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Title: How to Drop Out Author: Ran Prieur Date: April 2, 2004 Language: en Topics: Anti-civ, post-left, anti-work, gardening Source: http://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html
The original 2004
is easily the most popular thing I’ve written, and thousands of people
have found my site by putting “how to drop out of society” into Google,
but I wonder if it was worth it. The message I was aiming for was
something like “If you have the mental focus and self-discipline to be
successful in the dominant society, but you don’t like it, here’s how
you can change your value system to reduce your need for money and
status, and gain some benefits of industrial civilization without being
in a position of forced obedience.” Or: “Society is your enemy, it
attacks you by making you need money, and if you are better than the
average person at sacrificing comfort for long-term goals, you can work
toward a position where you need relatively little money and have more
free time.”
Instead, through great carelessness, I allowed people to think my
message was something like “If you can’t even get good grades or hold
down a job, don’t worry, there is a gateway to a magical wonderland in
the nearest dumpster.” Or: “If you have a weak sense of who you are and
you need an inspiring story to give your life meaning, how about being a
heroic puritan like me, whose goal is to avoid guilt through an
impossible lifestyle that has no connection to a society that is viewed
as a cartoonish monolithic evil.”
Over the years a lot of readers have been disappointed that I’m not that
guy, and at least a few have quit classes and jobs that they should have
stayed with. Even I sometimes lost focus on what I really needed. I
dabbled in homesteading and discovered that it requires too much work
and way too much driving, while the excitement of living in the woods
fades quickly. Looking back on the popular myth that first attracted me
to primitive living, what I wanted out there was something that is
easier to find in the city (but still difficult): close to zero
obligations, and giant blocks of time with nothing I’m supposed to be
doing. I’m still working on that.
“How To Drop Out” has been my most popular piece of writing for more
than four years. In that time I’ve bought some land, which you can read
about on my
, and I’ve shifted my main residence to Spokane, where it’s harder to
find good food in dumpsters, so my expenses are higher. Also, I’ve
decided I need to be even more aggressive in dispelling the very
powerful myths that are tied to the idea of dropping out of society. So
here’s a new short version of the essay, hitting the main points, adding
a few new points, and really hammering the points that people keep
missing. The original essay is below it.
1. Do not drop out. Instead, try to stop yourself from committing
suicide until you can find a job that is so non-hellish that it does not
make you suicidal, and then stay at that job, or an even better one if
you can find it, for several decades. Grab what fun you can on the
weekends, save up money, enjoy your retirement, and you will have lived
a pretty good life.
Seriously, it’s good to live differently, to take uncommon paths, to
minimize your dependence on a society gone astray. But if I were to say,
“Woo-hoo! Dropping out is so cool! Quit your job now and hop a freight
train to Bolivia, and you will be ALIVE while everyone else is DEAD,”
then that might be worse than saying nothing. Motivational writing is a
drug. If you require a motivational writer or speaker to live
differently, then as soon as that external energy shot wears off, you
will fizzle and burn out. But if everyone is trying to discourage you
from doing something, and you do it anyway, then you have the internal
motivation to persist and succeed. So: dropping out is not fun — better
not do it.
2. “Drop out” is a bad metaphor, because it implies you are either in or
out. In reality, no one has ever been in or out — everyone is somewhere
in between. The most pathetic office drone still has forbidden dreams,
and the most extreme mountain man still has commerce with society. Your
mission is to find a niche, somewhere in this range, where you’re not
held over a barrel by a system that gives you no participation in power.
3. It’s not about being pure. It’s not about keeping your hands clean or
avoiding guilt. Imagine birds living in a forest. Humans come and cut
the forest down and build barns and plant crops. If some birds are able
to live in the barns, or eat the crops, they don’t say, “I’m not going
to live in the barn — that’s cheating,” or “I’m not going to eat the
crops, because then I’m just part of the system.” Of all the species on
Earth, only humans are that stupid.
Now, that doesn’t mean you should accept all gifts. Sometimes the
“crops” are poisoned or the “barns” are traps. By all means, when you
are offered benefits, use your full intelligence to see what strings are
attached. And if you reject something, reject it because you see that it
will do you more harm than good, not because you have some silly
obsession with purity. Here’s a test: when Thoreau was living at Walden
Pond, he would often go into town for dinners with his family. If you
see anything wrong with that, read this section again, or read this
piece about the
.
4. “Out” is relative and not absolute. It is a path and not a
destination. And you walk the path not by disconnecting from the rest of
the world, but by engaging it in an intelligent and creative way,
instead of in one of the disempowering ways that are made to look like
the only ways. The myth of the pure and total outsider is one of those
disempowering ways. It’s a trick designed to make you set an impossible
goal, get discouraged, and give up.
5. Do not try to find a job doing what you love. This is my most radical
advice. There are some people in the world who have jobs they love so
much that they would do them for free. If you become one of these
people, you will probably get there not through planning but through
luck, by doing what you love for free until somehow the money starts
coming in. But if you make an effort to combine your income and your
love, you are likely to end up compromising both, making a poverty
income by doing something you don’t quite love, or no longer love. For
example, if you decide to become a chef because you love cooking, it
will probably make you hate cooking, because cooking will become linked
in your mind to all the bullshit around the job.
What I recommend instead is to separate your money from your love. Get
the most low-stress source of income that you can find, and then do
exactly what you love for free. It might eventually make you money or it
might not. “Do what you love and the money will follow” is mostly false.
The real rule is: “If you’re doing what you love, you won’t care if you
never make any money from it — but you still need money.”
6. When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It works like
this: When you were three years old, if your parents weren’t too bad,
you knew how to play spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where
everything you did was required. The worst thing is that even the fun
activities, like singing songs and playing games, were commanded under
threat of punishment. So even play got tied up in your mind with a
control structure, and severed from the life inside you. If you were
“rebellious”, you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to
forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good reasons, and
when your rebellion ended in suffering and failure, you figured the life
inside you was not to be trusted. If you were “obedient”, you simply
crushed the life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you’re not punished for saying no. The most fundamental
freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when you get this freedom,
after many years of activities that were forced, nothing is all you want
to do. You might start projects that seem like the kind of thing you’re
supposed to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish because
nobody is forcing you to finish and it’s not really what you want to do.
It could take months, if you’re lucky, or more likely years, before you
can build up the life inside you to an intensity where it can drive
projects that you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more
time before you build up enough skill that other people recognize your
actions as valuable.
7. Hard work is satanic. Primitive humans have moments of extreme
exertion, but they don’t go through life in a hurry, they don’t push
themselves, and even when they live on the edge of hunger, they don’t
stress about it. Even medieval serfs worked fewer hours, and at a slower
pace, than modern industrialized workers. Ivan Illich has written that
at the dawn of the industrial age, they would put a man in a pit that
gradually filled with water, and give him a pump, and he would have to
pump constantly all day to not drown. Humans are so naturally resistant
to hard work that it took something like that to train people for
industrial jobs. Now they do it with the schooling system, and with the
religious doctrine that hard work is morally virtuous.
The opposite of hard work is quality work. Quality work may be done
quickly, but it is never pushed. It arranges itself around the goal of
doing something as well as it can be done, and it finds its own pace.
Another opposite of hard work is playful work. Like quality work it may
be done quickly but is never pushed. But playful work is indifferent to
quality, or even to success. When you’re doing playful work, you don’t
care if it ends in total failure, because you’re having such a good time
that you would look forward to doing the whole job again.
8. There are no easy rules. This is a tangential point. If you’re
interested in dropping out of society, you are also likely to reject
society’s rules, and try to replace them with counterculture rules or
rules of your own invention. Humans are map-making animals, and we’re
always trying to make a map so good that we no longer have to look at
the land. This is a mistake, and if you reject the dominant map, it’s
best to learn to not use any map at all. There is one rule that’s very
simple, but not easy: observe reality and adjust.
9. Don’t rush it. Getting free is not like walking through a magic
doorway — it’s like growing a fruit tree.
I didn’t even start dropping out until my mid-20’s. Unlike many
outsiders and “radicals,” I never had to go through a stage where I
realized that our whole society is insane — I’ve known that as long as I
can remember. But even being already mentally outside the system, I
found it extremely challenging to get out physically. In fourth grade I
wanted to blow up the school, but I didn’t know how, and even if I had
done it, it would not have meant an endless summer vacation. In high
school, inspired by Bill Kaysing’s The Robin Hood Handbook, I wanted to
go live off the land in the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it
seemed as remote and difficult as going to the moon. (Kaysing later
wrote the book We Never Went to the Moon.) So I continued to bide my
time and obey the letter of the law, like the guy in the Kafka parable
. In college, when Artis the Spoonman performed on campus and told us
all to drop out, I thought that was ridiculous — how would I survive
without a college degree?
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 $2000 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 20^(th) 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 low-status, modest-paying 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, at a job that you can come home from
feeling energized and not drained. And then the important part of your
life 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 come 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 $20 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 $100 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 $200.
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
.) 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.
by Margareta Sliwka
by Eddie Vigor
Audio of me reading “How to Drop Out”
(thanks Avi)
Chris Davis’s
, a blog by a guy who has been living without money since 2000
A page about master dropout