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."