Could you Survive Without Money? Meet the Guy Who Does.

I'm pretty sure I could survive on the waste and charity of others as this guy does, but I wouldn't want to.

Money is merely a means to decouple the promise of payback from the promiser.<p>Without money, you have to trust Joe to help you can tomatoes next fall since you helped him plow his field. With money, Joe can pay you to plow his field, and you can pay Sally to help you can tomatoes (because Joe moved to another town).

His blog... <a href="http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/" rel="nofollow">http://zerocurrency.blogspot.com/</a>

It very well could be the knowledge he has gained while living without money that will go toward educating masses of people out of work in our increasingly struggling economy moving forward.<p>More people are losing jobs, homes, credit. Debt is increasing. How many people will know how to correctly identify edible cacti?<p>I was thinking of my grandmother who survived the great depression. She has so much knowledge up there in her brain. How to can tomatoes for the winter. How to store potatoes in holes to keep them fresh during the cold months. How to stuff the gaps in the logs of a cabin with mud to stay warm.<p>Countness numbers of the x-generation, y-generation, and even the baby boomers are going to die, simply because they do not know how to survive without money and a job and a grocery store.<p>I feel lucky. I can go out into the woods and find an animal and kill it and skin it and cook it and eat it. Many of my friends can't even eat meat with bones in it because it reminds them it was alive.

Reminded me a little of Diogenes (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes_of_Sinope</a>).<p>As Buddha said, suffering ends when our craving for material things ends. We don't have to be as extremely hardcore as the dude above, but following this philosophy in a limited pragmatic manner I think can be very liberating.

So, um, he's a homeless guy who lives in a cave. Congratulations, homeless guy, you have somehow managed to convince everybody that instead of a homeless guy, you're a cultural revolutionary. NB: you live in a fucking cave. Forgive me if this doesn't sound like the future of mankind.

The subject of the story confuses money and wealth. He is not the first to do so, nor will he be the last.

This is far from surviving. This is coming up with excuses and going to the extreme. Anyone with a psychology background want to diagnose this?

Interesting individual, I could never do anything like this myself.

Interesting article but it would have been even more interesting if the author had chosen to go more in depth about his daily activities and how Suelo copes with loneliness and boredom. IMO, these problems would be much more difficult than the physical hardships he faces.

Money is a unit of work. It is an almost universally accepted abstraction of the "worth" of somebody's time.<p>You could replace "dollars" with "bananas" if you wanted to, it is irrelevant.

This story reminded me of a grown-up version of the children's book "My Side Of The Mountain" for some reason. I love this kind of story because it reminds me that we could all do well to learn to live with less, and that there are some that do.

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subsistence_techniques" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_subsistence_techniques</a> to live without money.

Sometimes I like to think I do.. I have some passive income streams that pay rent.

No kids?

If everyone did this, he wouldn't have a thing to eat. I'm not knocking it, but it's something to think about.<p>But that brings us to a more important point: Why does this guy have to forage to survive without money? Shouldn't he be able to save up, buy a few acres and grow his own resources? Nope, because of the absurdity known as the property tax (er, I mean "protection racket").

"Money represents lack. Money represents things in the past (debt) and things in the future (credit), but money never represents what is present."<p>Spoken like a man who doesn't know how to manage money. Good article, though. It shows what copping out looks like.

I highly respect what this guy is doing, even though I don't yet have the guts to live like this myself. As Tyler Durden said, "the things you own end up owning you." The best I can do is smugly re-read Thoreau while sitting in a Starbucks and twittering from my iPhone in debt up to my eyeballs.<p>What I appreciate most about guys like this is how they make us face the mirror. Like fish unaware of the water in which they swim, American culture is so hyper-materialist that great numbers of us cannot even conceive of this guy's reasoning. Commercial interests can't have good, little fear-driven, obedient consumers dropping off the grid now can they?<p>The spiritual dimension to his lifestyle choice also deserves consideration. The article says he lived in a Buddhist monastery in Asia for several years up until 1999. He's obviously not even comparable to the typical crazy, drug-addled de-humanized homeless people we encounter in our day to day lives in our own urban zoo cages.