Commit a felony and go to jail. That will meet most of your requirements. You will probably be paroled early, so commit additional felonies as required.
How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
11–20 of 98 posts
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#12Where you will run into problems is food. B/c you only want to spend 1 hour a day on involuntary tasks, you'll have to buy food. Regardless of how efficiently you buy, your 10k wont last very long that way. If you are a little skilled and live in the right area, you can get food from hunting/trapping but you're still looking at significantly more than 1 hour a day. Farming is right out. To live that life you really h…
If you are willing to live on rice it's about $200 a year for 2000 kcal per day. This is at supermarket prices, if you were willing to buy by the tonne I'm sure it's much less, just buy a futures contract and bring your truck to the delivery point.
Serious question, not joking - wouldn't you die, literally die, without any protein, fat, or micronutrients?
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#13Where you will run into problems is food. B/c you only want to spend 1 hour a day on involuntary tasks, you'll have to buy food. Regardless of how efficiently you buy, your 10k wont last very long that way. If you are a little skilled and live in the right area, you can get food from hunting/trapping but you're still looking at significantly more than 1 hour a day. Farming is right out. To live that life you really h…
If you are willing to live on rice it's about $200 a year for 2000 kcal per day. This is at supermarket prices, if you were willing to buy by the tonne I'm sure it's much less, just buy a futures contract and bring your truck to the delivery point.
Is there enough nutrition in (brown, i assume) rice to do this?
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#14Respect if you do it because you're harmful to society, childish if its because society is harmful to you.
I think it is neither of these. Well, i am somewhat of an asshole, i guess, but I want to study math and physics.
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#15Commit a felony and go to jail. That will meet most of your requirements. You will probably be paroled early, so commit additional felonies as required.
Oh, by "escape the system" i meant escape the system we create here, as in keep my freedom, not be incarcerated, not be prevented from having sex or children for the rest of my life, etc.
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#16That is possum living there is a book for you http://www.possumliving.net/
There are video about it on youTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvn79E40VSc
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#17All those who venture in caves: return to the world, or go mad from loneliness. Some may seem interesting, but there is a thin line between insane and interesting.
Although i said old man in a shack, being isolated is not a requirement. But for the sake of argument, let's not prohibit it.
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#18More parameters are needed, in my opinion. What you want is possible, but not with only $10k. That, or give up some requirements (internet, unless you want to walk to a public library) and be prepared to squat on someone else's property.
I live close to your desired existence. I own my humble hermit's cabin outright, have no debt at all, and a few grand in savings. I grow some of my own food, hunt some more, but I still need supplies. I could conceivably coast through a few years without any external income, but it would be a very Thoreau-like existence (which isn't a bad thing, just too primitive for me). I own my car and home, but still forced to pay insurance and yearly registration/taxes (cheap, as the car and home are old and of very low value, but they're non-negotiable and will surely rise over the years and are unavoidable). I still pay for power and internet, which could be trimmed (but what's the fun in that?).
If someone mailed me a check for $100k today, I'd never need to work again, and I'm under 40. I'm that set up and frugal. As it stands, I pimp myself out as a remote admin and local PC support dude, with minor hopes that I can realize a small web site that will bring in a few kilobucks a year.
For $10k you can buy an acre on Hawaii ("the big island" -- subdivisions near the lava flows), fly out there, and start gardening year-round while you live in a tent. Water falls from the sky daily and you can raise some meat to supplement the fruit and veggies you can grow. You'd have enough cash to pay for a few years of taxes, too.
Property taxes will get you every time, though, unless you squat. There's some dude who lives in a cave in southern Utah on public land. He eats bugs and scavenges food from nearby towns. Interesting experiment, but he'd be hosed (likely) if the majority of people weren't wasteful and he lacked stuff to scavenge.
Anyway, it's possible, but you'd either need more money up front, to have everything owned outright when you begin, or have enough passive income/savings to cover taxes and minimal supplies. Like I said before, more information on your current situation and your goals/plans are required for a more realistic analysis.
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#19A thought - you might want to try this out for a month in a dry run before spending time building it. I spent about two months learning how to track, trap, and otherwise survive in the Southern Utah desert, which was an amazing experience that taught me a lot, but not as romantic as you might imagine. Before investing time, dreams, and resources learning about and trying to build this, why not go rent a remote cabin for a month and see how it suits you?
Re: How do I become a self-sufficient old man in a shack?
#20It's an interesting question. but if you are an old hacker in the US or probably anywhere else in the developed world you qualify for a retirement income. At age 70 it would be something on the order of $2500/month. If you had an unmarried old lady, you would have something on the order of $60K per year plus reasonable health benefits in a few years. The real problem is shelter. It is probably very difficult to build…
Sorry, there is a catch: I'm not actually an old man, i just want to live the life of an old man in a shack. What i really want is to maximize the hours per day dedicated to sleep and whatever else i want to do, which currently is only reading and writing. I had a relatively bad undergrad GPA and basically want to live the life of a professor without having to worry about grad school, then phd, tenure, teaching if i…
If I remember correctly, Joseph Campbell waited out the Depression this way. I don't know how he supported himself (probably borrowed the cabin from family), but he basically read books for 5 years.