Today's Unknown News
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Today's Unknown News
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my novel,
Apocalypsopolis |
How to Drop Out by Ran Prieur Friday, April 2, 2004
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 00 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 fuck 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 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 0 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 0. 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. 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, and inject it with toxic vaccinations to make it stupid and sick so it will grow into a docile worker who pumps money back into the medical system -- and don't forget the surface goal, that vaccinations enable human beings to live at the socially and ecologically destructive densities that make infectious disease a "problem."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. 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 own needs so she can devote complete 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 to Ursa for suggesting the topic!) Appendix 2: Dumpster Diving FAQ Why do they call it "diving"? Do you go in head first?Usually I don't have to climb in at all. I can just reach in, or climb up on the side of the dumpster and reach, or balance on my hips on the edge and lean down in, using my legs as a counterweight, which might be where "diving" comes from. And sometimes I do climb in, but not if it's too nasty. Isn't all the food rotten? Certainly not! You would be amazed at the quality of food that gets thrown away, and the reasons. As I draft this I'm making soup with a can of coconut milk that was thrown away for having a dent. This morning I had cereal that was thrown away for a tear in the box, even though the inner plastic bag was intact. Often produce gets thrown out for purely cosmetic reasons, like a funny-shaped bell pepper or an apple with a rough patch of skin. My favorite dumpster is at a store that sells produce in packages instead of by the pound. If a single orange is moldy, they'll throw out the whole five pound bag. They'll throw out basil for a few brown-edged leaves, and I'll make a huge batch of pesto. Once I found several cases of organic chicken broth that had apparently been tossed because they bought more than they could store. Also most stores are very conservative with their expiration dates, so I can get meat, eggs, cheese, and packaged meals that are still fine. You eat meat from the dumpster? Usually only organic meat, because the normal stuff is full of poisons. But yes, if you get it quickly, decay is not an issue. A few times I pulled out slimy salmon carcasses from which they had cut off the filets. The part that was left still had a lot of meat plus all the good healthy fat! Do you ever get sick? I have yet to get food poisoning from dumpster food, except once I got mild nausea and some sulfurous burps from (I think) some smoked salmon. The key is knowing a lot about how different foods go bad. Poultry has salmonella, so it has to be thoroughly cooked and you have to avoid getting any uncooked juices in your mouth. Never eat a dead crab -- but once I took a chance on one that was still packed in ice, and I was fine. When I get sushi from the dumpster, I cook it even if it's intended to be eaten raw. Eggs are good way past their expiration date. It helps that I live in a chilly city, and that I have a strong immune system, and that my diet is generally very healthy. I suspect that the #1 cause of food-borne illness is refined sugar weakening people's immune systems. What are some foods you've rescued from a dumpster? Apples, oranges, bananas, pears, peaches, strawberries, tomatoes, avocados, pineapples, eggplants, yams, bell peppers, zucchinis, asparagus, ginger, onions, potatoes, lettuce, spinach, arrugula, basil, eggs, sausage, beef, lamb, chicken, salmon, breaded halibut, hazelnuts, pecans, lentils, wild rice, salsa, guacamole, chips, pesto, olives, bread, croissants, chocolate, butter, coffee. What's the best thing you've ever found? Probably a whole case of extra-virgin olive oil. Another time I found about 40 packages of smoked salmon. It's always great to find a bag of premium organic bread. The coolest thing I've heard about was a block of chocolate so big that when they got it home they had to break it up with an axe! If you find a lot of something good, do you take it all? Not if I know that other people hit the same dumpster. I took only four bottles of the olive oil and gave two away. My rule is, take up to half, unless I believe no one will be diving after me. Any other dumpster diving ethics? Don't leave a mess, and if others have left a mess, clean it. Messes give us a bad name and give the stores a reason to lock us out. Also, if I dig down and find something good that I don't want, I'll pull it to the top for the next person. In some cases I'll pull stuff out and set it to the side, so it will still be there after the dumpster is emptied. Do you only dive grocery stores? What other good dumpsters are there? Anything that is manufactured, there are seconds and rejects that get thrown away. Somewhere there is a violin dumpster, a felt hat dumpster, an ice cream dumpster. Businesses that use the latest computer equipment usually just throw it away every time they replace it. You just have to find out where. I know people who have found good outdoor equipment and expensive clothing in manufacturer dumpsters. Also there are beer dumpsters! If a bottle gets broken, they throw out the whole case. I don't do this level of dumpster diving, because you generally need a car to navigate the spread-out industrial areas and to haul all the stuff you find. Are dumpsters often locked? Less often than you'd think. What gets a dumpster locked is the attitude of the manager in charge of it, not the value of stuff it contains. Do you have to go late at night? Not always! I go to my favorite food dumpsters in the mid-morning. Sometimes daylight is better because you look less suspicious. But clearly, if it's a manufacturer dumpster in plain view of the workplace, you have to wait until everyone goes home. What's a dumpster diver's worst enemy? Trash compactors, big sealed-off things that you can't get into. Evil stores use them. When the revolution comes they must all be destroyed. They can be disassembled, but be careful, because if there is compacted stuff inside, it tends to explode. You might become a suicide trash liberator. Another enemy is the irresponsible dumpster diver who makes a mess. People who scavenge cans are the worst. Is dumpster diving illegal? In case you haven't noticed, this world is no longer ruled by law -- if it ever was. If the authorities want to stop you from doing something, it doesn't matter if the law is on your side, and if the authorities don't notice or don't care, it doesn't matter if the law is against you. What concerns you, as a dumpster diver, are the attitudes of the workers at the places you're diving, and of the local police officers. If you encounter the police, most likely they'll check you for outstanding warrants and let you go. In any case do not act guilty. Act like what you're doing is perfectly normal and legal, but don't get cocky either. Do you look in residential trash? Never in house garbage cans -- it's rude, risky, and there's probably nothing there. But apartment dumpsters can be excellent. People throw out good blankets and pillows, small furniture, cookware, appliances. Once I snagged a perfectly good upright vacuum cleaner that someone threw away because the disposable inner bag had a hole. Rich kids who are moving out will throw out stuff worth hundreds of dollars. So do you ever sell stuff you find? That violates my personal moral code, which is that it's wrong to sell something for more than I paid for it. That's parasitism. Did Robin Hood steal from the rich and sell to the poor? If I siphon off stuff that other dumpster divers need for personal use, and then sell it, that's stealing from the poor and selling cheap to the rich! If you can't even give away something for free that you got for free, you have misplaced your soul. |
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