash in" his "good will" but avoid paying income and sale taxes on it.
Edit: don't shoot the messenger, I did not create the laws
Trading is friendly, too, btw. In a good trade, both parties are happier after the trade.
The pieces of paper, or the equivalent numbers on a bank web site, check, etc., are the common meaning of money in normal conversation. In every day English, I think that exclusively relying on direct bartering does qualify as "living without money."
Just a guess.
Also pg wrote an article about getting rid of "stuff" at one point.
People need frequent reminders that material possessions are not necessary for happiness to counteract the cognitive biases and societal pressures that are perpetually indicating the opposite. To go without such reminders in the face of economic reality is extremely stressful, leading to depression, anxiety, and the growing problem of pathological hoarding. There are even now several television shows on the subject, one in the same format as the show about drug interventions. It really can get that bad for otherwise well-adjusted people trying to cope with the difference between what they need and what they want.
The truth is that you can never have enough of what you don't need, and sometimes you need the example (if not the experience) of someone living very close to the edge to illuminate the problem in your own life.
Less charitably: There is a widespread meme associating simpler lifestyle with productivity, and many people here have a craving, if not an addiction, to "tips" or "hacks" to enable them to be more productive, or at least seem more productive. Because they profess to have obtained a desirable state, people with unconventional lifestyles are just as common a subject as famous historical figures or business leaders. The idea being that if you emulate something this woman or Thomas Jefferson or Steve Jobs did, you can achieve great things as they did. The term "productivity porn" is apt.
In essence, many are just looking for another way to get more of what they want, rather than learning to want less. Two sides of the same coin, so to speak. Both present at HN.