In the past I've lived sort of like this and found it quite lonely and alienating. What the article doesn't mention is that nobody really wants to hang out with the weird guy with no stuff and no apartment. If you're single, only really strange and desperate people want to date you. I also found that the act of finding another place to stay quickly became tedious. In the past, nomads were out being nomadic with the rest of their huge nomadic tribe. They weren't just bouncing around settled society with a laptop by themselves.
<i>The DJ has now substituted his bed for friends' couches</i><p>How does this scale when no-one has free crash space to give...?<p>It's like those TV shows where a family give up the corporate rat race and go and run a B&B or a vineyard in the country, who are their customers apart from corporate workers? It's not a revolution if only a small percentage of the population can ever do it.
Since almost 4 years now I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases. Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, I call home. I am very comfortable with the fact that I don't need to manage my possessions. And Dropbox, Google Apps and alike even made my fears of data loss a thing of the past.<p>I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond.<p>I am taking a wild guess; The past 400.000 years of evolution in which our bodies and minds adapted to a nomadic lifestyle may still resonate in our genes. Only since a few thousand years were a majority of my ancestors bound to one place and this short period is unlikely to have had any genetic impact. A lack of constricting possessions is surprisingly rewarding (constricting in terms of hard to move). I suspect that this reward is universal to humans which would imply some kind of genetically predetermined preference. But it is just a wild guess.<p>Yet I feel with my son's first birthday approaching this lifestyle will be hard to maintain.
As well as being a bad-ass programmer, Steve Dekorte is also a great example of this neavu-minimalism. His blog and Io show how deeply he has taken this "philosophy" (<a href="http://dekorte.com" rel="nofollow">http://dekorte.com</a> and <a href="http://www.iolanguage.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.iolanguage.com</a>).<p>I also don't want to sound too creepy but he has a awesome apartment: <a href="http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299</a>
Maybe I just don't get it, but the things keeping me tied to my apartment are my bed, shower and stove, not my shelves and shelves of physical media. I don't see how the digitalization of my live helps with those things.
Not really minimalists... they depend on others for things they need. If they were truly minimalists, they would live in one of those micro-shacks, hacking basic on an Apple I replica that is powered by solar power, while watching the tomatoes ripen.
"Another roof, another proof."
<i>- Paul Erdos</i><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s</a>
I recently started down this trail to simplify my life and draw down my personal property. I got rid of my DVDs because I simply wasn't watching them. I ripped every one of my CDs in FLAC format and then gave them away to friends. And these days, instead of a netbook and a desktop, I have only a single laptop running Arch Linux.<p>The one thing I cannot move on from is my book collection. I love books and I have two bookshelves with 285 graphic novels and novels (according to my LibraryThing account). And I am starting to make use of sites like Project Guttenburg to read public domains works (using FBReader).
Living a nomadic lifestyle can be fun, but I like knowing where I'm going to sleep. If I lived in the middle of a plains or was hiking down a trail, I know that I will be sleeping 'up ahead' or 'over there' or 'on the side of this trail'. However, in urban environments you actually have to find somewhere to sleep.<p>I'm also fond of my textbooks, which haven't yet been satisfactorily digitized, and my motorcycles and associated tools and parts, which haven't been successfully digitized either.
I like how the reasoning behind the move to MP3s instead of discs is that MP3s don't wear out. Because, you know, hard disks don't wear out either...
And with the whole move-to-digital thing, you might think you have less stuff, but what you're doing is transferring your belongings from one device to the next over time. Over the course of your life, you're gonna own dozens of laptops and the energy and the chemicals released to build those aren't free. Compare that to books and disks you bought once and for all (granted they don't wear out).
Maybe the move to all-digital is for the better, but it's just not that obvious to me.
Man, I hate traveling. I can understand the appeal of a spartan lifestyle, but I can't understand the appeal of not knowing where your head is going to rest tonight.
Not planning on going quite that far - but we are thinking of saving $200,000 by buying a one bedroom apartment with a few Kindle's instead of a 2Bed place with lots of bookshelves.<p>All the DVDs are already ripped to a couple of hard drives, the disks but in DJ CD files and the cases thrown away - that saved a 6' bookcase.
this might be a trend of the future. people are more mobile these days, and physical possessions can keep people tied down. i once thought about what i really need, and 80% of it is on my computer! time to start a remote backup company :)
Brain uploaders are missing that backing up your brain would create a clone of your mind - not transfer your conscious experience inside a digital world. Vacations of this nature would be your clone telling you the good time they had.
Man, it seems as if the only thing missing is a data bank where you can drop off your hard drive and the bank will store it for you and even lend out free space to others at an interest. Yay virtual currency.
I love this story. Sounds like a great life.<p>For me I think this works best after you've done the kids thing, if you plan on doing that. But I strongly agree with the premise here: people are naturally nomadic
My co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic.<p>Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city.<p>We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things we couldn't take with us.<p>I run a virtual machine on my laptop and under it I have a server that acts as our "intranet server" and so all of the collaboration tools, etc run there. I also start servers periodically while developing something that will eventually run in the cloud to test it out before running it online.<p>We're geared to be able to work full time without access to the internet. We're expecting to be in places where there is no internet. However, for the past 3 years that we've been traveling we've had pretty much full time internet access so far. When we're without internet we use an ad-hoc wifi network so we always have our "local network" with us.<p>Other than what fits in the backpacks we just have a couple boxes in storage. The most stressful experience has been going over all of our stuff and getting rid of it until we fit in the laptop. That took several months of work and because many of the possessions had a history it was not easy.<p>But now, we can go anywhere anytime we want, just about. It is very liberating!<p>Am willing to answer most questions....
One of the biggest efforts in making this kind of a transition is the digitization of your life. This is a huge project, and some of the work is still ongoing.<p>1) Music and Movies. About the easiest as ripping CDs and DVDs is not that hard.<p>2) Photographs. There was a time when I shot on film, and so for all the images taken before then, they needed to be scanned. Scanning paper photos on a flatbed is not too bad, but scanning negatives is very slow and a very hands-on process. But it does produce the best results.<p>3) Books. This is the hardest. I stopped buying books about 5 years ago because ebooks weren't really ready to meet my needs then (I hate the kindle) and only started buying again now because the iPad does.<p>But all these physical books. Scanning them is really a pain. Most of them just got tossed. We had huge collections of old instruction manuals that are long out of print and obsolete as well.<p>Unfortunately, the books were an almost total loss. We flatbed scanned a few pages here and there and that's it.<p>4) Storage and backup. We've iterated several times in our strategy here. This is something to consider very carefully. The solution isn't the same between even the two of us, so you'll have to find your own.<p>But keep at least 2 copies of everything in such a way as you always know what the prime copy is.
Slightly off topic...anyone know what kind of keyboard that is he had? Looks super useful being so small. Is it a Korg? This on: <a href="http://www.korg.com/nanoseries" rel="nofollow">http://www.korg.com/nanoseries</a> ? Confirmation?