The Moneyless Man (16 page)

The question for the outdoor dweller is how to deal with the little roommates you’ll undoubtedly attract. Rats and mice will be your chief visitors, though an infestation of cockroaches can play havoc. These three species – especially cockroaches – could probably survive almost anything, but between rats and mice, mice
are the more pleasant. They’re small, they’re terrified of humans, and their capacity for damage is pretty limited. I wasn’t too bothered when one moved into my trailer in mid-February. She had her place in the closet (I never actually ascertained my mouse’s sex but the mess it made reminded me of a few of my ex-girlfriends, so I joked that it was female), she kept pretty much to herself, and she didn’t give me grief for staying up too late at night.

However, at the beginning of spring, she decided that she wanted to build herself a nest. And she chose to do her building at three o’clock in the morning. She’d nibble the insulation out of the wall, drag plastic bags and newspapers down from the top of the closet and generally cause a fair amount of disturbance. In my turn, I’d spend half the next day boarding up the hole she had made, which from her perspective was equally inconsiderate. Without fail, the result was a night of rodent rage; the pocket-sized monster would spend the best part of four hours undoing my handiwork by digging another hole just above it. If we’d continued these tit-for-tat revenge attacks indefinitely, the whole wall would have become a series of little boards. So, after my second attempt to shore up her private entry to my house, I conceded defeat and effectively cut her a set of keys.

If you live with people who party hard at that time of the night, you can get up, join them and have some fun. Not the case here, unfortunately. After a few weeks in which I got very little sleep, the creature started to drive me crazy. I was happy to co-exist peacefully, but this wasn’t peaceful. The final straw came when she chewed into the bag of rye grain I’d spent a day working for. The sack was too big for the press in the trailer and I hadn’t then found a large enough metal container to protect it. Every day, my mouse would make a new hole, and once inside she left her droppings everywhere.

For most people, the solution would have been simple. Get some traps and some poison, lay them down, and let time sort the
problem. But even if I could have bought either, my vegan beliefs meant I didn’t want to. I didn’t want the mouse eating my hard-earned rations, but neither did I think executing her for theft was a fair punishment for her ‘crime’. Those who campaign for greater animal rights say almost everyone acts ‘speciesist’ sometimes, in the same way some people are sexist or racist. If a store owner finds someone stealing a bottle of wine, and the thief doesn’t manage to bolt through the door, the store owner can either phone the police or tell the thief to get the hell out and never return. If it’s a one-off, the store owner might leave it at that; if the problem persists, they might invest in CCTV to dissuade other potential thieves. However, if a non-human animal, such as a mouse, steals a few grains of rye, we impose the death penalty, which I personally feel is a bit harsh. They’re just trying to survive in a land in which, because humans have manipulated and shaped it, little wild food remains. You could argue that we’ve stolen their food and they’re merely taking it back.

How could I dissuade the mouse from soiling my food? I hid every bit I could and made sure I left no cooked food lying around after dinner. This saved the food but it didn’t stop her nightly nest-making waking me up. I tried every possible way to encourage the little thing to move out. A friend suggested I rammed cloth into the holes to plug them up and sprayed the material with peppermint water; mice apparently hate its smell. But nothing worked. I briefly questioned my vegan belief system. And if I hadn’t had such a short haircut I’d have torn half of it out by April. After two months, lack of sleep was starting to take its toll. Between living the slow life, writing and talking about it, volunteering, cycling, organizing Freeskilling sessions and administering the Freeconomy Community website and its global network of local groups, life was really busy. Waking up at three every morning didn’t help.

Just as I felt I couldn’t take it any longer, the late spring sunshine came out in full force and the higher temperatures persuaded my unwanted guest to move outdoors. In the end, the answer was simply patience. I no longer had to wash the surfaces the mouse walked and peed on every day. Peace and tranquility returned.

The longer days and increased sunshine of spring gave me more solar energy to play with. Over the winter, I’d known I was receiving lots of emails about my experiment, but I couldn’t store enough power in my battery to read or respond to most of them. This compounded the slight feelings of isolation I had around the time I broke up with Claire.

As well as charging my battery, I think the sunshine re-energized me. For the first time in my life I was living almost entirely outdoors. By April, I’d developed a tan I normally wouldn’t have built up until at least the middle of June. With my body and battery brimming with more energy than ever, I decided to dispel my feelings of loneliness and try to locate fellow moneyless humans out there in the world. As I was pretty sure no one else was doing it locally, I turned to the internet.

Most people who talked to me about my life thought I was the only person in the world living completely without money. I was (as far as I knew) the only person doing it in the UK, but by no means the only person living this way in contemporary society. Compared to two others that I became aware of, I was a rookie. Heidemarie Schwermer, the sixty-seven-year-old German author of
Das Sterntalerexperiment – Mein Leben ohne Geld
(‘The Sterntaler Experiment – My life without money’), has being living almost completely without money for thirteen years. (She keeps back a few Euros from her pension each month for train fares; the rest she gives away.) In a movie about her experiences,
Living without Money
, she explains how she worked for many years as a teacher and psychotherapist in Dortmund. Like most people, she spent most of her time earning money to buy the things she needed – and also things she didn’t really need. As a psychotherapist, she met many people who were depressed and frustrated, over-worked and with very little spare time. Among the unemployed and poor she often found those who thought themselves worthless. I had heard something of Heidemarie before I started my year, through Markus, a friend of mine who spoke German. At the time, her writing was all in her native language, so I wasn’t able to explore her thinking and experiences unless Markus translated. However, as the media has become more intrigued by the concept of a moneyless society, she has tried harder to communicate with the English-speaking world.

Heidemarie started an exchange circle, a
Tauschring
, through which people with little or no money could trade objects and favors (
Gib und Nimm
; ‘Give and take’). Through the exchange circle, people came in contact with each other in a new way. They felt useful and worthwhile and appreciated the social aspect of their contact. After a while, Heidemarie decided on an experiment. She gave up her apartment, donated her possessions to friends and started a new life based on exchanging favors without using money. At the start, she stayed with friends and acquaintances, took care of their houses when they were away on vacation or traveling, and in return received food and a place to live. Over the years, she has inspired exchange circles across Germany. The only people she hasn’t convinced are the managers of the national train service, which is why she keeps some money for fares. I wondered why she didn’t hitchhike, but I suppose that’s much easier for a thirty-year-old guy than for an elderly woman. Heidemarie’s goal was simply to create a ‘greater awareness of the relationship to money and consumption’. And while she wasn’t living completely without money, her exploits were enough to inspire many to use it less and less in their everyday lives.

Another person who has shot into the limelight, as a result of a similar surge of interest in moneyless living, is Daniel Suelo, a forty-eight-year-old American guy from Moab, Utah, who has been living totally without money since 2000. That put my minuscule year into proper perspective. I hadn’t heard of Daniel before I started, but my research in April made me aware of his blog, which seemed hugely over-looked, given how long he had been living like that. In the middle of my year, when media interest was, thankfully, taking a rest, the well-known American magazine
Details
ran a story on this ‘caveman’, from which MSN put the story on their homepage. Interest in Daniel went from almost zero (just like his bank balance) to (unlike his bank balance) millions of people overnight. His blog, in a similar
manner to mine, became a forum for intense debate. Cynics, without taking a moment to understand his motives, felt it their duty to tell him what a low-life he was. Who would have thought that living in a cave, and having a zero carbon footprint in a world whose climate is changing rapidly, would be such a social crime?

I want to share some of Daniel’s thoughts with you, to give you a flavor of his views. They aren’t necessarily my views; although I agree with much of what he says, I don’t by any means concur with it all. I thought it would be helpful to give you another perspective on why people like Daniel, Heidemarie, and I see living without debt, credit and little bits of paper as crucial to our ability to survive and thrive on our planet.

Suelo on ‘ownership and possession’

A moneyless existence ... is not a matter of giving up possessions, because there is nothing to give up, really. Nobody owns anything, so it is simply a matter of realizing that you already own nothing. Then, when you lose something and you realize you never owned it in the first place, there is no sense of loss. And when somebody asks you for something, you freely give it to them because it really isn’t yours to give anyway. Then have faith that everything comes as you need it in the moment.