I see others expressing this point, but I'll add my two cents: this essay really bothered me.
1. The writer describes hitchhiking to work every day, presumably for months or years. He doesn't describe in any way how he paid back that kindness, either to the people he rode with directly, or just by paying it forward.
2. The writer describes traveling in Asia for 8 years, and many of the instances of kindness he describe imply very strongly that he intentionally put himself at risk, where others were faced with the choice to help him or let him suffer consequences. It's one thing to get caught in a rip current and need assistance; it's another entirely to swim out past where you are safe, and then wait for someone to rescue you -- and to do that repeatedly for eight years. Further, it is obvious from the language used that he was traveling rough by choice, with the privilege and economic security of his background, and yet repeatedly accepting -- I would argue demanding -- the help of people from a poorer background than himself. He was cosplaying poverty and repeatedly being assisted by people living it for real.
3. The backyard idea seems similarly pushy. He says he was never turned away, not once. So he believes that no one, given an actual free choice, would rather not have a stranger camp in their backyard. He ignores the possibility that people would feel uncomfortable about rejecting someone presenting as having no place to stay, and rather believes that everyone he asked woke up that day thinking about how happy they'd be to do a favor for a stranger. And he couches the whole process as him doing them a favor.
4. He lists multiple instances where people less well-off than him went to great lengths to help him, without ever thinking about why they might feel obligated, and through it all admitting that not only doesn't he engage in such kindness himself, he can't imagine that he would.
5. And through it all he characterizes what he very nearly describes as him pushing himself on people as "willingness to be helped" -- as some sort of saintliness.
And of course each of these people only saw him once, for a short while. Reading this essay we see how it is a pattern: how he is essentially a traveling con man, moving from mark to mark, letting each of them believe that he just happens to need help this one time, so they put good out into the universe. But in reality he is taking, taking, taking, abusing the world's willingness to help -- if everyone did what he did, the world would swiftly become a meaner, poorer place.