The Moneyless Man Read Online Free PDF

difficult. While I always definitely enjoyed having a bit of spare cash at my disposal, it had been a while since my days of rampant consumerism. However, the more I started to explore the rabbit hole that is freeconomic living, the more of a warren it became. Not because it’s so difficult in itself, but because we in modern western societies have become very conditioned to our comforts and, more critically, have lost many traditional skills. Humans lived without money for a long time – over 90% of
Homo sapiens
’s time on the planet. The problem is that it has become something of a lost art.
    One of my first realizations was that there is a huge difference between living on a very tight budget and not being able to spend a single penny. The US Census Bureau classifies a household that lacks the resources to meet the basic needs forhealthy living as impoverished. In official terms, a typical household earning less than about $22,000 is considered to be in poverty. Or some kind of living hell on earth. According to the US Census Bureau, around 12% of Americans live in poverty.
    Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorized as poverty stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high wage. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the West isn’t material poverty, it’s spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfillment comes only from the pursuit of material gain. Much of the material poverty in places such as Africa stems from the spiritual poverty of the West, as institutions such as the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund (IMF) continue to cripple ‘developing’ nations with debts and restrictions designed to enable western governments to supply the extravagant products and cheap food we, as consumers, demand.
    With a bit of organization, I found I could quite easily live on £5,000 ($7,500) a year, even after rent. The problems begin when you cannot use money at all, turning what would normally be a small purchase into a huge undertaking. Let’s say you live on a tiny wage of $50 a week and your pen runs out. Pens are, monetarily, cheap; almost anyone can run to the nearest store and pick up a new one for 30 cents. Without money, this becomes an entirely different prospect. It doesn’t matter if pens are unbelievably cheap, it doesn’t matter if they drop to 5 cents; without money, you simply cannot buy one. Instead of spending the equivalent of two minutes’ work at the US minimum wage, you’d have to spend three-quarters of a day making a new penfrom inkcap mushrooms. This is the difference between living frugally and living completely without money. This reality scared the hell out of me.
DECONSTRUCTING MY CONSUMPTION HABITS
     
    Journalists and reporters, it seemed, sensed the enormity of my experiment long before I did. In the early stages, often the first question they asked was ‘how are you going to do this?’ They hoped for a short sound-bite they could fit into their interview or article. Yet how do you explain succinctly how you are going to live without money for an entire year?
    I found the best answer to this question was to be honest about how I had prepared. When I decided to live for a year without money, the second thing I did, after formulating my rules, was to get a notepad and list every single thing I consumed; as it stood, there and then. I called this my ‘breaking-it-down’ list. To structure my thoughts, I categorized my list into food, energy, heating, transportation, entertainment, lighting, communications, reading, art, and so on. The list eventually took up half the notepad – and that was the list of someone who