Great read. Makes me nostalgic for the optimistic incoherence of the 60s counterculture, a time I never knew firsthand but heard stories about from my dad. My grandmother was part of it, growing weed on a farm outside Montpelier Vermont. The misadventures of the hippies do make you wonder if maybe another way of living is possible...
> The misadventures of the hippies do make you wonder if maybe another way of living is possible... Only on the backs of the people who actually keep the world running. It's an inherently parasitic sort of LARP only possible in a very wealthy society. If everybody starts living the commune life, you're soon looking at a whole lot of violence and abuse, just like the primitive, self-sufficient societies the hippies ro…
I think the fact that healthcare, education, and housing (necessities) were all far cheaper then, relative to wages, also made it far easier to "drop out". The things that were more expensive then but much cheaper now are things that are essentially luxuries, like everything you can buy from China at Walmart and Amazon.
This was a time when you could graduate from college with little or no debt -- and more importantly, have a large cohort of friends, now also equally educated, who were in the same situation. You could find cheap rent, avoid buying a TV, and make do on very little.
Today rent and student loan payments alone ensure that most people who might combine the working class grit with the educated creativity and out of the box thinking to want to do weird stuff like this, can't afford to do anything but get a mainstream job. And even if they make it work, people don't do stuff like this alone, and all their friends have mainstream jobs.
Hell, even as recently as 2011 you could get a studio in Manhattan for under $1000.