Ran Prieur's latest article, How To Drop Out, eloquently describes his journey out of complete enslavement to "the system", so to speak. In many regards, his story mirrors my own struggle, although it sounds like he is farther along with it than I am. The article provides a sort of abbreviated practical How-To guide, with references for further reading.

A couple of key passages:

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.

I know there have been times when I have gotten into this trap of believing it has to be either everything or nothing. Time has taught me otherwise, and the article provides a good reminder of that.

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.

Self-discipline.

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.

This is a cycle I have also found myself playing out repeatedly. Get into life in the system (work, school, or whatever), realize that it's fundamentally unsatisfying. Get out for a while, but then end up feeling unfulfilled in other ways, in addition to financial pressures. Sometimes I wonder if I will ever advance beyond it. Reading an article like this -- knowing that somebody has found a way that works -- gives me hope that I might as well.

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.

Often times, the artificial manufactured needs are my addiction, a placeholder for deeper fulfillment. I have not yet gotten beyond them. However, as the article pointed out earlier, maybe it's not an all-or-nothing proposition.

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.

...

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.

YES! My brain has a bug in its programming. Whenever my bank account balance (or cash in my wallet) is greater than 0, and all bills for the month are paid, I tend to assume that whatever is left can be spent on whatever random thing happens to catch my eye, no matter how trivial. During times when there is a nice steady stream of income, this doesn't cause any problems. But in bad times, it leaves me empty. Given that I am a person who at least has some desire to free myself (sporadic and conflicted though this instinct may be), I need to learn to do a better job of conserving. So if I remind myself every time before I spend money, "This represents $HOURS of enslavement. Do I really want it that badly?" Maybe I can develop better habits.

And then we get to the fundamental problem of capitalism:

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.

That part isn't really practical advise, but it does manage to describe our society's fundamentally flawed economic system quite succinctly. The practical advise follows.

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 Communities Directory) 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.

And in the conclusion, back to philosophy:

Again, we have a transition between two different self-supporting systems. In the slave system, prostitution is not the oldest profession -- it's the only profession: all of us demand money for what we should give 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.

Again, I'm not sure what more to add except that this is exactly right. The more we move activities, goods, and services away from the monetary realm, the better off everyone will be. Give freely, receive freely. A little bit each day.

I think I just got my inspiration for the week.