My brother has a friend who is the modern day equivalent. He travels North America by bike, eats pizza from cheap pizza restaurant dumpsters.
Leatherman (vagabond)
101–110 of 153 posts
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lived a pretty high life in Los Angeles for 15 years, and when the time came for me to move to Europe (I'm Australian), I had two weeks where I was basically homeless before the flight home - lease expired on the apartment, circumstances with couch-surfing were not ideal - so I tried two weeks living hard, to see what it was like, as I was also going to have a 6 month hiatus before Europe, back home in the Australi…
Being homeless in a city doesn’t sound like fun at all. Being homeless in a rural buffer outside cities seems much more pleasant.
[deleted]
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is a third option, which is to move to a place with a much lower cost of living. This isn’t always possible, due to family or job, but it’s not exactly uncommon either. Remote work, in particular, has helped with this. Work fewer hours, for less money, but with fewer needs. Doable, but it’s about what you prioritize and care about.
> Remote work, in particular, has helped with this. Work fewer hours, for less money Honestly, this sounds like an armchair fantasy. It sounds great on paper– tech jobs pay $150K, so just find a remote job and work half-time. Boom, less taxes and you still have $5K/mo plus tons of time! IME though, 99% of jobs want to own you full-time. There are almost no roles where you can be part-time. The other alternative, inde…
I didn’t say you could do it working for Amazon. There are plenty of law firms, medical offices, etc., that need software and IT help and are happy to have it part-time or provide flexibility. Sure, it won’t be FAANG, but that wasn’t what we were talking about here.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Hard does not mean negative or bad It does when it applies to your life. (Edit to reply to your edit) A bit of physical activity doesn't make your life harder. A lot of it might. And almost only hard physical activity is pure punishment, even literally used as such in labor camps. > the safety nets are often illusions Safety nets are sometimes illusions, they are mostly helping. Like an airbag they only need to wor…
> Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you. This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my…
What a horrific misattribution. Doctors, nurses, the people who built and maintain the facilities they work in, and generations of researchers saved your life.
Insurance is the rent-seeking middleman that exists between you and them for no purpose other than to shave a percentage off forthemselves.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#105I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life. During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group…
Yeah. The options for lots of leisure are either: a) be homeless, or b) be rich. Those of us inbetween always have to choose and make compromises. In my life, this has forced me to quit on a bunch of things I would have continued otherwise, and to lean down things like my workouts and so on. This isn't necessarily bad, I like that I can now do 80% with 20% of time/effort, but still, would be nice to have more slack.
Or work as contractor / part-time.
I've had two experiences with people like that:
- At one place I've worked at (big corp), the QA department was full of contractors. One of the contractors was only working 9 months per year - they spent all summers in Australia. Everyone knew about that and accepted this. The contractor was great, and no one had problems with that (I am sure not having to pay them anything while they were away helped :) )
- At other place, a small startup, we had a team member who was in a band. He'd work for us for a few months, help us to finish a project and make sure customer is happy.. and then disappear for a few more months to tour the US. Again, he was a great programmer, and we always welcomed him back.
I am sure that not every place is like this (for example my current workplace is pretty bureaucratic and would not be happy with this arrangement), but things like this definitely exist.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#106I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life. During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group…
> I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. >I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time. Trust me mate. Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD. I am homeless for 3 months now and it's absolutely devastating for my so…
Maybe that's because you're homeless and don't want to be. The Leatherman could have settled down, per the article he "had money", but he just didn't want to.
I was intentionally homeless for 4 months, just riding my bike all around western Europe, just setting up my tent in a random woodland every night. I didn't have a safe harbor, except for the knowledge that I could get a job and rent an apartment if I wanted to.
It was not hard at all. In fact, I loved every minute of it. I lived/worked on a farm and slept on a bed for 2 weeks(WWOOFing), and I could not wait to get back out on the road again.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives. You see this with the coder who dreams of the farmer's life, or that of a "rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond", or even that of a soldier. It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that…
The romanticized farmer aspect always gives me pause as well. Farming is a very difficult job that requires many hours of work every single day, every day per year. Even if you had enough money left over from some other job to get to go travel, you could never find the time to do so after becoming a farmer
As you say, farming is difficult, so if you're going into it with the expectation that it is idyllic, you have another thing coming. There is no "time off" on the farm. Some may enjoy that, but most people dreaming about it wouldn't.
It's much better to examine one's motivations for romanticizing the farm. Is it escapism from reality and the suffering endemic to it (in which case, you are only multiplying it by avoiding it)? Is it pride (too good to work)? Is it an impulse toward "immanentizing the eschaton"? Does your current job suck? Is the environment bad? Is it because you're living your life in a meaningless way?
Worth exploring.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#108Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Remote work, in particular, has helped with this. Work fewer hours, for less money Honestly, this sounds like an armchair fantasy. It sounds great on paper– tech jobs pay $150K, so just find a remote job and work half-time. Boom, less taxes and you still have $5K/mo plus tons of time! IME though, 99% of jobs want to own you full-time. There are almost no roles where you can be part-time. The other alternative, inde…
I didn’t say you could do it working for Amazon. There are plenty of law firms, medical offices, etc., that need software and IT help and are happy to have it part-time or provide flexibility. Sure, it won’t be FAANG, but that wasn’t what we were talking about here.
What kind of software development would law/medical/other offices need on a flexible basis? I'm having trouble envisioning a scenario where someone could realistically be a dev part-time.
Re: Leatherman (vagabond)
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you. This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my…
What a horrific misattribution. Doctors, nurses, the people who built and maintain the facilities they work in, and generations of researchers saved your life. Insurance is the rent-seeking middleman that exists between you and them for no purpose other than to shave a percentage off forthemselves.
That is ridiculously unfair. We're talking totals in the tens of millions for these procedures. You can make a very good argument it should be paid for by some other public means and I would not necessarily disagree with you, but given that doesn't currently happen, insurance did a lot more than just skim off the top. They paid for the work. And I'm not aware of any society out there right now that publicly provides free to the consumer home and auto repair.
I agree that the providers themselves, along with the basic science and engineering that made their work possible in the first place, deserves the bulk of the credit, but nobody was attacking physicians and scientists here.
For what it's worth, in plenty of other Reddit-style "everthing sucks and I'm pessimistic about technology" threads, I'm out there touting these same stories as examples of science and technology making the world better, as many of these procedures either weren't possible or had far worse success rates as recently as 20 years ago. This just wasn't one of those threads.