And why not if that's what floats her boat. I remember years ago, under very unusual circumstances, I met this guy in his mid 70s,who was living in a tent somewhere in a park or nearby forest in Stockholm.The guy could speak 6 or so languages,was using his laptop every now and then and had a very sound mind. Technically,he was homeless. He used to visit a homeless center in the city to get some food. Apparently the guy just wanted to live this way because he was sick and tired of the life he had earlier. Fair enough. The main problem with all these ancient ways of living is healthcare: I could be a Robinson Crusoe in some forest without issues, however as soon as I get asthma attack, some nasty wound or a bacterial infection, I'm more or less dead...
as a kid reading Asterix comics (forest village in brittany) I'd fantasize about living this way. Saying "I wouldn't miss a single thing about modern 80s.. except the pharmacy"
Can you claim to be living primitively while mounting horses? I believe hose taming and its use for war and transportation is somewhat a recent technology (~2000 BCE)
> If indeed our lives were better back when we lived in roving bands, would it be wise to consider how we might revive aspects of our deep past?
This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
All these modernities come together as if to say "either learn how to exist like us or you have no right to exist."
> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
Are you in the US? Most of the US is incredibly cheap and has virtually no building codes. You don't see it if you never get out of the major metro areas, but there is like a million miles of undeveloped cheap land.
A quick search reveals a pile of websites that specifically cater to this offering acres in the middle of nowhere for less than a thousand bucks.
Of course, you're in the middle of fucking nowhere so all of the benefits of modernity don't go with you. But if your goal is opt out of much of the social contract, there is plenty of places in the US to do it.
Woodland is relatively cheap in the UK. Certainly for what you pay, you can get an unmanageably large amount of land. You can get a few acres for 10-20k, up to hundreds of acres for < 200k. Prices have gone up quite a lot recently. You pay more for things like ancient/hardwoods, features like river frontage/streams (which may have fishing rights) and occasionally some come with outbuildings.
The catch is that you are extremely unlikely to get planning permission (hence cheap) for a building and you can legally only stay there for a certain period of time each year. On the other hand, you can put up a small cabin if it's for "forestry activities" and if appropriate you can make a profit out of the land (e.g. lumber, forest crops, charcoal). There's also a reasonable chance there will be public access routes through your land.
Big benefits though. It's yours, freehold, and it's convenient for tax purposes (no inheritance tax). You can camp on it, or have a caravan, and it's essentially your playground. You are liable for some maintenance like boundary fencing, but aside from that its' really up to you what you do with it.
In Scotland it's a bit different, you can build a hut (technical term) and the only real constraint is that it must be removable without leaving a trace - so you can't put in permanent plumbing, for example. It also can't be your main residence.
Nope. I spent the last year looking to do this and it’s not as simple as you say. If you buy a plot in the middle of Arizona or something, you might be responsible for road upkeep or charged for other things. And you still have to pay taxes every year as well as follow building codes. And there are hidden problems. You have no privacy, you will be in a wash and get flooded, you will probably get robbed, an industrial farm might move in nearby and spray fecal matter upwind of you. You’ll need an off-road vehicle just to get there and you’re going to have to off-road truck all your building supplies to the site. Oh and you want water? Good luck. And you have to pay tens of thousands at least to get the land. By the end, it’s not even close to being cost effective. Back in the day you could buy land in Texas with no zoning or building codes and get a huge area for almost no money. That just doesn’t exist anymore.
And plus, you are at the mercy of the county. If they want to raise taxes or make your life hell with some kind of development like a highway or something, it’s them vs little old you. And guess who’s gonna win. Oh and if you have a small medical problem you are 100% dead.
If you want to get out of the rat race, you should move to a midwestern city. You can find houses for less than 50k in safe neighborhoods by California standards. For 50k you get low property taxes, decent neighborhood, reliable internet, nearby hospital, Costco, cheap gas and cheap electricity. And plus, when the county wants to fuck people over with taxes or developments, they have to deal with half a million angry people rather than just you. That’s crucially important. I’ve been researching this intensely for a year and casually for almost a decade.
And you can live cheaper than you think. If you live in your house and aren’t selling in the next two years, you can perform almost any alteration to your house yourself. You don’t have to hire an electrician or plumber as long as you pull permits yourself and follow code. You could build a whole house yourself in most places — just need an engineer to draw plans. People have no clue about this, they just assume you have to pay thousands to do anything. You can live quite well outside the rat race if you are smart.
I hope you have been saving because the next 6 months will probably be the best time to do this in the last decade. I bought a cheap house just like this a month ago and while I still paid very little, I am kicking myself.
Would you be willing to share which states you've considered?I've been looking into this myself, and although cost is not the only factor I'm considering, I find it's intertwined with other social factors.
I’ve visited almost every state at least briefly. In the past couple months I visited El Paso, New Orleans, Huntsville, Lincoln and Omaha, Wichita and Des Moines. Des Moines was the best by a mile.
Absolutely. I know someone who bought 5 (I think, it might have been a bit more) acres of land about 90 miles north of Minneapolis for $15,000 back around 2009. It went cheap because it's too rocky for farming and would cost too much to get utilities put in.
I also know some other people who bought cheap land in the same area. They have a trailer home up there for a weekend getaway.
Isn't Alaskan real-estate wildly expensive? This lifestyle appeals to me, but any time I've looked into it the prices seem greater than other comparable west-coast land (e.g. Republic, Washington).
It wasn't that long ago that you could homestead in Alaska (end in the 80s). Go out, parcel out a piece of land, improve it and give the gov't $100 and it's yours.
How hard is this if you want land that is road accessible (so that I don't have to trespass in order to reach it), and has a source of water like a creek?
Last year, we bought a 40 acres in Colorado with a creek and a half-finished cabin for 100k. The land is about 45 min from our house in town, last 2 miles are 4wd only dirt road. There is 1-2 acre that is flat enough to farm, the rest is too steep. In the mountains, if it is steep it will be cheap.
As far as the no building codes dream, good luck finding that. Expect the county to do whatever it can to make your life difficult and extract the maximum of fees from you.
I guess the main use of the steep land is to provide physical distance from the neighbors. We do have some trails and lots of trees for hiking and firewood. Hunting is an option when in season. The animals tend to walk on the trails because it is easier, same as humans do. Assuming the virus does not get me I will plant some fruit trees.
It took us about a year of looking to find land that met our requirements at a reasonable price. It is possible to find deals but it takes a while.
We found an agent in our area that specializes in land/cabin properties. You want an agent that is willing to drive with you for an hour or more to view property, and is not afraid to help get the car un-stuck on muddy roads. The advantage of having a relationship with a buyer's agent is that you can move more quickly when a good listing comes on the market. Land with good value will not stay on the market long.
Also google earth is useful, or your county may have a GIS tool on their website you can use to view property boundaries, example: http://maps.boco.solutions/propertysearch/
I did a search on this a couple years ago and found a table of property tax data (no idea where now). From what I recall, Mississippi, Alaska and Nevada were all pretty low. There weren't as many low-tax areas as you might expect, though, and I'm sure a few of those are less than hospitable.
Property taxes really are the hardest part of this idea. You can find ways to unload almost every other expense (if you have enough time & energy, that is!). I guess you could be a nomad, moving your campsite around a national forest every couple weeks-- but you'd still need permits for any kind of hunting or fishing, and too much gathering might also be frowned upon.
Honestly, this lady was right when she said the only way to really live completely free in this age is to do it illegally. To be fair, though, there are probably a lot of places where you could do it & be unlikely to get caught.
Alaska is an outlier in a lot of ways; they pay you to be a resident. I know a few military/coast guard folks who went up there -- Alaska is one of the top requested posts in the Coast Guard, btw -- and retained their AK residency even after moving elsewhere because of the tax benefit.
You don't even need to be in a big empty country like that...Even here in Germany there are plenty of depressed rural areas especially in the east.
As long as it doesn't have convenient access to the rail network or an autobahn you can find a plot with a small, old house on it even 2-3 hours drive from Berlin for next to nothing in a village that had 2x today's population in 1990 (and everyone left there today are old people).
It has fewer people living in it today than it had in 1875 (earliest available data) & half as much as it had in its peak in 1950. It is about 2 hours drive from Berlin according to google maps.
It will not be a comfy home for a family but for the type of stuff discussed above it would do (e.g. a formerly abandoned but still standing/stable house).
In Canada though you're gonna be 1) very VERY remote, and 2) you're gonna be extremely cold. It's no surprise that the most expensive cities in Canada are also the furthest south.
> This pings something about modern existence that bothers me. If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
Before modern times, you couldn’t just “exist” on a plot of land. Ask the Native Americans or any other indigenous populations what happens if you try that. All animals have to participate in the rat race, lest someone higher up the food chain comes around.
I assume there were plenty of survival challenges back then. Knowledge about farming, lack of food and clean water security, heat, natural predators, other tribes, medicine etc.
Even in a little,tiny country I'm from, one could go into the forest owned by the state, build some stone age shelter and live there as long as he'd like to. Someone would probably discover at some point, check if he's not in a need of a medical assistance, call him a nutter and leave alone. Mileage may vary depending on a country.
Lithuania.Not sure what the law is really like, however people can freely move in forests irrespective of who owns it as long as one doesn't start some sort of crazy activity in there.To be honest,I very much doubt that majority of private owners would mind too much if someone would be living Flintstones style as long as it's fairly reasonable and not like ' let me litter as much as I can around my tent' type of living. Yes,one would have issues with permanent structure,if it's like a house, however a few planks and some bushes on top of it would hardly pass as a perm structure..
Interesting. I've checked out the Lithuanian forests after hearing much of them. I remember, we drove for about 1h to get into as much into 'middle of nowhere' as we could. Didn't strike me as a place where you wouldn't be found by a forester quite quickly. But that could be just my perception, from growing up in Germany and building places in the forest as a child.
Where is that? I'd say in Europe forests are so well utilized that you will be discovered by a professional forester in no time - and likely asked to leave.
I'm in NJ, which is the most densely populated state, and you could get away with this in many places. Your biggest problem would be having someone detect your fires.
Most of these constraints are there because there are a lot of humans and there is really no such thing as unused land. Land that isn't being used commercially is either someone's investment or actively bring reserved for nature. Life as described in the article isn't available for a meaningful amount of people since it requires an enormous amount of space per person. That's a large reason why we stopped being hunter gatherers and started farming. It's boring and reduces your freedom, but if you want to feed billions of people it's needed.
> You also can't just construct your own shelter that you find adequate. It has to reach the very stringent and remarkably expensive building codes that exist virtually everywhere.
Not really. Most of California has no building codes. From what I understand, you could buy land in the desert (or honestly, just squat, no one cares) and even if you went the legal route, no one cares if you do whatever you want.
Of course, all the desirable land is taken and expensive because you'll have to convince someone else to give up its use to you.
> Of course, all the desirable land is taken and expensive because you'll have to convince someone else to give up its use to you.
This is also crucial to the point I'm trying to make. Everything is already owned by somebody. Some of this "owned" land hasn't had anything done to it yet and likely won't for another hundred years, but you still can't use it, because it's "owned".
Well this is no different than hunter gatherer society where land was 'owned' by those willing able to defend it. If your tribe couldn't defend your land from invading tribes, the other tribe would take ownership of it.
What you're ultimately complaining about is that other people exist, which is often noteworthy of complaint, but you'll be hardpressed to find a solution.
OK, but, knowing this, how is it somehow "unfair" that you can't... what... steal this land from the people who have it now so you can drop out of society?
That seems just as unfair, but from a different perspective.
Well, if we're talking "fairness", why is it "fair" that someone gets to permanently deny a piece of the Earth to everyone else? It's not like they made it in the first place, it's not even possible to make more. I argue that every fenced-off area incurs a debt to every citizen of the Earth.
The state possesses a monopoly on the use of force, so the only way to acquire a useful place to live is to have money or expose yourself to the state’s wrath.
Verified. In particular if you try to "get away from it all", you need to pay close attention to the California wildland urban interface code.
That says things like what materials are acceptable for your house, and how you have to clear brush within 100' (or to your property line) of your house.
I live in Washington and my uncle was a state inspector for years. I assure you, there are places in certain areas of the state where you can build whatever you want as long as you keep a low profile. Officials are afraid to drive their official vehicles, let alone attempt to flex their influence or rules.
He went berserk, and started murdering people, because one day he went to his favorite, most remote, unsullied spot of nature that he could possibly find - a symbol of his ability to escape a toxic civilization - and found that it had been razed and there was now a logging road through it.
I don't think that example quite supports the point you were trying to make.
Taxes also pay for things that people rarely think about, like police. And yes, I know some people have guns in their house, and live in places where police take ages to get there. But I'm not aware of anyone in America that has to stress over a local warlord.
> You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on. And if you did you'd be there illegally.
If you've somehow managed to squat there long enough without anyone asserting their ownership, you might gain title of the land thanks to adverse possession laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
A friend of mine did this, in the legal way, with his wife and children. The police brutally beat him and he later died of complications associated with the beating.
I'll google the incident and post links, edit forthcoming.
> If you want stop participating in the rat race, the only accepted way to do that is to have acquired enough money to retire. You can't just go find an unused plot of land to exist on.
I mean this is only "modernity" if you talk about modernity going back thousands of years. People have staked out land for millennia (and people who wanted land would have to kill the people on the land to take their land).
i remember articles about people being taken out of their properties because they made their own repairs and extensions. A double penalty because even it wasn't made by a NEC code company, the work was said to be safer.
All in all it's another side of the 'burden is others' coin. You can't live in simple means because it will cost the rest more than if you were dancing the same beat. Unless you create your own insulate independant country :)
Haha, neat! Lynx is a really awesome person. I met her at a winter survival workshop. She's kind, generous and extremely observant. Not to mention, a mass of specialized knowledge that you'll never hear about -- in my experience she listens hard and says very little.
Folks are posting a lot of baseless, irrelevant and shallow dismissals here. I'm happy to know she's got better things to do than read that drek.
I happen to know a few people in the larger "primitive" community in the Pacific Northwest, though I am not one myself. I can't speak for them but have know them for >10 years and am pretty close with some.
Feel free to ask me any questions and I can do my best to answer.
> Do they use modern medicine as indiscriminately as one of us would?
As someone who pays ridiculous money for a too-high-deductible insurance plan, going to the doctor is a "someone is pretty badly sick or injured" event.
I have friends with a roughly zero deductible plan they get super cheap from their employer. Seems like they are at the doctor every other week. Have a tickle in your throat? Might as well go have a doctor look at it.
The American health system is so vastly unequal even among the fairly well-to-do that it's honestly depressing.
And that's when there isn't a global pandemic going on.
Definitely not as indiscriminately. Interestingly a large number of these people went down this path initially because of chronic health problems, e.g. autoimmune issues; things that our modern medical system is not great at diagnosing or treating but sometimes radical diet changes or the like can alleviate symptoms. For most run-of-the-mill things they'll just use natural remedies which, if you have no experience with them, can be surprisingly effective. Aspirin was derived from willow bark, chewing that bark gets rid of a headache just as well.
With that said when things get serious and/or acute, the people I know do still use modern medicine as a backstop. If someone were to break their leg and have a piece of bone sticking out of their skin, I'm certain they would go to a hospital. Or for instance if they couldn't breath because they caught covid-19, I'm sure they'd go to a hospital and use a ventilator. There are probably diehards who wouldn't, but those exist in cities too ;)
Pandemics (COVID-19 included) aren't possible in an usual tribal zone, where population density remains low (because there is not industrial ways to produce food) and people travel much more slowly and rarely than we do (because there is no vehicle).
Many (maybe even most(?)) our modern thingies, respirators included, are only useful/necessary because we live as we do.
IMHO the bottom line is: are we more happy and fulfilled to live as we do than to live like 'Lynx' (the woman subject of the article) does?
If you adjust the number of homicides per capita, tribal wars are far more destructive that anything more modern (including WW1&2). It's hard to get the right perspective on it, because hunter-gatherer societies are so small, the death toll from warfare isn't just a large and impersonal number, but specific people's stories. So then we compare it to our nameless millions of dead, and proclaim ourselves to be monsters. But:
"Anthropologists formerly idealized band and tribal societies as gentle and nonviolent, because visiting anthropologists observed no murder in a band of 25 people in the course of a three-year study. Of course they didn’t: it’s easy to calculate that a band of a dozen adults and a dozen children, subject to the inevitable deaths occurring anyway for the usual reasons other than murder, could not perpetuate itself if in addition one of its dozen adults murdered another adult every three years. Much more extensive long-term information about band and tribal societies reveals that murder is a leading cause of death. For example, I happened to be visiting New Guinea’s Iyau people at a time when a woman anthropologist was interviewing Iyau women about their life histories. Woman after woman, when asked to name her husband, named several sequential husbands who had died violent deaths. A typical answer went like this: “My first husband was killed by Elopi raiders. My second husband was killed by a man who wanted me, and who became my third husband. That husband was killed by the brother of my second husband, seeking to avenge his murder.” Such biographies prove common for so-called gentle tribespeople and contributed to the acceptance of centralized authority as tribal societies grew larger."
As far as I know all this is controversial. Some tribal zones are under nearly constant low-intensity warfare, other know rare but rather sever episodes. In many other areas war is sporadic and each conflict is, by convention, halted after a rather limited event (first wound, first blood, or first death). In at least some cases neighboring tribes intervention forbids escalation (as they have members coming from the tribes at war, or want to avoid unpleasant side-effects, for example arson).
Someone unhappy can escape from a tribal zone, and (albeit not easy) it is much more easy than to escape from our civilization.
In the same vein escaping a tribe or tribal war may not be easy, but one may have major problem showing to me that escaping modern society or modern war (or, worse, a full-blown world war, or nuke war) is more easy.
In our very own towns there are very violent subcultures, composed of a rather high amount of people. Many women living in gang zones have life paths (companions killed, maimed, overdosed, in prison for life...) similar to the ones of the New Guinea’s Iyau women. One may also check the lumpen proletariat, living and dying in IMHO appalling conditions. Is this representative of our civilization? Are those Iyau's women representative of tribal life (in each and every tribe)? Are those last less able to escape than gangzone women?
Each civilization has zones of extreme occurrences of nearly any type of event (here of violence), and at least partially locks people into their present situation.
Studies about the amount of violent deaths in the past are difficult to assess. Some tribe members invented stories in order to satisfy their audience (anthropologists).
What an individual is living (or really able to do) in a given culture is very difficult to understand and represent in another context, as illustrated by Horace Miner's Nacirema 'study'. Not to mention than cultural relativism and moral relativism heavily taint all this. Moreover various forms of 'biases' in studies, some extreme, are known ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secrets_of_the_Tribe ).
A fundamental question is to me "is someone born in a random tribe more free than we are to chose his lifepath?"
It's about the extent. Smallpox was devastating only when people traveled quickly far away. Our current COVID-19 pandemics is only possible to such an extent for the very same reasons.
Are members of the primitive community living in villages, solo, or small groups? Do they follow hunting laws (tags and license)? Do they live on public or private land, if public do they try to grow crops?
> Are members of the primitive community living in villages, solo, or small groups?
Mostly in/near small towns like Twisp. Some live in nomadic groups, often matriarchal which is interesting. The only people I know who live solo are young men "on the trail", most shepherd herds of livestock and are alone much of the year but these people are rare.
> Do they follow hunting laws (tags and license)?
Some do, some don't. I would say that they are slightly more inclined to break hunting laws than your normal rural resident. That is to say, both groups are pretty comfortable breaking the law when no rangers are around though the primitive community a) is only ever hunting for food and b) is much more interested in preserving herd health. They also very routinely eat roadkill or dumpster dive.
> Do they live on public or private land, if public do they try to grow crops?
Mix of both, depends on how settled they are. Those that are nomadic often spend some time on public land, those people obviously don't grow crops since they move throughout the year but gathering wild food is a staple for sure. Often this wild food is formerly cultivated land, e.g. former fruit orchards that are now feral.
> Some do, some don't. I would say that they are slightly more inclined to break hunting laws than your normal rural resident. That is to say, both groups are pretty comfortable breaking the law when no rangers are around though the primitive community a) is only ever hunting for food and b) is much more interested in preserving herd health. They also very routinely eat roadkill or dumpster dive.
Poachers are the lowest form of life. Though I respect a decision to live simply, the wild game of America is owned by the people and held in public trust by the state governments; ignoring this because you think you're special endangers the conservation efforts of the state biologists.
The one guy i know that lives like this... his feet! oh god, do they smell. So much so, you don't notice the rest so much. You'd think being barefoot so much would air them out.
> Our wild history is presented as a time before the world was scarred by borders, before politics, before race, before even the concept of identity carved out its demarcations of who belongs and where.
This is just flat wrong. Tribal politics are brutal, and any ancient community would have a very strong sense of identity, and about who belonged and who didn't. Life was way harder for people who didn't fit into the role assigned by their tribe; if you didn't conform, and were kicked out, you would die.
This. The names of many tribes is simply "the people" in their language. You can easily read into it that those humans not that are not members of their tribe are not people.
http://www.native-languages.org/original.htm
We invented huge anonymous cities where either tight surveillance or gang wars flourish, extermination camps, total war and many other wonders. Let's explain to any tribe that we, 'people', painfully devised and realized ways to massively and indiscriminately kill very remote civilians using dedicated complex machinery (ICBMs), then discuss about who is 'people' for who.
Comparing the 'costs' of nearly-constant but limited tribal violence to our own 'civilized' violence isn't easy.
Indeed. Therefore the "outsiders aren't real people" stance isn't specific to tribal life.
Upon reading (above) "Tribal politics are brutal" and "Life was way harder" one may think about the way we wage war, establish the rat race in huge cities, try hard to control everything everywhere to the point of practically barring anyone to opt out... "brutal"? "harder"? Doubt so.
Please read "armenarmen" comment, above: "those humans not that are not members of their tribe are not people". Albeit difficult to grok, it seems pretty clear to me.
That's not my understanding, as he answered "This." to a post containing "Tribal politics are brutal, and any ancient community would have a very strong sense of identity, and about who belonged and who didn't. Life was way harder...".
Came here to say this. This writer is clearly projecting her own opinion of what an ideal society looks like into the past. People usually do this as a way to convince people of why their world view is correct ("this is how people used to do it!"). In this case though, it is blatantly wrong.
Agreed. Most of these ancient societies would be completely alien to us. Even pre-US Civil War would be different enough to make the average USA-ian uncomfortable.
There is evidence that hunter gatherers would take care of extremely disabled people. What do you mean by "didn't fit into the role assigned by their tribe"? What are some references on the body of knowledge you are confidently referring to?
In a tribal zone exile doesn't everywhere nor always imply death. We nearly cannot escape from our societies. Is it better to be able to escape or not? For the ones really loving liberty the choice seems pretty clear.
In every human society one has to apparently submit to some rules. It is somewhat difficult for me to believe that I enjoy more freedom 'Lynx' (the woman subject of the article).
An excerpt from the article follows: "Never mind the struggle to meet Maslow’s tenets of survival: being wild verges on illegal. There are limits to how long you can spend on public land. Fires are frequently prohibited, and hunting is closely circumscribed. Lynx came up against the law in 2008, when a government officer attended one of her classes undercover. She was unaware of his identity until two years later, when she was charged for running a course on public land without a permit and for cutting down a freestanding dead tree. She was barred from the national forests of eastern Washington for a year."
Lynx was annoyed in this way. An excerpt from the article follows: "Never mind the struggle to meet Maslow’s tenets of survival: being wild verges on illegal. There are limits to how long you can spend on public land. Fires are frequently prohibited, and hunting is closely circumscribed. Lynx came up against the law in 2008, when a government officer attended one of her classes undercover. She was unaware of his identity until two years later, when she was charged for running a course on public land without a permit and for cutting down a freestanding dead tree. She was barred from the national forests of eastern Washington for a year."
I guess I read somewhere Scandinavians used to leave the weak/disabled kids out in wild and if they can survive on their own, they were accepted in the tribe if not then it helped eliminate weakness.
I've been on long hikes through the woods where few people tread. One thing I've noticed, is the apparent scarcity of food: at least food that we recognize as "food". There's no animals to hunt for, no bird's nest, no wild animals, even after a 4 hour long hike. No berries, no blueberries or anything fancy like that.
What there is quite a bit of is edible greens: dandelions, oxylis, purslane, amaranth, lots of edible green plants and weeds. I can only imagine that our ancestors must of lived off greens.
Modern day studies of wild human tribes in africa that really do live the way people lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, actually mainly subsist on greens. They've been studied, and the researchers have noted that they basically graze on leafy green vegetables all days, lucky to find anything else.
As, the article alluded to, hunger was the norm, pretty much all day, everyday. This day and age, people think of hunger as an anomoly, a problem, something you can't experience for more than a few minutes without going crazy.
Fair point, but it depends on where you live. Many places have lots of smaller animals like squirrels and rabbits. Even some deserts have rabbits and field mice, etc.
But, those animals are trained to stay away from humans. You won't see them out in the wilderness, at least not for long. And, you won't be able to catch up to one in the brushes where there's thorns, bushes, and all kinds of stuff that can stick you.
You won’t see them while you’re hiking, because you’re making lots of noise and likely not out at the right times. Hunting , especially primitive hunting, is usually either lots of traps and snares or lots and lots of waiting.
LOL. With inherited wealth allowing her to enforce her property rights with an armed government, with a log cabin built with modern technology, with fuckin’ running water. She lives 110 years in the past, not 200,000.
that is for-profit by running classes. It talks about how she goes to bars, and the local library to check her email, and flies to other countries. Article is a bit of an advertorial for her programs (which do sound cool), similar to another one from Outside on this guy's group dirt bike trips: https://www.outsideonline.com/2410685/wilderness-collective-...
Overall takeaway is that organized wilderness travel is something that appeals to techies heavily.
If you like stuff like this you may like this article,
https://www.businessinsider.com/adrain-chessers-photos-of-hu...
it follows a band of hunter gatherers who travel through the great basin desert (Nevada, Utah, and Calif) and has some amazing pictures of a way of life that I didn't think existed anymore. They aren't as strict as the OP's article (they have facebook pages) but really fascinating nonetheless.
I wonder when in (pre)history commerce first developed. 200,000 years ago could Lynx have offered classes in return for food, shells, or an early form of debt? (e.g., “Teach me to fish and I will share half of my first year’s catch with you.”)
Nowhere in here was there a suggestion of 7 billion people adopting this lifestyle. The only suggestion was that there should be a wild human preserve for those that want to live in this lifestyle.
Obviously not many people want to live like this anyways.
If everybody does it, absolutely. But, curiously enough, we do actually need more people to hunt deer, because their populations are exploding (since we wiped out the predators that kept them in check, like wolves), while the popularity of hunting is plummeting.
There's over 30 million deer in North America. And moose, and antelope, and bear, beaver, elk, geese, ducks, quail, pheasant. I think there's plenty of wildlife to feed us.
I think you need to think some more. Search how many people there are in North America. 1 deer might feed one person for 1 week so basically that’s enough food to Feed everyone for a day?
Oh definitely. HG culture is hard! The skills aren't easily learned, and depend on knowledge specific to a region. What would really kill most of us is water issues.
It's not just about skills. The point, again, is that there is simply not enough game (or edible plants, for that matter) to sustain out present population levels. It's a difference of several orders of magnitude.
Look at some of the most successful historical hunter-gatherer societies, the ones that lived in areas that are naturally abundant with food - e.g. temperate rainforests with bountiful rivers, like Japan or American PNW. But even then, we're talking about the largest communities consisting of several hundred people, maybe a thousand - nowhere near our present population density.
I really can never understand this desire to get away from it all and live primitively. It sounds so miserable. I love modern conveniences and technology.
On the other hand ... my understanding is the U.S. took so much land through violence and lying, and often with some rhetoric about how the native people that didn't farm or settle and live on specific parcels weren't "civilized". There was an assumption that Americans establishing farms and towns and whatever was inherently superior to the way Native Americans occupied the land they had been on since time literally immemorial.
So it's cool, it's kinda bad-ass what she's doing. But isn't it also fucked up? Isn't it deeply hypocritical to occupy land that was taken from people in part using the justification that the way they lived wasn't civil or modern or productive enough, and then try to live on it in a "wild" way?
I don't know anything about the specifics of the history of interactions of the tribes of the Okanagan area, where Twisp is. But I'm guessing that their inheritance didn't give them the freedom to choose how they wanted to live, or how they wanted to relate to a changing world. And I'm disappointed that absolutely none of that is even mentioned in passing in this article.
Not to discount your comment which I largely agree with, but to the article's credit there is at least passing mention:
>Some suggest that the primitive-skills community can run the risk of appropriating indigenousness. Practitioners of bushcraft draw liberally from the world’s traditions but are themselves typically white people, often endowed with at least some degree of privilege. “There is an inherent colonialism built into the primitive-skills idea,” says Kiliii Yüyan, a photographer, survival expert, and one of Lynx’s occasional collaborators, who is a Chinese-American descendent of the Nanai people of Siberia. “Part of the idea is that you can be air-dropped into anywhere and survive off the land. Indigenous literally means ‘of a place’—survival is almost the exact opposite of that.”
I guess what I think is absent is a recognition that Lynx is able to do what she does in part because she is a beneficiary of a history which specifically prevented others from living on the land. "Appropriation" of skills from traditional practices to me reads as a distinct harm from the very physical appropriation of actual territory.
This sort of self-flagellation is tedious. Occupying stolen land is the human condition. How that land is occupied makes it neither better nor worse, so either every article about a way of life in America contains this kind of breast-beating, or none should.
It being predictable and low-information, I favor the latter.
I'm replying to you because of your last paragraph, specifically this:
> But I'm guessing that their inheritance didn't give them the freedom to choose how they wanted to live
Which is a denial of the agency of Native Americans. They lost a war, had their food sources systematically exterminated and were subject to ethnic cleansing and genocide. No fun, as my own people can tell you from their more recent history.
Any descendent of those people has the same freedom to live as Lynx does, more even, since she's a British national and they are American citizens. Some few no doubt do this. It's their choice in any case.
Also likely a reference to the fact that you drive through Newhalem on the way over the pass, which is a company town owned by Seattle City Light for hyrdo operations.
I live in the next town over from Twisp and see Lynx and her crews out in the mountains and in town once in a while. The town I live in, Winthrop, has a Western theme and I always wonder if the summer tourists might think they're just part of the Western act.
What's interesting is what this article doesn't mention. Take, for example, antibiotics.
It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've had them for fewer than 100 years. Take one wrong step, make one bad food decision, or cut yourself building something and it could be game over.
For example, take Calvin Coolidge Jr.:
> ... while playing lawn tennis with his brother on the White House grounds, sixteen-year-old Calvin, Jr. developed a blister atop the third toe of his right foot. Before long, the boy began to feel ill and ran a fever. Signs of a blood infection appeared, but despite doctors’ best efforts, young Calvin, Jr. was dead within a week.
Lincoln's son, William, died from typhoid fever. I bring up these two cases because the children of well-to-do, powerful men dying from these diseases today would be a scandal. But not long ago, it was to be expected from time to time.
I'd be curios whether Lynx has ever had to go to the hospital for an infection, or maybe childbirth.
I get the impression that she lives the way she does because it makes her happy, not because of religion or ideology, like the Amish. She has no problem sending out emails to get in touch with people, and she has her solar panels and phone.
This is a common notion that I am yet to understand or relate to...
What does "still slowly killing us" even mean? Life is slowly killing us because everyone everywhere is getting old and is dying. It has been that way since the first multi-cell organism. What does this have to do with our way of life?
If our current way of life is killing us slower than all other previous ways of life, then it is surely better than them? What kind of characterization is it even, what does it accomplish?
What is "a way of life" anyway? Sedentary, no-sports? Eating farm-produced food? Watching TV? Having clothes? Driving cars? Living in individual houses instead of big villages?
It may have been a poetic way to describe the feeling some people have that while we are alive, we are not doing the things that make a life, so to speak.
I don't know how to put it succinctly, but a single comment on HN months ago described the feeling. Is it true? I don't know, I don't have "myself but living as a thousand years ago" to compare. We do know that people's social circles, e.g. the number of close friends people describe themselves as having, has been shrinking.
"""
The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.
The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.
The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.
No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else.
"""
We don't face any struggles in our lives. This leads to depression.
I'm not criticising our culture or way of life. We naturally want to spend our lives comfortably at peace. We have managed to improve our lives, generation over generation, to the point now where the average person can reasonably expect to live their entire life without fear of violence or starvation and die of natural causes in their 80's.
But just like how eating all the high-calorie food we want leads to diabetes, because our bodies are evolved to a much less calorific diet (and periodic starvation), we evolved to face more challenges. The lack of fear and the ease of our survival leads to mental health problems because we have the luxury of wondering wtf we're doing here, instead of wondering how we're going to survive until next week.
Exercise helps with depression, partly because it's not easy, it requires effort and discipline and it's not "fun". Forcing yourself to get out of the house and go for a run is difficult (I know, I went through clinical depression and had to force myself to do this. Still do). It does the same for your body - stresses it to make it more healthy.
Hopefully it'll change. As following generations get used to lives without struggle or fear or starvation they'll adapt and be more mentally healthy. We'll also conquer diabetes, somehow, I'm sure.
Many people face struggles in their lives. Can be struggling to pay the bills, sickness, mental health problems, abuse at home or work, loneliness and so on. These did happen int he past too, but it is just not true that people today don't face struggles.
> Exercise helps with depression, partly because it's not easy, it requires effort and discipline and it's not "fun". Forcing yourself to get out of the house and go for a run is difficult (I know, I went through clinical depression and had to force myself to do this. Still do). It does the same for your body - stresses it to make it more healthy.
Exercise is and can be fun. And there are enough forms of exercise to take the one that matches your personality. People get addicted to exercise and many people overdo it - even injuring themselves for fun.
The struggle to go out was not because exercise is inherently not fun, but because you had depression.
Having your house bombed, being drafted and forced to fight a war. Having most of your family die of plague. Being raped repeatedly by a rich man with no way of ending it because you're poor. These are struggles. Trying to work out how to pay your bills, or get up on a Monday morning to face your job, are not in the same league.
Exercise was used as a punishment during most of my schooling. It's not "fun" (otherwise the punishment wouldn't work). "drop and give me 20" is a punishment, not a reward. Getting addicted to something doesn't mean it's "fun".
You may enjoy exercise. Good for you, I'm jealous. Wish I did. But the reality for the majority of people out there is that it's a chore that they'd rather not do if at all possible.
And thanks for telling me about my depression. Please, go on, tell me more about my life that you clearly understand so much better than me...
Lonliness is not struggle in the same way we struggled to survive for thousands of years not knowing what next week would bring. Your examples kind of bear out his point.
Then again, the thousands of years mentioned here are kind of imagined history.
The acute life threat of war times and famine was not constant. While 21 century west have higher life expectancy then the past, the "don't know what next week brings" is not how majority of history works. There are such unstable periods (world wars etc) that get changed for stable periods.
Second, parent said that we don't face any struggle which leads to depression. That is not true on any point. People struggle, they are poor or in pain.
Third, unstable periods make mental health issues go worst. Including depression. They also make consequences of those mental health issues worst - meaning depressed person is more likely to die, get hurt or hurt others.
Social struggle is quite different than the day-to-day struggle to survive that was the default until recently on the human scale. Not sure that needs a reference.
There has been some work on it. There is a higher prevalence of depression in our modern society. Other societies facing more struggles are less prone to depression. It makes sense, if you think about it - if you're struggling to feed yourself and your family, you're not happy, but you're also not depressed. You haven't got time to be depressed.
Of course, there's other interpretations: people with depression would have not bothered to get up to feed themselves, because what's the point? They would be early victims of whatever violence the society was under.
I've seen similar while travelling. Poor societies with better family connections are less depressed. Mentally unwell people are looked after by their families. Everyone seems happier and more content with their lives, despite being materially poorer.
Returning to Australia after a year away in Cambodia, my first impression was "why is everyone so unhappy and angry?". It's strange. We have everything, yet we're unhappy.
When looking at historical life expectancies, a common mistake is to look from birth. High rates of infant mortality shift the average. The life expectancy from birth for a Roman was about 35 but take it from age 5 and it jumps up to 60-65.
It certainly would need to, because you can't sustain 7 billion people on a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Despite its many disadvantages, agriculture won out because you can feed more people on less land, which makes it easy to push hunter-gatherers from their land.
The modern way of living makes us weak and reliant on technology - It happens at a genetic level. Removing basic evolutionary pressures causes the species to evolve complex adaptations to constantly changing abstract cultural problems instead of more concrete and static problems in our environment.
In the context of recent human evolution, survival has taken the backseat to mating - But evolution has a way to balance itself out. Humans will become so overly optimized for mating that we will lose all basic survival abilities and our immune systems will become weak and fully dependent on complex drugs.
Yes, but unlike the peacock's feathers, technology makes our survival easier not harder. This is what makes us weaker over time. Because of technology, natural selection doesn't select for fitness as strongly as it would otherwise - Technology lowers the bar in terms of what genes are required for survival, so natural selection becomes centered around abstract cultural aspects related to mating such as (for example) wealth which doesn't correlate very strongly with fitness (likely inversely correlated in fact).
Anything which allows for weak genes to pass down to the next generations is bad for evolution. That's what happened to many species of birds in New Zealand; there were so few natural predators for such long periods of time that many lost their ability to fly. Then when predators were introduced, a lot of these species went extinct very quickly.
A hammer and a hard place. We have alot to improve -
I had days when i down right thought “this is hell”, when deeply thinking about “modern” life and the exploitation and existential issues needed to maintain it.
I honestly wouldnt choose us, if i was starting a new. on the other hand murder or genocide arent an option either, so we have to improve, somehow, or suffer badly.
President Garfield died from blood poisoning too. But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them and no healthcare to remove it. But Garfield being president had all sorts of excessive medical attention before proper sanitation procedures were common in US medical practice. By the way I've just read Candice Miller's book on him and find her writing style great.
> But interestingly, they think if he wasn't well to do he would have survived. Many poor people who fought in the civil war walked away with bullets still inside them
Many of those poor soldiers died - including from infections.
I always bring up Darwin when thinking such thoughts. Rich guy as well, I think his father was a businessman. But the thing about Darwin is he articulated just how cruel nature can be while being a victim himself. Something near half his kids died.
"For over forty years Darwin suffered intermittently from various combinations of symptoms such as: malaise, vertigo, dizziness, muscle spasms and tremors, vomiting, cramps and colics, bloating and nocturnal intestinal gas, headaches, alterations of vision, severe tiredness, nervous exhaustion, dyspnea, skin problems such as blisters all over the scalp and eczema, crying, anxiety, sensation of impending death and loss of consciousness, fainting, tachycardia, insomnia, tinnitus, and depression."
The time integral of his suffering must be enormous. I'm a little horrified that a man so famous can suffer so much, and yet almost no one knows about it. They remember him for his achievements; but the countless days he spent in pain are forgotten.
I’ve just discovered that I’ve been living for with blood parasites from my travels many years ago. It’s been really terrible, chronic inflammation, years of doctors telling me that nothing is wrong. I only discovered it because one of the symptoms got so bad without explanation that I bought and refubished an old microscope and started looking at things for the last few months.
First I saw their eggs, and I thought they were white blood cells. There were millions of them, but my WBC counts came back low. After a few months I finally saw one of the little monsters. I sent photos to my doctors and they ignored them. Finally, I got a video call with a doctor, went through the whole procedure with them and found one on the call. This got their attention, but they couldn’t re-order labs because they had already come back negative. The proper tests/treatment are very specific and expensive in the US, nearly impossible to get approved by insurance, although they are given for free in the third world.
This stuff happens. Native people generally develop some form of neonatal immunity or tolerance. Travelers mostly stay safe in leisure travel, but some studies show it to be less rare than expected. For me it took a combination of an untreated flesh wound, and a flood of contaminated water.
I’m reminded of the blood parasites support group in Fight Club. I can’t even begin to tell you how much of my life I’ve lost to this.
Keep in mind that one of the definitions of the word “suffer” is “to undergo or experience (any action, process, or condition)”.
The article you link to also mentions that Darwin himself found upsides to his condition, which implies that the integral of the suffering (now using the emotionally-valenced definition of the word) may not have been of the magnitude you imagine, nor even necessarily negative.
On a related and curious note, I have found fainting to be one of the most pleasurable experiences.
Isn't it generally a temporary lifestyle to teach lessons about self-reliance and adaptiveness and not some permanent lifestyle like say, the Amish, who do use modern healthcare despite living a 19th century lifestyle?
The amish don't make any particular effort or have any particular desire to live a 19th century lifestyle. They simply avoid technology that they consider to have more downsides than upsides.
I keep thinking of all of the young women on her retreats - since they're living completely in the wild for 30 days, what do they do about menstruation? I wish the article mentioned what her primitive solutions are (if any) for some of the more gross inconveniences of being human.
Didn't realize antibiotics were only available in less than 100 years. Amazing progress in so little time. Makes me realize we are much better equipped to fight biological threats than ever before.
maybe it's not in fashion to listen to the CDC in these times, but:
"Obesity is a serious concern because it is associated with poorer mental health outcomes, reduced quality of life, and the leading causes of death in the U.S. and worldwide, including diabetes, heart disease, stroke, and some types of cancer." [0]
Except "associated with" is just another way of saying correlated, not the cause of. A lot of people would live healthier lives, both mentally and physically, if we gave up on trying to fight obesity itself and just spent all our effort getting people to exercise.
They won't die to it because they don't have it - while the percentage of people who are obese in the US is higher than other parts of the world, it's still not a majority.
No the majority of people will die from, surprise, being old. Being obese might be correlated with dying a little less old, but the cause of death is still, fundamentally, being old.
> It's easy to take these miraculous little pills for granted even though we've had them for fewer than 100 years.
We've had effective antibiotics for thousands of years. When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it. It wasn't particularly difficult to commercialize, but no one actually cared.
Modern antibiotics are mostly only necessary if you get shot or you're a burn victim or something, which is why no one cared until WWII. Also, some of the berberine plants that were used before that were starting to become less common around that time.
If we didn't have effective antibiotics before penicillin then human life expectancy would have gone way up after the discovery of penicillin. But looking at the data, it's pretty obvious that that didn't actually happen. Pretty much every scientific paper agrees with this, e.g.:
> When penicillin was first isolated in 1928, there was so little demand for it that it took over a decade before anyone even bothered working on a way to commercialize it.
That's false. Penicillin was discovered in 1928. It took until 1940 for researchers to show it could cure infections. It was put to use in a human the next year, and Fleming won the Nobel Prize in 1945.
Infections that could be cured by penicillin (staph and strep) were on their own never a leading cause of death, and so you wouldn't expect penicillin on its own to drive big life expectancy improvements.
That's how research works. You have to wait for the researcher with the right skill set to attack the problem in the right way. Sometimes it takes a few years.
I see. In my part of the world, an expat is someone who took a job in another country. This country where they are currently resident isn't their home; they are merely there for the duration of their contract.
It's the opposite. Today if things go really bad, let's say you or someone you care about gets injured, really sick or run out of food you can fall back to civilization instead of just dying.
Maybe there are people who play in hardcore mode but they won't be the ones you hear about.
That's not the point of that passage, here's the rest
> Never mind the struggle to meet Maslow’s tenets of survival: being wild verges on illegal. There are limits to how long you can spend on public land. Fires are frequently prohibited, and hunting is closely circumscribed.
It's not that the life of being a hunter-gatherer is hard, it's that the ability to even live that life is hard to come by.
That’s assuming you can make it back to civilization. If you live in a remote area, that may be difficult or impossible.
Hunter-gatherers of the past, on the other hand, had friends and family to take care of them. Sure, they didn’t have access to modern medicine, but at least they had someone to feed them and keep them warm while they attempted to heal.
If that family could manage to acquire the resources needed to heal. More likely, they would just die after a long and painful death and their family would mourn and hope they could birth another baby to take your place.
Depends on what type of injury it is. There are lots of injuries that don’t require medical attention, such as minor sprains and hairline fractures, that you could survive as long as you had someone to feed you and take care of you.
I don’t think you can say you’re “more likely” to just die just because you don’t have access to a doctor.
Not just minor sprains and hairline fractures. The fact that our body can heal from much worse injuries, shows, that it was useful back then and not necessarily a death sentence.
No the issue is that people like your acquaintance rely on other people living life in a way they don't want to in order to subsidize their preferred way of life. I'm all for homesteading by yourself away from society, but the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
> the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
I'm not sure it matters that much.
The number of people doing this is so vanishingly small that I'd characterize your opinion on the matter as peevish.
Insisting that people be consistent and that everything always be fair a regressive trait.
No. I characterize someone choosing to be homeless who does not have to be (the situation described above) and yet depending on others to feed him as unjust, yes. It would be equally unjust of me -- a perfectly able-bodied human adult -- to ask for charity as well.
This is not about unchosen homelessness and poverty; this is about people shirking responsibility because they don't like it. Stop changing the topic.
> It's the lowest stage of moral development to insist on rigid adherence to each and every rule.
No. It's simply not paying attention to people whose philosophy is inherently duplicitous.
> There are people playing by the rules doing immensely more damage to the world and to the economy.
Where did I say this man was damaging the economy? All I pointed out was that his philosophy (living away from the rat race is a good thing) is inconsistent. Please don't change the goalposts. I was having a discussion on living with integrity (having your actions align with your purported values), not economic damage / benefit.
> I was having a discussion on living with integrity (having your actions align with your purported values), not economic damage / benefit.
I don't know you from anybody but I'm one hundred percent sure that you live with contradictions to your own values, no matter how carefully cultivated and adhered to.
I'm saying this to disparage you, because the same applies to me. In fact one of the hallmarks of humans is that they are inconsistent in their beliefs, morals values and so on.
If we were not inconsistent, then everything would be frozen in place and no change would be possible, so I see it as a good thing.
> I don't know you from anybody but I'm one hundred percent sure that you live with contradictions to your own values, no matter how carefully cultivated and adhered to.
Years ago I read an interview by Nolan Bushnell or someone like that. He was asked what he did about unproductive engineers and his answer was 'an unproductive engineer is his managers problem because fundamentally I don't care' He went on to say that the problem is negative productive engineers or worse managers. While an unproductive engineer wastes his salary, a negative productive employee destroys the work of many people.
I take that to heart. Big picture a bum costs society basically nothing as long as he's not actively making trouble. Meanwhile you have successful people consuming huge amounts of resources while destroying immense amounts of societal value. See Sears and Eddie Lampert.
> Big picture a bum costs society basically nothing as long as he's not actively making trouble
That's because you think of society in purely monetary terms. Socially, a bum that needs not be a bum, but chooses to be one, reduces social cohesion, makes people distrustful of necessary welfare programs, and unnecessarily inflates the homeless numbers.
Most Western countries could eliminate homelessness in one day if it was just about the beds in shelters. People opt for a straet instead of a shelter mainly because: it may not be safe there ( drugs, alcohol, aggressive behaviour) or they are on the other side of the spectrum, such as drug addicts, mentally ill and etc. Usually a holistic approach is needed.
Yeah if it was just about having enough beds somewhere then we wouldn't have issues. But there is a lot of mental health, addiction, and trauma -- often feeding off each other, e.g. people with metal health issues turn to drugs to self medicate -- and that requires more than just a place to keep them.
In a lot of cases it's more about harm reduction (to themselves, and to the local community) then getting them fixed in a home. Cuz you're not going to rehab some of these people.
The tiny handful of people who are homeless because "they don't like the rules, man" are statistically irrelevant.
Maybe he felt he had already contributed enough to the establishment in his prior, more conventional situation. Would probably take a lot of $3 meals to change that balance substantially.
"Apparently the guy just wanted to live this way because he was sick and tired of the life he had earlier."
Anyways, do we want as a society do the maths if someone has the right to "profit" from our infrastructure? Isn't the main goal of a society to support a wide range of lifestyles?
Thats not a rhetorical question, i mean it. There is balance to be struck between enabling everyone to live their life like they want to and having a standardized flow of goods and services that makes a "good life" possible for everyone.
In this case, i would say it is a thing that modern society should be able to handle and we shouldn't look after every penny. Those people are in the very minority and if they need help we should be able to provide them with the necessary things. But that is only an opinion of mine and there is a discussion to be had regarding the handling of those cases.
Do trust-fundies bug you the same way? Granted, someone put up capital that came from somewhere to seed their lifestyle, but they're quite literally living off others' labor, too.
Putting that aside, a lot of folks seems far more attuned to 'cheating' at the very bottom of society than the (much more damaging) cheating elsewhere. Is someone eating almost-expired grocery store waste a bigger imposition on others than fraud? Tax evasion?
> Do trust-fundies bug you the same way? Granted, someone put up capital that came from somewhere to seed their lifestyle, but they're quite literally living off others' labor, too.
No, because they're supposed to be living off of daddy and mummy's labor, not mine. You see, trust fund kids have a trust fund, but the people who provided that money (mom and dad) typically have a lot of say in how its used. It's the same principle here. If a trust fundie went to a public soup kitchen, then yes I want a say, because that's my money.
Otherwise, no I don't really care that someone gave someone else money. Not my business. If the 'wild' guy in the comment found an independent patron to provide him everything he needed, I'd say go for it -- that's a great business to be in honestl.
> Putting that aside, a lot of folks seems far more attuned to 'cheating' at the very bottom of society than the (much more damaging) cheating elsewhere.
That's not true at all. You just haven't made a proper comparison. Trust fund kids aren't stealing anything from me. That money is not mine. It was their ancestor's and now it's theirs. If they were taking my money then that would be unfair.
> Is someone eating almost-expired grocery store waste a bigger imposition on others than fraud?
I have no idea how this relates
> Tax evasion?
Tax evasion -- not paying taxes that are owed -- is against the law, and ought to be prosecuted, including with jail time. I don't think that my country (America) typically goes easy on those who flout tax law, but in general, I support law enforcement universally, and I would support cracking down on those breaking tax law and building more jails to house them.
>I don't think that my country (America) typically goes easy on those who flout tax law, but in general, I support law enforcement universally, and I would support cracking down on those breaking tax law and building more jails to house them.
Again the poor are scrutinized more in this area than the rich. The rich move their money offshore and use expensive lawyers and social connections to make this happen.
Insisting on locking up poor people for tax evasion is a terrible idea, most of them don't owe much tax anyway. It would cost you more of your money to lock them up than it saves.
Once society really starts to go after the rich for tax evasion, then arguments like yours might become more credible, but even then I'd never be in favour of locking up poor people for unpaid taxes. It's disproportionate and counterproductive.
Sometimes people are going to cheat, and it won't seem fair. It's not worth disturbing your peace of mind over it.
> Again the poor are scrutinized more in this area than the rich. The rich move their money offshore and use expensive lawyers and social connections to make this happen
Source? For a long time the irs didn't investigate taxes for discrepancies under a few hundred thousand which seems to favor the poor.
The 'tax evasion' you cite is (moving money) is legal. It is not tax evasion. No one, rich or poor, should be punished for doing something legal at the time they did it. Congress should change their laws
OK, thanks. But this confuses something: we're not talking about me giving money to my kid, we're talking about my hypothetical kid. My choices can't tell us anything about the moral character of my kid.
I submit that the kid and the voluntarily impecunious are morally identical - neither is personally adding any value, they're exploiting arrangements neither of them made to continue their lifestyle while producing nothing.
Also, food banks != the state. The one I volunteer at is a church distributing food that's nearly expired, donated by stores who would have tossed it otherwise. It appears win-win-win to me and is taking nothing from you. Do you have a problem with that?
The donations are typically given with the understanding they are helping those in need, not those who want to be in need.
> The one I volunteer at is a church distributing food that's nearly expired, donated by stores who would have tossed it otherwise. It appears win-win-win to me and is taking nothing from you. Do you have a problem with that?
Then why doesn't they guy simply to go to the store and offer to take their almost expired food? My guess is that they wouldn't give it to him because they'd want him to pay. The food is given to food banks for those in need. Someone not really in need taking it lowers the amount available for those truly in need, artificially signals to donators that more food is needed, and violates the consent of those giving the food for the truly destitute.
That the state spends money to help the destitute and that some of those might be not-quite-destitute and therefore by some logic defrauding the state really seems to irk people in ways that always surprise me. As you say, why focus on the pennies involved when waste in the military (at least in the US) and other fraud against the government (such as Medicare fraud) is magnitudes more?
The main defender of this point would've been better off taking the money earned during the time writing his comment, donating it to a shelter (because a lot of charity is not government funded), and never thinking about the issue again. Yet you can just see how it gets under his skin.
You mention various other free loaders as if I don't think they deserve condemnation as well. However, I'm not going to hijack a thread about some homeless-by-choice bum to talk about that, because I like to stay on-topic.
> but the moment you walk into a homeless shelter asking for a meal funded by the people in the rat race that you like to condemn and opt out of, I'm afraid my opinion starts to matter.
Well it's a fair trade off. Much of land has been commandeered by the state for the people in the rat race. So the homeless getting a meal from a homeless shelter doesn't seem so hypocritical.
With an extensive skill set and knowledge base that is probably larger than everything you know about computers. How much of your life could you build from first principles?
She lives like someone in the Stone Age, it’s a metaphor. You’ve heard of those, right? They are a way of saying a thing by saying something that is not literally true - she does not have a time machine, or if she does she has been very good at concealing it - but in an interesting way that conveys the essential point the writer would like to make.
I don't like how she is referred to as a "woman", as by now, we all know that there is no such thing as "gender". Why can't it just be called a "person"?? Seriously people, this is the 20th century, ok.
