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- - How to Drop Out (http://goldismoney.info/forums/showthread.php?t=362679)

scholarcoon | 03-28-2009 11:53 AM
How to Drop Out Dropping out of society. Dumpster diving. Living on less than $2000 a year. Author says it's not easy but still implies that its worth it. http://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html I didn't even start dropping out until my mid-20's. Unlike many outsiders and "radicals," I never had to go through a stage where I realized that our whole society is insane -- I've known that as long as I can remember. But even being already mentally outside the system, I found it extremely challenging to get out physically. In fourth grade I wanted to blow up the school, but I didn't know how, and even if I had done it, it would not have meant an endless summer vacation. In high school, inspired by Bill Kaysing's The Robin Hood Handbook, I wanted to go live off the land in the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it seemed as remote and difficult as going to the moon. (Kaysing later wrote the book We Never Went to the Moon.) So I continued to bide my time and obey the letter of the law, like the guy in the Kafka parable (link). In college, when Artis the Spoonman performed on campus and told us all to drop out, I thought that was ridiculous -- how would I survive without a college degree? A few years later, with my two college degrees, after jobs operating envelope-stuffing machinery and answering phones in a warehouse, I was finally nudged toward dropping out by the Bush I recession and my own nature -- that I'm extremely frugal, love unstructured time, and would sooner eat garbage than feign enthusiasm. More than ten years later I'm a specialist at eating garbage -- as I draft this I'm eating a meal I made with organic eggs from a dumpster, and later I'll make a pie of dumpstered apples. I live on under $2000 a year, I have no permanent residence, and moving to the Idaho wilderness now seems like a reachable goal -- but no longer the best idea. Getting free of the system is more complex than we've been led to believe. Here as in so many places, our thinking has been warped by all-or-nothingism, by the Hollywood myth of the sudden overwhelming victory: Quit your corporate job this minute, sell all your possessions, and hop a freight train to a straw bale house in the mountains where you'll grow all your own food and run with the wolves! In reality, between the extremes there's a whole dropout universe, and no need to hurry. In my case, as I understood what I had to go through to make money, I stopped spending it. I learned to make my meals from scratch, and then from cheaper scratch, making my own sourdough bread and tortillas. I stopped buying music and books (exceptions in exceptional cases) and got in the habit of using the library. When I crashed my car, I kept the insurance money and walked, and then got an old road bike. I took a road trip by hitchhiking, but it was too physically taxing and I got sick. Like many novice radicals, I got puritanical and pushed myself too hard, and finally eased off. I temporarily owned another car and lived in it for a couple months of a long road trip. In the Clinton economic bubble, I got a job that was much easier and better paying than my previous jobs, and built up savings that I'm still living on. The main thing I was doing during those years was de-institutionalizing myself, learning to navigate the hours of the day and the thoughts in my head with no teacher or boss telling me what to do. I had to learn to relax without getting lethargic, to never put off washing the dishes, to balance the needs of the present and the future, to have spontaneous fun but avoid addiction, to be intuitive, to notice other people, to make big and small decisions. I went through mild depression and severe fatigue and embarrassing obsessions and strange diets and simplistic new age thinking. It's a long and ugly road, and most of us have to walk it, or something like it, to begin to be free. A friend says, "This world makes it easy to toe the line, and easy to totally **** up, and really hard to not do either one." But this hard skill, not quitting your job or moving to the woods or reducing consumption or doing art all day, is the essence of dropping out. When people rush it, and try to take shortcuts, they slide into addiction or debt or depression or shattered utopian communities, and then go back to toeing the line. The path is different for everyone. Maybe you're already intuitive and decisive and know how to have fun, but you don't know how to manage money or stay grounded. Maybe you're using wealth or position or charm to keep from having to relate to people as equals, or you're keeping constantly busy to avoid facing something lurking in the stillness. Whatever weaknesses keep you dependent on the system, you have to take care of them before you break away from the system, just as you have to learn to swim before you escape a ship. How? By going out and back, a little farther each time, with persistence and patience, until you reach the skill and distance that feels right. At the moment there's no reason to drop out "all the way" except puritanism. I hate civilization as much as anyone, but in these last few years before it crashes, we should appreciate and use what it offers. Sylvan Hart (his given name!), the 20th century mountain man who even smelted his own metal, still traded with civilization, and once carried a sheet of glass 50 miles through the woods so he could have a good window. (See Harold Peterson, The Last of the Mountain Men) Some of the happiest people I know have dropped out only a short distance. They still live in the city and have jobs and pay rent, but they've done something more mentally difficult -- and mentally liberating -- than moving to some isolated farm. They have become permanently content with no-responsibility slack jobs, low-status, modest-paying, easy jobs that they don't have to think about at home or even half the time when they're at work. Yes, these jobs are getting scarce, but they're still a thousand times more plentiful than the kind of job that miserable people cannot give up longing for -- where you make a living doing something so personally meaningful that you would do it for free. "Do what you love and the money will follow" is an irresponsible lie, a denial of the deep opposition between money and love. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make a cent from it, because that's what love means -- but you still need money!" So what I recommend, as the second element of dropping out, is coldly severing your love from your income. One part of your life is to make only as much money as you need with as little stress as possible, and a separate part, the important part, is to do just exactly what you love with zero pressure to make money. And if you're lucky, you'll eventually make money anyway. But how much money do you "need"? And what if the only jobs available are low-paying and so exhausting that you barely have the energy to go home and collapse into bed? These questions lead to my own level of dropping out, which is to reduce expenses to the point that you shift your whole identity from the high-budget to the low-budget universe. In a temperate climate, you have only five physical needs: food, water, clothing, shelter, and fuel. (If you're a raw-foodist and don't mind the cold, you don't even need fuel!) Everything else that costs money is a luxury or a manufactured need. Manufactured needs have fancy names: entertainment, transportation, education, employment, housing, "health care." In every case these are creations of, and enablers of, an alienating and dominating system, a world of lost wholeness. If you love your normal activities, you don't need to tack on "entertainment." If you aren't forced to travel many miles a day, you don't need "transportation." If you are permitted to learn on your own, you don't need "education." If you can meet all your physical needs through the direct action of yourself and your friends, you don't need to go do someone else's work all day. If you're permitted to merely occupy physical space and build something to keep the wind and rain out, you don't need to pay someone to "provide" it. Expensive health care is especially insidious: not only is our toxic and stressful society the primary cause of sickness, but the enormous expenses that have been added in the last hundred years are mostly profit-making scams that cause and prolong sickness far more than they heal it. This is the low-budget universe: I ride around the city on an old cheap road bike, in street clothes, often hauling food I've just pulled out of a dumpster. Sometimes I'll be on a trail where I'll invariably be passed by people on thousand dollar bikes in racing outfits. Why are they riding around if they're not carrying anything? And why are they in such a hurry? I used to be envious of those suckers: I have to ride my bike to survive and they're so rich they do it for fun. But what is this "fun"? I get everything -- exercise, getting from place to place, meaningfulness, the feeling of autonomy, and doing what's necessary to survive -- all with the same activity: riding my bike. They should be envious of me: my life is elegant and theirs is disjointed and self-defeating, making money which they have to turn around and spend on unhealthful restaurant food because they don't have time to cook, on cars because they have too many obligations to get around by bicycle, and then on bicycles or health club memberships to make up for sitting in their jobs and cars all day, and even then on medical "insurance" (a protection racket which for most people costs more than uninsured care -- or there would be no profit in it) for when their fragmented poisonous life makes them sick. How do you get out of this? One step at a time! Move or change jobs so you don't need a car, and then sell the damn thing. Get a bicycle and learn to fix it yourself -- it's not even 1% as difficult and expensive as fixing a car. Reduce your possessions and you'll find that the fewer you have, the more you appreciate each one. Get your clothing at thrift stores on sale days -- I spend less than $20 a year on clothes. Give up sweetened drinks -- filtered water is less than 50 cents a gallon and much better for you. If you have an expensive addiction, pull yourself out of it or at least trade it for a cheap one. Probably the most valuable skill you can learn is cooking. For a fraction of the cost of white-sugar-white-starch-hydrogenated-oil restaurant meals, you can make your own meals out of high quality healthful ingredients, and if you're a good cook, they'll taste good. I eat better than anyone I know on $100 a month: butter, nuts, dates, whole wheat flour, brown rice, olive oil, all organic, and bee pollen for extra vitamins. From natural food store dumpsters I get better bread, produce, meat, and eggs than Safeway even sells, but if this is impossible in your city, or you'd just prefer not to, you can still eat beautifully on $200. The foundation of all this is to cultivate intense awareness of money. It doesn't grow on trees but you have millions of years of biological memory of a world where what you want does grow on trees, so you need to constantly remind yourself that whatever you're thinking of buying will cost you an hour, ten hours, 100 hours of dreary humiliating labor. Your expenses are your chains. Reducing them is not about punishing yourself or avoiding guilt -- it's about getting free. If you continue to reduce expenses, eventually you'll come to the proverbial elephant in the parlor, the single giant expense that consumes 50-80% of a frugal person's money, enough to buy a small extravagant luxury every day. Of course, it's rent, or for you advanced slaves, mortgage. The only reason you can't just go find a vacant space and live there, the only reason another entity can be said to "own" it and require a huge monthly payment from whoever lives there, is to maintain a society of domination, to continually and massively redistribute influence (symbolized by money) from the powerless to the powerful, so the powerless are reduced to groveling for the alleged privilege of wage labor, doing what the powerful tell them in exchange for tokens which they turn around and pass back toward the powerful every month and think it's natural. Rent is theft and slavery, and mortgage is just as bad, based not only on the myth of "owning" space but also on the contrived custom of "interest," simply a command to give money (influence) to whoever has it and take it from whoever lacks it. Fortunately there are still a lot of ways to dodge rent/mortgage other than refusing to pay or leave and being killed by the police. For surprisingly little money you can buy remote or depleted land and build a house on it. (see Mortgage Free! by Rob Roy, and also Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country by Les Scher) If you don't mind starting over with strangers, you can join an existing dropout community. (See the Communities Directory.) You can live in a van, camp in the woods, or look for a caretaker or apartment manager job. If you're charming, you can find a partner or spouse who will "support" you by permitting you to sleep and cook someplace without asking for money. And if you're bold or desperate, most cities have abandoned houses or buildings where you can squat. Mainly all you need are neighbors oblivious to your coming and going, a two-burner propane camp stove, some water jugs and candles, and a system for disposing of your bodily waste. If the "owners" come, they'll probably just ask you to leave, and in some places there are still archaic laws from compassionate times, making it legally difficult for them to evict you. I squatted a shed for two weeks in December 2002 and if necessary I'll do it again. Also I have enough money saved to buy cheap land -- the project is just too big for me to do alone. Also I'm slowly learning wilderness survival -- which is iffy since wilderness itself is not surviving. But I spend most of my time surfing housesits and staying with friends and family. To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your "success" means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest. But what if they don't? What about people who are outside the system but still hyper-selfish? These people are not what I call "dropouts" but what I call "idiots." The view of this world as a war of all against all, where your purpose in life is to accumulate "wealth," zero-sum advantages and scarce resources for an exclusive "self," is the view of the elite. The only reason to think that way is if you are one of the handful of people in a position to win. For everyone else, the value system that makes sense is that you are here to help, to serve the greatest good that you can perceive. Yet in America, rich and poor alike are raised with robber baron consciousness, to turn us against each other, to keep us exploiting those below us instead of resisting our own exploiters, to keep all the arrows going the right way in the life-depleting machine. The frugality that I'm talking about is the opposite of ungenerosity, because it frees us from a scarcity-based system in which we cannot afford to be generous. For all our lives we've been trained as prostitutes, demanding money in exchange for services that we should be giving free to those we love, because others demand the same of us. In this context, the dropout is a hero and a virus: if you no longer need money, you can give others what they need without asking for money, and then they no longer need money, and so on. In practice it's still sketchy because there are so few of us, but the more of us there are, and the more skills and goods and openings we offer, the better our gift economy will work. And if we do it right, they won't be able to just massacre us or put us in camps, as they've always done before, because we will have too many friends and relations in the dominant system. For strategy I look not to political movements like revolts or strikes or radical parties, but to cultural movements like gay liberation or feminism or pagan spirituality. First define a clearly understood identity, then proudly claim that identity, then build public acceptance through entertainment and by each of us earning the support of friends and family outside the movement. I'm envious of gay people -- I've spent years mastering written language just to halfway explain myself, and all they have to say is "I'm gay." If we had a word, what would it be? In a recent family bulk Christmas mailing, I was "living the bohemian lifestyle," but I don't go to poetry readings or hang out in coffee shops. "Anarchist" smacks of ideology, of people who bicker endlessly about abstract theory, although maybe we could adopt an insulting term used by theory anarchists, and call ourselves "lifestyle anarchists." "Voluntary simplicity" is too tame and politically correct, suggesting aging yuppies trying to save the world by reducing households to one car -- plus the life I advocate is not at all simple, just unstressful. I'm too politically ambitious and forward-looking to be a hobo or a tramp. In Eastern tradition I could be respected as some kind of monk or holy man, but I don't want to get "enlightened" -- I want to make the whole world wild and free. The word I've been using, "dropout," is a good start but it has the same deep flaw as "primitive": it places our dominating, parasitic, and temporary civilization in the fixed center. We've got it inside out. On the physical plane, nature is the center that holds, and "mainstream" society is the falling apart, the irresponsible life-wasting deviance. What I'm trying to do -- and what we're all going to have to do in the next few decades if we survive at all -- is drop back in. related links My own recommendations of books to drop out with. A page about Jeffrey Sawyer, who has gone way farther out than I ever did. Appendix 1: Having Kids For very young people there are also two universes. Squatting over a tub of warm water is a much cheaper and healthier way to give birth than lying on your back in a harsh hospital room where the high priest will take the infant away from the mother to teach it alienation. Then you can buy a stroller and a crib (more alienation practice) and expensive baby food, or do like most nature-based peoples and carry your baby against your body and breast-feed it for the first three to four years (reference) (reference). You can send it to day care (practice for later institutions) so you can go to your job that pays only slightly more than day care costs, or you can raise the kid yourself. And the idea that a kid needs a "nice" upper-middle-class-style physical environment is worse than false. A "dirty" environment strengthens the immune system, and if I were a toddler again, I'd much rather live in a cool abandoned house or junkyard or shack in the woods than in a sterile room with a television where I wasn't allowed to touch anything. The little problem here is that raising kids with dropout values is marginally illegal, and you risk having them kidnapped and reprogrammed by the authorities -- the same as they did to the Indians. And the big problem is that, while the financial requirements for having kids are completely artificial, the mental/emotional requirements are real and more difficult than we can imagine if we haven't tried it. To "raise the kid yourself" must be something like three full-time jobs that you can't quit. The mother needs at least one other person capable of taking care of all her needs so she can devote full attention to the child, and ideally she needs a whole "tribe." Babies are super-adaptable -- it's the mother who needs a level of comfort and stability that's hard to achieve without money -- and a level of emotional health that's hard to achieve with money. Otherwise the baby will adapt itself for compatibility with a hostile, empty, stressed-out hell-world. I'd love to have a couple kids, but I won't do it without a physical location that's owned and paid for, and without someone besides myself to help out the mother, and without the means to dodge the institutions, whether through excellent legal help or through the institututions breaking down. (Thanks Ursa for suggesting the topic!)

gasilat | 03-28-2009 01:26 PM
Re: How to Drop Out There are society dropouts just about everywhere... Some of the ones I know are men that went through bitter divorces and ended up losing their jobs...I've seen them lose there competitive edge, the fight in them vanish and turn to just existing...just getting by...Is it better ? Well I guess that depends on the individual at the time. Many of us are born with the drive to go far past surviving and just getting by to exceling in many things in life and would quickly go insane living like that...until one day we change through an emotional event like a tough divorce, or aging to trigger the transformation. I have known some people that dropped out because they were raised wealthy and learned to hate the insincerity and quasi-worshipping of material wealth combined with over-working in their families. This kind of person interests me because they actually have options and a fallback plan if need be that only takes a phone call to implement that they refuse to make...hmmm. Usually they work the summers in some part time crappy little job and then take all winter off bumming a place to stay or house-sitting for someone for free rent. Experts at living with practically no possessions and very cheaply. They don't have cars. One guy got a little camper and just pulled it onto the power line right of way out in the boonies and squatted for a couple years with a wood stove and no running water until they made him move. Another built a treehouse out of scrap lumber out of the dump on some out of the way government property and lived in it for a few years...I've hung out with enough of them to realize they don't fit any mold...free spirits...

Tome | 03-28-2009 04:17 PM
Re: How to Drop Out This is basically about Slackers. Hardly a survival prep strategy wtshtf. :dontknow:

scyth | 03-28-2009 05:08 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by Tome (Post 1650528) This is basically about Slackers. Hardly a survival prep strategy wtshtf. :dontknow:
I couldn't disagree more.......... I have known more than a few highly motivated and talented people Who have chosen the roads of voluntary poverty or disconnecting From the grid, whether it be political power, economics, religion, or Other enforced behaviors. Personal example: In 1970 I built an 8' x 18' cabin about a mile back in the woods Of Southern Oregon, using wood salvaged from a falling down barn which Belonged to the rancher I worked for ($50 cash/week). I borrowed his old Willies pickup to transport the heavy stuff; The rest was shanks mare. The cabin was built with hand tools. I had a garden, and would hitch into town every week or two For store bought supplies, like kerosene in tin gallon cans for the two lamps. Lived that way for almost 5 years, and those were halcyon days. Then I got suckered back into the world of money/career etc. And, yeah, I'm still mired in it and slowly, slowly, agonizingly slowly Pulling out of it. And I've known plenty of dharma bums and bumettes who didn't (like me) get wired into 60 hrs/week/no limit Who have my absolute respect. So, all I can say or ask is Reconsider. There's a lot more than meets the eye, here. scyth

Tome | 03-28-2009 06:57 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by scyth (Post 1650569) I couldn't disagree more....
That's what these forums are for. :smile:

Dave Thomas | 03-28-2009 08:26 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Funny, there is a fine line between "survival" and living. If someone drops out, in these terms I don't consider this surviving, I consider it living. Survival is a temporary thing that is done under duress. Those competitive folks caught up in the rat race mortgaged up to their eyeballs with tons of toys and the like, are in more of a survival mode than the guy just beach combing collecting aluminum cans. That guy is living. When we talk about survival here on this board a funny thing happens. People are preparing to make their lives post sthf as much like their PRE shtf lives. This seems like a lot of trouble considering you'll never be 100% prepared, and if everything does go to hell, you'll never ever be able to replace those tools, generators, panels, radios, gun parts, twinkees, ever again. So in regards to survival, I think the guy eating crap out of a dumpster is much closer to being prepared mentally wsthf as opposed to someone who prepares endlessly wishing the "good old days" come back. The mindset of minimalisim is perhaps the best tool in the shed so to speak. It's also one of the most difficult tools to aqquire I'm guessing. (As I edit this on my 26" LCD) :553:

RaccoonRiverRadical | 03-28-2009 08:51 PM
Re: How to Drop Out If you can establish a little farmstead offgrid somewhere I say go for it. If you can establish a little business offgrid (as in taxes) go for it. If what you mean by dropping out is living as a vagrant in a rv or public park on the West Coast I say forget about it, because that is nothing more than a wasted life.

staupostek | 03-28-2009 09:10 PM
Re: How to Drop Out I have heard stories about people in the not so distant past who went west, homesteaded some land, and became very successful. But now day, homesteading is gone. And if one does acquire some land, the government will charge you tax on it. They will charge fees and require licenses and permits to build anything. If you try to drill a well for water, they will stop you and require you to tap into their water and/or sewer lines (even in the country). If you produce anything for sale, the government wants to regulate and tax it. And since the government will only take federal reserve notes for tax payments, one must have some money. Bartering will work for somethings, but not for the tax man. And we wonder why people get used to relying on the government for everything. Maybe it is because they make it impossible to live and make it on your own.

tanner12oz | 03-28-2009 09:49 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by staupostek (Post 1650856) I have heard stories about people in the not so distant past who went west, homesteaded some land, and became very successful. But now day, homesteading is gone. And if one does acquire some land, the government will charge you tax on it. They will charge fees and require licenses and permits to build anything. If you try to drill a well for water, they will stop you and require you to tap into their water and/or sewer lines (even in the country). If you produce anything for sale, the government wants to regulate and tax it. And since the government will only take federal reserve notes for tax payments, one must have some money. Bartering will work for somethings, but not for the tax man. And we wonder why people get used to relying on the government for everything. Maybe it is because they make it impossible to live and make it on your own.
kinda what i figured....so where does that leave us if your under 25...living in the city without a crapload of disposable cash??? any options other then prep?

Agamemnon | 03-28-2009 10:11 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Read the topic post again. Reducing the need for FRNs is the key. Owning you land is the beginning, even if its just a tiny parcel. A place that cost you very little to dwell and stockpile tangible wealth, a place to produce your needs as well. I'm not stress-free but I don't worry about losing my job either. Its a nice feeling. Time to go back to the shop and tinker on my new used junker ATV ...

grinningdog | 03-28-2009 10:21 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Please don't bring a child into the world with the intention of making them a bum. We have enough of those.

TLM | 03-28-2009 10:22 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by staupostek (Post 1650856) I have heard stories about people in the not so distant past who went west, homesteaded some land, and became very successful. But now day, homesteading is gone. And if one does acquire some land, the government will charge you tax on it. They will charge fees and require licenses and permits to build anything. If you try to drill a well for water, they will stop you and require you to tap into their water and/or sewer lines (even in the country). If you produce anything for sale, the government wants to regulate and tax it. And since the government will only take federal reserve notes for tax payments, one must have some money. Bartering will work for somethings, but not for the tax man. And we wonder why people get used to relying on the government for everything. Maybe it is because they make it impossible to live and make it on your own.
Very true, it's all about control. Welcome to the forum, good post.

RaccoonRiverRadical | 03-28-2009 10:27 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by tanner12oz (Post 1650910) kinda what i figured....so where does that leave us if your under 25...living in the city without a crapload of disposable cash??? any options other then prep?
Learn a trade. Develop a hobby you love. Meet a woman. Have a family.

bonaparte | 03-28-2009 10:27 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Hummm.... this is interesting. I think most people at GIM are dropouts, or a dropout want a be to some extent. For me "dropping out" is having a parcel of land I own outright and not having any debt to anybody (except taxes, which is unavoidable). I would also like to run my own business off of my land, whether that is just renting the land to a farmer for farming, or setting up a small engine repair shop or whatever. I might even get solar panels so I don't have to worry about electricity. The extent that the author went to for the purpose of dropping out seems a little extreme. If you read closely you see that he lives rent free with relatives. I'm not sure what type of life that is. I would think to really drop out you would also have to be 100% self reliant, which means providing your own place to live.

RealJack | 03-28-2009 11:28 PM
Re: How to Drop Out I just don't see all that many dumpster diving opportunities these days. Most food or grocery establishments I'm aware of keep their dumpsters pretty well locked up behind fences now, so the idea of riding your bike from dumpster to dumpster eking out a modest living scavenging high quality organic meat and produce seems a bit optimistic to me.

SLV>GLD | 03-28-2009 11:30 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by RealJack (Post 1651067) I just don't see all that many dumpster diving opportunities these days. Most food or grocery establishments I'm aware of keep their dumpsters pretty well locked up behind fences now, so the idea of riding your bike from dumpster to dumpster eking out a modest living scavenging high quality organic meat and produce seems a bit optimistic to me.
Location, Location, Location ???

scholarcoon | 03-29-2009 01:19 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Another set of anecdotal stories from another "drop out." http://cfu.freehostia.com/Members/je...livinginquiry/ A few clippings: After a time I stopped worrying so much about food and just walked north, talking with people along the way. I ate what became available and soon became indifferent to whether I ate or not. I came to the conclusion that, for me, understanding was more important than food. I may not have had a piece of chicken, but I had a peace of mind. This attended to my hunger for days, whereas when I had more food without understanding the root of desire, it wasn’t long before I became agitated, fearful, and again hungry. I usually had a dollar or less in my pocket, but ultimately food would show up. A person would ask, “You want something to eat?” or perhaps a loaf of bread would fall off a truck. One time I found ninety-five dollars along a curb. Sometimes there was just enough money on the ground to buy some fruit or soup. But mostly food came from unpredictable places: a library pizza day in Pennsylvania; a generous homeless man in Mexico; a sandbar picnic on the Mississippi with one of the leaders of the Teamsters Union; venison from a man’s freezer in Iowa. It became clear that the amount of food I could gather or buy by my own doing was negligible in comparison to the abundance that arrived when I ceased making any effort at all. ----- While staying in Chicago, I enjoyed taking a swim in the lake just before sunset. One evening as I emerged from the waves, I saw a group of teenage boys gathered on the shore, posturing for a fight. The seven boys had slipped through a fence and positioned themselves on some rocks. Five of them circled two, laughing and goading them on. One of the fellows in the middle obviously didn’t want to fight. His opponent was bigger and had a fierce look in his eyes. The bigger one grew bolder with the taunts from the crowd, while the shorter, pudgier one became more nervous. The pair put their chests up against each other and began pushing. It was late, and not many people were on the beach. My shirt was about eight feet from the activity. The boys glanced over at me in the water. I pretended not to notice them while I considered my options. Here on their neck of the beach, I felt aware of my whiteness. The big one slapped the small one’s face. The crowd oohed. The small one pushed the big one. The big one smacked him again. The circle closed in tighter. I began walking toward my shirt. Just walk up, I told myself. Words will come. One of the boys piped up. “What do you want? Why don’t you get your ass out of here?” “I will. I was just watching you guys from the water there, and I couldn’t let you be cheating here in this fight.” “What are you talking about?” “Well, fighting on these jagged rocks here, that isn’t fighting. This is nothing.” I still didn’t know what I was going to say. “I mean, if one of you slips or something and cracks your head on a rock, it’s just an accident. No one wins. If you want to fight — I mean, if you really want to knock the crap out of each other — come out here onto the sand. That’s fighting. Here you can crack someone’s head with a fist or an elbow.&rdquo; I flung my elbow into my palm with a pop. The boys jerked back a bit. The bigger of the two fighters tapped one of his buddies and said, “Man, let’s go. This mother****er weird.” They turned and walked up the beach. I picked up my shirt and dried off. I don’t think they really wanted to fight, anyway. They just needed a reason not to.

tanner12oz | 03-29-2009 01:50 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by SLV>GLD (Post 1651070) Location, Location, Location ???
i think its do-able....i regularly dumpster dive bread from a local bakery...shelf life is a day but i freeze it and use it as needed. they throw out garbage bags full every day. im far from the only one who takes advantage of this oppurtunity either. i would imagine the same could be done at local bagel shops....bakeries.

scholarcoon | 03-29-2009 01:56 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by Dave Thomas (Post 1650807) Funny, there is a fine line between "survival" and living. If someone drops out, in these terms I don't consider this surviving, I consider it living. Survival is a temporary thing that is done under duress. Those competitive folks caught up in the rat race mortgaged up to their eyeballs with tons of toys and the like, are in more of a survival mode than the guy just beach combing collecting aluminum cans. That guy is living.
Good point. We pity the bum on the streets but reading these kinds of stories make me wonder if they pity us!

scholarcoon | 03-29-2009 01:59 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by bonaparte (Post 1650967) The extent that the author went to for the purpose of dropping out seems a little extreme. If you read closely you see that he lives rent free with relatives. I'm not sure what type of life that is. I would think to really drop out you would also have to be 100% self reliant, which means providing your own place to live.
Being 100% self sufficient is a myth. Even Thoreau walked to town and ate dinner with his family every week or so.

Olmstein | 03-29-2009 02:17 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by grinningdog (Post 1650954) Please don't bring a child into the world with the intention of making them a bum. We have enough of those.
Freedom does not equal "bum". Open your mind, grinningdog.

Saul Mine | 03-29-2009 04:16 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Three observations: 1. We only hear from people who happen to be graceful with words. Never the ones who can't write charmingly. So we only hear of the successes, and only the most charming stories. 2. Any story depends on viewpoint. Where you see a "free man" another might see a hobo. 3. Even considering only the successes, things that work for one person often won't work for another. Nobody knows why, that's just the way things happen.

RaccoonRiverRadical | 03-29-2009 04:22 PM
Re: How to Drop Out One thing for certain, poverty does not equal freedom.

dosman | 03-29-2009 04:24 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by Saul Mine (Post 1652029) Three observations: 1. We only hear from people who happen to be graceful with words. Never the ones who can't write charmingly. So we only hear of the successes, and only the most charming stories. 2. Any story depends on viewpoint. Where you see a "free man" another might see a hobo. 3. Even considering only the successes, things that work for one person often won't work for another. Nobody knows why, that's just the way things happen.
Bingo. Lately I have started noticing the effects of words. Now I try to sort them out and look for the ideas.

scholarcoon | 03-29-2009 04:34 PM
Re: How to Drop Out It all depends on your mindset and outlook. Most people on the streets or digging around in dumpsters probably have problems; psychological, drug-related, or monetary. They couldn't get their act together and live in the rat-race 9-5 "civilized" world if they wanted to. But we see from these writings that there are a small group of people who consciously choose to drop out of society as a path to freedom. They had a job, house, and a car and chose to give that up for a life of voluntary simplicity. I think these people will be better prepared for TSHTF than anyone else.

morganchaser | 03-29-2009 04:35 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Beach around here has mussels on the rocks with a daily catch that is more than enough to live on.

scyth | 03-29-2009 08:43 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by RaccoonRiverRadical (Post 1652036) One thing for certain, poverty does not equal freedom.
...And, just the same, freedom does not equal poverty....... Depends on the coin you deal with. Which is just another way of asking just how far Have you sold out to entrenched interests. Yayuss, massa? scyth

fasTTcar | 03-29-2009 10:13 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Everybody has a different interpretation of what Freedom means to them. The author is either trying to convince himself that he is free, or truly feels it. That is for he alone to decide. If he believes himself to be free, than he is. Working crap dead end jobs and couch surfing, may not bother him, but would be the death of me. Again, if he believes himself to be free, more power to him. However, I find his version of Freedom really translates to removal of responsibility. Quote:
Originally Posted by Saul Mine 2. Any story depends on viewpoint. Where you see a "free man" another might see a hobo. 3. Even considering only the successes, things that work for one person often won't work for another. Nobody knows why, that's just the way things happen.
Both those points are very true, with point 2 being the most poignant. I believe that the author is trying to convince himself being a hobo equals being a free man. Personally, I believe you become free when you stop giving a shit what others think about you. Janis was wrong - Freedom means more than "having nothing left to lose".

ShortJohnSilver | 03-29-2009 10:24 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by scholarcoon (Post 1652056) But we see from these writings that there are a small group of people who consciously choose to drop out of society as a path to freedom. They had a job, house, and a car and chose to give that up for a life of voluntary simplicity. I think these people will be better prepared for TSHTF than anyone else.
I somehow doubt it. The only reason that the food is free is due to ridiculous health care regs. When there are 100 people looking for free food, what is this guy's advantage? You really think this guy will survive in a situation where TN_Andy won't?

scholarcoon | 03-30-2009 11:04 AM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by ShortJohnSilver (Post 1652664) I somehow doubt it. The only reason that the food is free is due to ridiculous health care regs. When there are 100 people looking for free food, what is this guy's advantage? You really think this guy will survive in a situation where TN_Andy won't?
It's another option. Not everyone has the money to buy solar panels and a herd of cattle. Mental preparedness is as important as physical preparedness. Like another poster in this thread mentioned, most people here are prepping to preserve their current lifestyle. That's a tall order and most of them will fail. What's coming is going to slash our standard of living dramatically. Why cling to a lifestyle that is going bye bye? Everyone's buying generators and solar panels, like that's really a survival necessity. Wake up. You're preserving a lifestyle, not a life. That's not survival, that's comfort. 100% of electricity use in a house is for making our lives more comfortable. All our preps could end up being as much of a burden as a savior. Maybe I'm just biased because I don't have the money to buy a lot right now, but I've been thinking about this lately, and I'd rather have the knowledge and ability to survive on very little than have all the preps money could buy.

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grinningdog | 03-30-2009 11:38 AM
Re: How to Drop Out Get a job and you could buy those preps. By the way I prefer comfort. You are leading the life of a bum and I can speak to that personally as I had a grandfather that did that for 30 years. I think what you are doing is avoiding responsibility and living on crap from dumpsters. If you think that is life then I think you have a weird outlook on life. I could never be happy eating someones else's trash.

scholarcoon | 03-30-2009 12:22 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by grinningdog (Post 1653401) Get a job and you could buy those preps. By the way I prefer comfort. You are leading the life of a bum and I can speak to that personally as I had a grandfather that did that for 30 years. I think what you are doing is avoiding responsibility and living on crap from dumpsters. If you think that is life then I think you have a weird outlook on life. I could never be happy eating someones else's trash.
For the record. I didn't write the article that I posted. But I do empathize with the author's beliefs and admire his resourcefulness. Comfort is nice but it's not a necessity for survival. And it doesn't equate with happiness. I quit college to work my ass off as a farmhand and it's the best job I've ever had. I love it. And now I know how to grow food and make soap and identify wild edibles.

itsaconspiracy | 03-30-2009 05:41 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by Tome (Post 1650528) This is basically about Slackers. Hardly a survival prep strategy wtshtf. :dontknow:
The way they've got the system set up, it's kinda hard to live without those slave chits and not be a "slacker" (or at least considered one). And when they take them away, It'll be that much harder.

ShortJohnSilver | 03-30-2009 06:16 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by scholarcoon (Post 1653335) It's another option. Not everyone has the money to buy solar panels and a herd of cattle. Everyone's buying generators and solar panels, like that's really a survival necessity. Wake up. You're preserving a lifestyle, not a life. That's not survival, that's comfort. 100% of electricity use in a house is for making our lives more comfortable. All our preps could end up being as much of a burden as a savior. Maybe I'm just biased because I don't have the money to buy a lot right now, but I've been thinking about this lately, and I'd rather have the knowledge and ability to survive on very little than have all the preps money could buy.
I think that of the typical TSHTF scenarios, there are two choices: 1. have a defensible area that you and yours can use to hold things that are useful to you for survival purposes (e.g., piece of land, storage of food, guns to defend, in the event of food supply problems, poisoned water, etc.) 2. have a means or method to flee the area (e.g. bombings, large forest fire, government tyranny) In such a situation, the scrounger only can deal with #2 and will lose with #1 - if no restaurants are open, where will he get food from? Also he has no good means of physical transportation.

Dude | 03-30-2009 06:22 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Maybe they should make a movie about him and call it "It's a Wonderful Life".:4_1_72:

scholarcoon | 03-30-2009 07:18 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by ShortJohnSilver (Post 1654077) I think that of the typical TSHTF scenarios, there are two choices: 1. have a defensible area that you and yours can use to hold things that are useful to you for survival purposes (e.g., piece of land, storage of food, guns to defend, in the event of food supply problems, poisoned water, etc.) 2. have a means or method to flee the area (e.g. bombings, large forest fire, government tyranny) In such a situation, the scrounger only can deal with #2 and will lose with #1 - if no restaurants are open, where will he get food from? Also he has no good means of physical transportation.
Those options aren't mutually exclusive. What if you have skills, such as gardening, but no land? Someone with a little bit of land would let you shack up with them if you could promise them fresh vegetables in return. You're not tied down to the land either and you could leave if you had to. What if you have a couple guns and know how to use them? That too could get you a warm bed and a roof over your head.

simplelife | 03-31-2009 06:09 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by scholarcoon (Post 1650320) Dropping out of society. Dumpster diving. Living on less than $2000 a year. Author says it's not easy but still implies that its worth it. http://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html I didn't even start dropping out until my mid-20's. Unlike many outsiders and "radicals," I never had to go through a stage where I realized that our whole society is insane -- I've known that as long as I can remember. But even being already mentally outside the system, I found it extremely challenging to get out physically. In fourth grade I wanted to blow up the school, but I didn't know how, and even if I had done it, it would not have meant an endless summer vacation. In high school, inspired by Bill Kaysing's The Robin Hood Handbook, I wanted to go live off the land in the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it seemed as remote and difficult as going to the moon. (Kaysing later wrote the book We Never Went to the Moon.) So I continued to bide my time and obey the letter of the law, like the guy in the Kafka parable (link). In college, when Artis the Spoonman performed on campus and told us all to drop out, I thought that was ridiculous -- how would I survive without a college degree? A few years later, with my two college degrees, after jobs operating envelope-stuffing machinery and answering phones in a warehouse, I was finally nudged toward dropping out by the Bush I recession and my own nature -- that I'm extremely frugal, love unstructured time, and would sooner eat garbage than feign enthusiasm. More than ten years later I'm a specialist at eating garbage -- as I draft this I'm eating a meal I made with organic eggs from a dumpster, and later I'll make a pie of dumpstered apples. I live on under $2000 a year, I have no permanent residence, and moving to the Idaho wilderness now seems like a reachable goal -- but no longer the best idea. Getting free of the system is more complex than we've been led to believe. Here as in so many places, our thinking has been warped by all-or-nothingism, by the Hollywood myth of the sudden overwhelming victory: Quit your corporate job this minute, sell all your possessions, and hop a freight train to a straw bale house in the mountains where you'll grow all your own food and run with the wolves! In reality, between the extremes there's a whole dropout universe, and no need to hurry. In my case, as I understood what I had to go through to make money, I stopped spending it. I learned to make my meals from scratch, and then from cheaper scratch, making my own sourdough bread and tortillas. I stopped buying music and books (exceptions in exceptional cases) and got in the habit of using the library. When I crashed my car, I kept the insurance money and walked, and then got an old road bike. I took a road trip by hitchhiking, but it was too physically taxing and I got sick. Like many novice radicals, I got puritanical and pushed myself too hard, and finally eased off. I temporarily owned another car and lived in it for a couple months of a long road trip. In the Clinton economic bubble, I got a job that was much easier and better paying than my previous jobs, and built up savings that I'm still living on. The main thing I was doing during those years was de-institutionalizing myself, learning to navigate the hours of the day and the thoughts in my head with no teacher or boss telling me what to do. I had to learn to relax without getting lethargic, to never put off washing the dishes, to balance the needs of the present and the future, to have spontaneous fun but avoid addiction, to be intuitive, to notice other people, to make big and small decisions. I went through mild depression and severe fatigue and embarrassing obsessions and strange diets and simplistic new age thinking. It's a long and ugly road, and most of us have to walk it, or something like it, to begin to be free. A friend says, "This world makes it easy to toe the line, and easy to totally **** up, and really hard to not do either one." But this hard skill, not quitting your job or moving to the woods or reducing consumption or doing art all day, is the essence of dropping out. When people rush it, and try to take shortcuts, they slide into addiction or debt or depression or shattered utopian communities, and then go back to toeing the line. The path is different for everyone. Maybe you're already intuitive and decisive and know how to have fun, but you don't know how to manage money or stay grounded. Maybe you're using wealth or position or charm to keep from having to relate to people as equals, or you're keeping constantly busy to avoid facing something lurking in the stillness. Whatever weaknesses keep you dependent on the system, you have to take care of them before you break away from the system, just as you have to learn to swim before you escape a ship. How? By going out and back, a little farther each time, with persistence and patience, until you reach the skill and distance that feels right. At the moment there's no reason to drop out "all the way" except puritanism. I hate civilization as much as anyone, but in these last few years before it crashes, we should appreciate and use what it offers. Sylvan Hart (his given name!), the 20th century mountain man who even smelted his own metal, still traded with civilization, and once carried a sheet of glass 50 miles through the woods so he could have a good window. (See Harold Peterson, The Last of the Mountain Men) Some of the happiest people I know have dropped out only a short distance. They still live in the city and have jobs and pay rent, but they've done something more mentally difficult -- and mentally liberating -- than moving to some isolated farm. They have become permanently content with no-responsibility slack jobs, low-status, modest-paying, easy jobs that they don't have to think about at home or even half the time when they're at work. Yes, these jobs are getting scarce, but they're still a thousand times more plentiful than the kind of job that miserable people cannot give up longing for -- where you make a living doing something so personally meaningful that you would do it for free. "Do what you love and the money will follow" is an irresponsible lie, a denial of the deep opposition between money and love. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't care if you never make a cent from it, because that's what love means -- but you still need money!" So what I recommend, as the second element of dropping out, is coldly severing your love from your income. One part of your life is to make only as much money as you need with as little stress as possible, and a separate part, the important part, is to do just exactly what you love with zero pressure to make money. And if you're lucky, you'll eventually make money anyway. But how much money do you "need"? And what if the only jobs available are low-paying and so exhausting that you barely have the energy to go home and collapse into bed? These questions lead to my own level of dropping out, which is to reduce expenses to the point that you shift your whole identity from the high-budget to the low-budget universe. In a temperate climate, you have only five physical needs: food, water, clothing, shelter, and fuel. (If you're a raw-foodist and don't mind the cold, you don't even need fuel!) Everything else that costs money is a luxury or a manufactured need. Manufactured needs have fancy names: entertainment, transportation, education, employment, housing, "health care." In every case these are creations of, and enablers of, an alienating and dominating system, a world of lost wholeness. If you love your normal activities, you don't need to tack on "entertainment." If you aren't forced to travel many miles a day, you don't need "transportation." If you are permitted to learn on your own, you don't need "education." If you can meet all your physical needs through the direct action of yourself and your friends, you don't need to go do someone else's work all day. If you're permitted to merely occupy physical space and build something to keep the wind and rain out, you don't need to pay someone to "provide" it. Expensive health care is especially insidious: not only is our toxic and stressful society the primary cause of sickness, but the enormous expenses that have been added in the last hundred years are mostly profit-making scams that cause and prolong sickness far more than they heal it. This is the low-budget universe: I ride around the city on an old cheap road bike, in street clothes, often hauling food I've just pulled out of a dumpster. Sometimes I'll be on a trail where I'll invariably be passed by people on thousand dollar bikes in racing outfits. Why are they riding around if they're not carrying anything? And why are they in such a hurry? I used to be envious of those suckers: I have to ride my bike to survive and they're so rich they do it for fun. But what is this "fun"? I get everything -- exercise, getting from place to place, meaningfulness, the feeling of autonomy, and doing what's necessary to survive -- all with the same activity: riding my bike. They should be envious of me: my life is elegant and theirs is disjointed and self-defeating, making money which they have to turn around and spend on unhealthful restaurant food because they don't have time to cook, on cars because they have too many obligations to get around by bicycle, and then on bicycles or health club memberships to make up for sitting in their jobs and cars all day, and even then on medical "insurance" (a protection racket which for most people costs more than uninsured care -- or there would be no profit in it) for when their fragmented poisonous life makes them sick. How do you get out of this? One step at a time! Move or change jobs so you don't need a car, and then sell the damn thing. Get a bicycle and learn to fix it yourself -- it's not even 1% as difficult and expensive as fixing a car. Reduce your possessions and you'll find that the fewer you have, the more you appreciate each one. Get your clothing at thrift stores on sale days -- I spend less than $20 a year on clothes. Give up sweetened drinks -- filtered water is less than 50 cents a gallon and much better for you. If you have an expensive addiction, pull yourself out of it or at least trade it for a cheap one. Probably the most valuable skill you can learn is cooking. For a fraction of the cost of white-sugar-white-starch-hydrogenated-oil restaurant meals, you can make your own meals out of high quality healthful ingredients, and if you're a good cook, they'll taste good. I eat better than anyone I know on $100 a month: butter, nuts, dates, whole wheat flour, brown rice, olive oil, all organic, and bee pollen for extra vitamins. From natural food store dumpsters I get better bread, produce, meat, and eggs than Safeway even sells, but if this is impossible in your city, or you'd just prefer not to, you can still eat beautifully on $200. The foundation of all this is to cultivate intense awareness of money. It doesn't grow on trees but you have millions of years of biological memory of a world where what you want does grow on trees, so you need to constantly remind yourself that whatever you're thinking of buying will cost you an hour, ten hours, 100 hours of dreary humiliating labor. Your expenses are your chains. Reducing them is not about punishing yourself or avoiding guilt -- it's about getting free. If you continue to reduce expenses, eventually you'll come to the proverbial elephant in the parlor, the single giant expense that consumes 50-80% of a frugal person's money, enough to buy a small extravagant luxury every day. Of course, it's rent, or for you advanced slaves, mortgage. The only reason you can't just go find a vacant space and live there, the only reason another entity can be said to "own" it and require a huge monthly payment from whoever lives there, is to maintain a society of domination, to continually and massively redistribute influence (symbolized by money) from the powerless to the powerful, so the powerless are reduced to groveling for the alleged privilege of wage labor, doing what the powerful tell them in exchange for tokens which they turn around and pass back toward the powerful every month and think it's natural. Rent is theft and slavery, and mortgage is just as bad, based not only on the myth of "owning" space but also on the contrived custom of "interest," simply a command to give money (influence) to whoever has it and take it from whoever lacks it. Fortunately there are still a lot of ways to dodge rent/mortgage other than refusing to pay or leave and being killed by the police. For surprisingly little money you can buy remote or depleted land and build a house on it. (see Mortgage Free! by Rob Roy, and also Finding and Buying Your Place in the Country by Les Scher) If you don't mind starting over with strangers, you can join an existing dropout community. (See the Communities Directory.) You can live in a van, camp in the woods, or look for a caretaker or apartment manager job. If you're charming, you can find a partner or spouse who will "support" you by permitting you to sleep and cook someplace without asking for money. And if you're bold or desperate, most cities have abandoned houses or buildings where you can squat. Mainly all you need are neighbors oblivious to your coming and going, a two-burner propane camp stove, some water jugs and candles, and a system for disposing of your bodily waste. If the "owners" come, they'll probably just ask you to leave, and in some places there are still archaic laws from compassionate times, making it legally difficult for them to evict you. I squatted a shed for two weeks in December 2002 and if necessary I'll do it again. Also I have enough money saved to buy cheap land -- the project is just too big for me to do alone. Also I'm slowly learning wilderness survival -- which is iffy since wilderness itself is not surviving. But I spend most of my time surfing housesits and staying with friends and family. To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty about using strengths and advantages that others do not have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish competition, where your "success" means the failure or deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people get out first, and then help the rest. But what if they don't? What about people who are outside the system but still hyper-selfish? These people are not what I call "dropouts" but what I call "idiots." The view of this world as a war of all against all, where your purpose in life is to accumulate "wealth," zero-sum advantages and scarce resources for an exclusive "self," is the view of the elite. The only reason to think that way is if you are one of the handful of people in a position to win. For everyone else, the value system that makes sense is that you are here to help, to serve the greatest good that you can perceive. Yet in America, rich and poor alike are raised with robber baron consciousness, to turn us against each other, to keep us exploiting those below us instead of resisting our own exploiters, to keep all the arrows going the right way in the life-depleting machine. The frugality that I'm talking about is the opposite of ungenerosity, because it frees us from a scarcity-based system in which we cannot afford to be generous. For all our lives we've been trained as prostitutes, demanding money in exchange for services that we should be giving free to those we love, because others demand the same of us. In this context, the dropout is a hero and a virus: if you no longer need money, you can give others what they need without asking for money, and then they no longer need money, and so on. In practice it's still sketchy because there are so few of us, but the more of us there are, and the more skills and goods and openings we offer, the better our gift economy will work. And if we do it right, they won't be able to just massacre us or put us in camps, as they've always done before, because we will have too many friends and relations in the dominant system. For strategy I look not to political movements like revolts or strikes or radical parties, but to cultural movements like gay liberation or feminism or pagan spirituality. First define a clearly understood identity, then proudly claim that identity, then build public acceptance through entertainment and by each of us earning the support of friends and family outside the movement. I'm envious of gay people -- I've spent years mastering written language just to halfway explain myself, and all they have to say is "I'm gay." If we had a word, what would it be? In a recent family bulk Christmas mailing, I was "living the bohemian lifestyle," but I don't go to poetry readings or hang out in coffee shops. "Anarchist" smacks of ideology, of people who bicker endlessly about abstract theory, although maybe we could adopt an insulting term used by theory anarchists, and call ourselves "lifestyle anarchists." "Voluntary simplicity" is too tame and politically correct, suggesting aging yuppies trying to save the world by reducing households to one car -- plus the life I advocate is not at all simple, just unstressful. I'm too politically ambitious and forward-looking to be a hobo or a tramp. In Eastern tradition I could be respected as some kind of monk or holy man, but I don't want to get "enlightened" -- I want to make the whole world wild and free. The word I've been using, "dropout," is a good start but it has the same deep flaw as "primitive": it places our dominating, parasitic, and temporary civilization in the fixed center. We've got it inside out. On the physical plane, nature is the center that holds, and "mainstream" society is the falling apart, the irresponsible life-wasting deviance. What I'm trying to do -- and what we're all going to have to do in the next few decades if we survive at all -- is drop back in. related links My own recommendations of books to drop out with. A page about Jeffrey Sawyer, who has gone way farther out than I ever did. Appendix 1: Having Kids For very young people there are also two universes. Squatting over a tub of warm water is a much cheaper and healthier way to give birth than lying on your back in a harsh hospital room where the high priest will take the infant away from the mother to teach it alienation. Then you can buy a stroller and a crib (more alienation practice) and expensive baby food, or do like most nature-based peoples and carry your baby against your body and breast-feed it for the first three to four years (reference) (reference). You can send it to day care (practice for later institutions) so you can go to your job that pays only slightly more than day care costs, or you can raise the kid yourself. And the idea that a kid needs a "nice" upper-middle-class-style physical environment is worse than false. A "dirty" environment strengthens the immune system, and if I were a toddler again, I'd much rather live in a cool abandoned house or junkyard or shack in the woods than in a sterile room with a television where I wasn't allowed to touch anything. The little problem here is that raising kids with dropout values is marginally illegal, and you risk having them kidnapped and reprogrammed by the authorities -- the same as they did to the Indians. And the big problem is that, while the financial requirements for having kids are completely artificial, the mental/emotional requirements are real and more difficult than we can imagine if we haven't tried it. To "raise the kid yourself" must be something like three full-time jobs that you can't quit. The mother needs at least one other person capable of taking care of all her needs so she can devote full attention to the child, and ideally she needs a whole "tribe." Babies are super-adaptable -- it's the mother who needs a level of comfort and stability that's hard to achieve without money -- and a level of emotional health that's hard to achieve with money. Otherwise the baby will adapt itself for compatibility with a hostile, empty, stressed-out hell-world. I'd love to have a couple kids, but I won't do it without a physical location that's owned and paid for, and without someone besides myself to help out the mother, and without the means to dodge the institutions, whether through excellent legal help or through the institututions breaking down. (Thanks Ursa for suggesting the topic!)
I have no problme with most of this, but to call rent theft is total hypocricy. You want someone else to do what you are trying to avoid (hard phyiscla nd mental work of buiding a house) so you can have it free.....hippie beatnic attitude.

silverdude | 04-02-2009 01:54 AM
Re: How to Drop Out Anybody that believe that ownership, specially of land and guns, will give them freedom or happiness or survival, well, is ****ed in the near future... you have to keep 5 years ahead of the crowd... so for starter that means you have less than a year to move to the southern hemisphere, like everybody that retires from the cia is doing right now.... And then you have to get rid of civilization IN YOUR HEAD, which is where the wall of the prison is, and that includes money. This is not the end of a empire we are witnessing, it's the end of a civilization, the same way we have ended the "savages". So if you think in term of post-civilized, maybe you are meant to make it, if you don't you are about to be made obsolete. I see the author of this essay as a buffer between me and TPTB. All my gratitude to him and all the others like him ready to sacrifice themselves even if they don't know it yet, including the generator toting bozos!

simplelife | 04-02-2009 02:01 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdude (Post 1658558) Anybody that believe that ownership, specially of land and guns, will give them freedom or happiness or survival, well, is ****ed in the near future... you have to keep 5 years ahead of the crowd... so for starter that means you have less than a year to move to the southern hemisphere, like everybody that retires from the cia is doing right now.... And then you have to get rid of civilization IN YOUR HEAD, which is where the wall of the prison is, and that includes money. This is not the end of a empire we are witnessing, it's the end of a civilization, the same way we have ended the "savages". So if you think in term of post-civilized, maybe you are meant to make it, if you don't you are about to be made obsolete. I see the author of this essay as a buffer between me and TPTB. All my gratitude to him and all the others like him ready to sacrifice themselves even if they don't know it yet, including the generator toting bozos!
I am sure there are those with the same basic plan as you, only they take gun and ammo, and try to live off whatever you produce after they shoot you.

silverdude | 04-03-2009 03:02 AM
Re: How to Drop Out if you get in a situation where you have to fight it just mean you haven't got deep enough in the bush... We've been killing each other for a while now, what's coming up is a totally different ball game... guns will be a barbarous relic... but then i am taking the very long term view...

simplelife | 04-03-2009 10:23 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdude (Post 1660427) if you get in a situation where you have to fight it just mean you haven't got deep enough in the bush... We've been killing each other for a while now, what's coming up is a totally different ball game... guns will be a barbarous relic... but then i am taking the very long term view...
Very few people have the genes(or mental and physical strenth) to live deep in the bush, most would die of disease, starvation pretty quickly. The gene pool is not what it used to be. I would take my chances on at least a bare functioning society.

Agamemnon | 04-03-2009 10:41 PM
Re: How to Drop Out "Dropping out" is best done one step at a time. I dropped out of a mortgage and being a renter first. The rest is much easier.

silverdude | 04-04-2009 02:47 AM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by simplelife (Post 1661742) Very few people have the genes(or mental and physical strenth) to live deep in the bush, most would die of disease, starvation pretty quickly. The gene pool is not what it used to be. I would take my chances on at least a bare functioning society.
My point exactly. Its a lot easier to arm yourself up than develop the mental and physical strength to survive the coming culling. The ones left will be tough as nail. thanks for pointing that out... The guy that wrote the essay is pretty soft in my book... The 2000$ per year that he lives on is mainly from housitting is mom's property in summer (yeah she pays him to do it!). Talk is cheap, lets do something and do it fast!

Agamemnon | 04-04-2009 10:04 AM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdude (Post 1662016) My point exactly. Its a lot easier to arm yourself up than develop the mental and physical strength to survive the coming culling. The ones left will be tough as nail. thanks for pointing that out... The guy that wrote the essay is pretty soft in my book... The 2000$ per year that he lives on is mainly from housitting is mom's property in summer (yeah she pays him to do it!). Talk is cheap, lets do something and do it fast!
I liked the Rambo movies too ...

simplelife | 04-04-2009 03:51 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdude (Post 1662016) My point exactly. Its a lot easier to arm yourself up than develop the mental and physical strength to survive the coming culling. The ones left will be tough as nail. thanks for pointing that out... The guy that wrote the essay is pretty soft in my book... The 2000$ per year that he lives on is mainly from housitting is mom's property in summer (yeah she pays him to do it!). Talk is cheap, lets do something and do it fast!
Yea, but, in general, you are either tough as nails, or your not, depending on your genes. And even the toughest of the tough will starve without a lot of preperation (knowledge of the erea like eatable wild plants, herbal remedies, and many things you simply cant forsee). The scenerio you are talking about could bring the 6 billion down to a few hundred thousand highly specialized individuals. For example a few eskimos that have preserved the old way will survive. Some untouched jungle tribes, and a few of the most gifted and tough modern people will. I pretty much count myself a goner in this scenerio, so I am hoping for a mild calapse.

TheNocturnalEgyptian | 04-04-2009 03:54 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Nature is deadly, but not dangerous, if you take my meaning. Nature can and will kill, but is impartial and has no motivation to do so. My biggest fear is another human.

silverdude | 04-04-2009 11:06 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by simplelife (Post 1662612) Yea, but, in general, you are either tough as nails, or your not, depending on your genes.
Genes can be switch on or off, depending of the physical necessity and spiritual purpose. Look at animals going feral... Go spend a year alone in the bush and you'll know what I mean... It's all in the rythm... In 2005 I crossed the Pacific ocean solo from Canada to Australia in a 24', 70 year old leaky half rotten wodden boat. 113 days at sea straight-pipe... To make a long story short, I should be dead many times over... I can confidently say that I survived because of the spirit and my purpose on this planet, not preparation or gadgets... I could even go as far as says that some contigency I prepared for almost killed me because I was inflexible (prepared) for it, and dealt with it the way I imagined it should be, not the way it needed to. It's a paradox but it's not my background in sailing that helped me survive but my time with the indians in Northern Saskatchewan the winter before. They really believe the spirit is in everything (animist) and that we are basically puppets without much say. So everything you NEED (not what you WANT) is always within arms reach, because thats how spirit works. They always say: "Stay calm, Be brave, and Wait for the signs". Life does talk to you if you listen. Man, things got tougher and tougher until I realised that they were right. So, yeah go nature and the genes will switch back on, changing your neurological patterns is more painful though...

simplelife | 04-05-2009 05:46 PM
Re: How to Drop Out Quote:
Originally Posted by silverdude (Post 1663102) Genes can be switch on or off, depending of the physical necessity and spiritual purpose. Look at animals going feral... Go spend a year alone in the bush and you'll know what I mean... It's all in the rythm... In 2005 I crossed the Pacific ocean solo from Canada to Australia in a 24', 70 year old leaky half rotten wodden boat. 113 days at sea straight-pipe... To make a long story short, I should be dead many times over... I can confidently say that I survived because of the spirit and my purpose on this planet, not preparation or gadgets... I could even go as far as says that some contigency I prepared for almost killed me because I was inflexible (prepared) for it, and dealt with it the way I imagined it should be, not the way it needed to. It's a paradox but it's not my background in sailing that helped me survive but my time with the indians in Northern Saskatchewan the winter before. They really believe the spirit is in everything (animist) and that we are basically puppets without much say. So everything you NEED (not what you WANT) is always within arms reach, because thats how spirit works. They always say: "Stay calm, Be brave, and Wait for the signs". Life does talk to you if you listen. Man, things got tougher and tougher until I realised that they were right. So, yeah go nature and the genes will switch back on, changing your neurological patterns is more painful though...
Although there may be some truth in this. I really dont think that will change your natural immune system's lack of natural resistance to malaria, or change your skin to have exta fat lining for surviving artic winters, or change your intestines to retain most water and be able to give only hard rock dry bowel movements without getting major roids in an arid climate, or help you to understand eatable plants in a completely foriegn envirnoment, or help you survive major drought before you could establish food storage supply system, or increase your body strength beyond natural limits in order to chase down dear to eat....... I would guess that, about one in 10,000 people could survive a two year stay in a remote jungle, or remote desert, or remote subartic region. And most of those 1 in 10000 already live there and have the neccessrry adapting skills. maybe one 1 in a million could do it who now lilve in a city (assuming no supplies are provided) I hope the best for you though.

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