Published by Ran Prieur under Creative Commons
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https://ranprieur.com/essays/dropout.html
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Disclaimer (last updated October 2014)
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The original 2004 How to Drop Out is easily the most
popular thing I've written, and thousands of people have
found my site by putting "how to drop out of society" into
Google, but I wonder if it was worth it. The message I was
aiming for was something like "If you have the mental focus
and self-discipline to be successful in the dominant
society, but you don't like it, here's how you can change
your value system to reduce your need for money and status,
and gain some benefits of industrial civilization without
being in a position of forced obedience." Or: "Society is
your enemy, it attacks you by making you need money, and if
you are better than the average person at sacrificing
comfort for long-term goals, you can work toward a position
where you need relatively little money and have more free
time."
Instead, through great carelessness, I allowed people to
think my message was something like "If you can't even get
good grades or hold down a job, don't worry, there is a
gateway to a magical wonderland in the nearest dumpster."
Or: "If you have a weak sense of who you are and you need
an inspiring story to give your life meaning, how about
being a heroic puritan like me, whose goal is to avoid
guilt through an impossible lifestyle that has no
connection to a society that is viewed as a cartoonish
monolithic evil."
Over the years a lot of readers have been disappointed that
I'm not that guy, and at least a few have quit classes and
jobs that they should have stayed with. Even I sometimes
lost focus on what I really needed. I dabbled in
homesteading and discovered that it requires too much work
and way too much driving, while the excitement of living in
the woods fades quickly. Looking back on the popular myth
that first attracted me to primitive living, what I wanted
out there was something that is easier to find in the city
(but still difficult): close to zero obligations, and giant
blocks of time with nothing I'm supposed to be doing. I'm
still working on that.
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October 2008 Update
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"How To Drop Out" has been my most popular piece of writing
for more than four years. In that time I've bought some
land, which you can read about on my landblog, and I've
shifted my main residence to Spokane, where it's harder to
find good food in dumpsters, so my expenses are higher.
Also, I've decided I need to be even more aggressive in
dispelling the very powerful myths that are tied to the
idea of dropping out of society. So here's a new short
version of the essay, hitting the main points, adding a few
new points, and really hammering the points that people
keep missing. The original essay is below it.
1. Do not drop out. Instead, try to stop yourself from
committing suicide until you can find a job that is so
non-hellish that it does not make you suicidal, and then
stay at that job, or an even better one if you can find it,
for several decades. Grab what fun you can on the weekends,
save up money, enjoy your retirement, and you will have
lived a pretty good life.
Seriously, it's good to live differently, to take uncommon
paths, to minimize your dependence on a society gone
astray. But if I were to say, "Woo-hoo! Dropping out is so
cool! Quit your job now and hop a freight train to Bolivia,
and you will be ALIVE while everyone else is DEAD," then
that might be worse than saying nothing. Motivational
writing is a drug. If you require a motivational writer or
speaker to live differently, then as soon as that external
energy shot wears off, you will fizzle and burn out. But if
everyone is trying to discourage you from doing something,
and you do it anyway, then you have the internal motivation
to persist and succeed. So: dropping out is not fun --
better not do it.
2. "Drop out" is a bad metaphor, because it implies you are
either in or out. In reality, no one has ever been in or
out -- everyone is somewhere in between. The most pathetic
office drone still has forbidden dreams, and the most
extreme mountain man still has commerce with society. Your
mission is to find a niche, somewhere in this range, where
you're not held over a barrel by a system that gives you no
participation in power.
3. It's not about being pure. It's not about keeping your
hands clean or avoiding guilt. Imagine birds living in a
forest. Humans come and cut the forest down and build barns
and plant crops. If some birds are able to live in the
barns, or eat the crops, they don't say, "I'm not going to
live in the barn -- that's cheating," or "I'm not going to
eat the crops, because then I'm just part of the system."
Of all the species on Earth, only humans are that stupid.
Now, that doesn't mean you should accept all gifts.
Sometimes the "crops" are poisoned or the "barns" are
traps. By all means, when you are offered benefits, use
your full intelligence to see what strings are attached.
And if you reject something, reject it because you see that
it will do you more harm than good, not because you have
some silly obsession with purity. Here's a test: when
Thoreau was living at Walden Pond, he would often go into
town for dinners with his family. If you see anything wrong
with that, read this section again, or read this piece
about the myth of self-sufficiency.
4. "Out" is relative and not absolute. It is a path and not
a destination. And you walk the path not by disconnecting
from the rest of the world, but by engaging it in an
intelligent and creative way, instead of in one of the
disempowering ways that are made to look like the only
ways. The myth of the pure and total outsider is one of
those disempowering ways. It's a trick designed to make you
set an impossible goal, get discouraged, and give up.
5. Do not try to find a job doing what you love. This is my
most radical advice. There are some people in the world who
have jobs they love so much that they would do them for
free. If you become one of these people, you will probably
get there not through planning but through luck, by doing
what you love for free until somehow the money starts
coming in. But if you make an effort to combine your income
and your love, you are likely to end up compromising both,
making a poverty income by doing something you don't quite
love, or no longer love. For example, if you decide to
become a chef because you love cooking, it will probably
make you hate cooking, because cooking will become linked
in your mind to all the bullshit around the job.
What I recommend instead is to separate your money from
your love. Get the most low-stress source of income that
you can find, and then do exactly what you love for free.
It might eventually make you money or it might not. "Do
what you love and the money will follow" is mostly false.
The real rule is: "If you're doing what you love, you won't
care if you never make any money from it -- but you still
need money."
6. When you begin to get free, you will get depressed. It
works like this: When you were three years old, if your
parents weren't too bad, you knew how to play
spontaneously. Then you had to go to school, where
everything you did was required. The worst thing is that
even the fun activities, like singing songs and playing
games, were commanded under threat of punishment. So even
play got tied up in your mind with a control structure, and
severed from the life inside you. If you were "rebellious",
you preserved the life inside you by connecting it to
forbidden activities, which are usually forbidden for good
reasons, and when your rebellion ended in suffering and
failure, you figured the life inside you was not to be
trusted. If you were "obedient", you simply crushed the
life inside you almost to death.
Freedom means you're not punished for saying no. The most
fundamental freedom is the freedom to do nothing. But when
you get this freedom, after many years of activities that
were forced, nothing is all you want to do. You might start
projects that seem like the kind of thing you're supposed
to love doing, music or writing or art, and not finish
because nobody is forcing you to finish and it's not really
what you want to do. It could take months, if you're lucky,
or more likely years, before you can build up the life
inside you to an intensity where it can drive projects that
you actually enjoy and finish, and then it will take more
time before you build up enough skill that other people
recognize your actions as valuable.
7. Hard work is satanic. Primitive humans have moments of
extreme exertion, but they don't go through life in a
hurry, they don't push themselves, and even when they live
on the edge of hunger, they don't stress about it. Even
medieval serfs worked fewer hours, and at a slower pace,
than modern industrialized workers. Ivan Illich has written
that at the dawn of the industrial age, they would put a
man in a pit that gradually filled with water, and give him
a pump, and he would have to pump constantly all day to not
drown. Humans are so naturally resistant to hard work that
it took something like that to train people for industrial
jobs. Now they do it with the schooling system, and with
the religious doctrine that hard work is morally virtuous.
The opposite of hard work is quality work. Quality work may
be done quickly, but it is never pushed. It arranges itself
around the goal of doing something as well as it can be
done, and it finds its own pace.
Another opposite of hard work is playful work. Like quality
work it may be done quickly but is never pushed. But
playful work is indifferent to quality, or even to success.
When you're doing playful work, you don't care if it ends
in total failure, because you're having such a good time
that you would look forward to doing the whole job again.
8. There are no easy rules. This is a tangential point. If
you're interested in dropping out of society, you are also
likely to reject society's rules, and try to replace them
with counterculture rules or rules of your own invention.
Humans are map-making animals, and we're always trying to
make a map so good that we no longer have to look at the
land. This is a mistake, and if you reject the dominant
map, it's best to learn to not use any map at all. There is
one rule that's very simple, but not easy: observe reality
and adjust.
9. Don't rush it. Getting free is not like walking through
a magic doorway -- it's like growing a fruit tree.
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How to Drop Out
original 2004 essay
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I didn't even start dropping out until my mid-20's. Unlike
many outsiders and "radicals," I never had to go through a
stage where I realized that our whole society is insane --
I've known that as long as I can remember. But even being
already mentally outside the system, I found it extremely
challenging to get out physically. In fourth grade I wanted
to blow up the school, but I didn't know how, and even if I
had done it, it would not have meant an endless summer
vacation. In high school, inspired by Bill Kaysing's The
Robin Hood Handbook, I wanted to go live off the land in
the Idaho wilderness, but actually doing it seemed as
remote and difficult as going to the moon. (Kaysing later
wrote the book We Never Went to the Moon.) So I continued
to bide my time and obey the letter of the law, like the
guy in the Kafka parable (link). In college, when Artis the
Spoonman performed on campus and told us all to drop out, I
thought that was ridiculous -- how would I survive without
a college degree?
A few years later, with my two college degrees, after jobs
operating envelope-stuffing machinery and answering phones
in a warehouse, I was finally nudged toward dropping out by
the Bush I recession and my own nature -- that I'm
extremely frugal, love unstructured time, and would sooner
eat garbage than feign enthusiasm. More than ten years
later I'm a specialist at eating garbage -- as I draft this
I'm eating a meal I made with organic eggs from a dumpster,
and later I'll make a pie of dumpstered apples. I live on
under $2000 a year, I have no permanent residence, and
moving to the Idaho wilderness now seems like a reachable
goal -- but no longer the best idea.
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.
In my case, as I understood what I had to go through to
make money, I stopped spending it. I learned to make my
meals from scratch, and then from cheaper scratch, making
my own sourdough bread and tortillas. I stopped buying
music and books (exceptions in exceptional cases) and got
in the habit of using the library. When I crashed my car, I
kept the insurance money and walked, and then got an old
road bike. I took a road trip by hitchhiking, but it was
too physically taxing and I got sick. Like many novice
radicals, I got puritanical and pushed myself too hard, and
finally eased off. I temporarily owned another car and
lived in it for a couple months of a long road trip. In the
Clinton economic bubble, I got a job that was much easier
and better paying than my previous jobs, and built up
savings that I'm still living on.
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.
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.
The path is different for everyone. Maybe you're already
intuitive and decisive and know how to have fun, but you
don't know how to manage money or stay grounded. Maybe
you're using wealth or position or charm to keep from
having to relate to people as equals, or you're keeping
constantly busy to avoid facing something lurking in the
stillness. Whatever weaknesses keep you dependent on the
system, you have to take care of them before you break away
from the system, just as you have to learn to swim before
you escape a ship. How? By going out and back, a little
farther each time, with persistence and patience, until you
reach the skill and distance that feels right.
At the moment there's no reason to drop out "all the way"
except puritanism. I hate civilization as much as anyone,
but in these last few years before it crashes, we should
appreciate and use what it offers. Sylvan Hart (his given
name!), the 20th century mountain man who even smelted his
own metal, still traded with civilization, and once carried
a sheet of glass 50 miles through the woods so he could
have a good window. (See Harold Peterson, The Last of the
Mountain Men)
Some of the happiest people I know have dropped out only a
short distance. They still live in the city and have jobs
and pay rent, but they've done something more mentally
difficult -- and mentally liberating -- than moving to some
isolated farm. They have become permanently content with
low-status, modest-paying jobs that they don't have to
think about at home or even half the time when they're at
work. Yes, these jobs are getting scarce, but they're still
a thousand times more plentiful than the kind of job that
miserable people cannot give up longing for -- where you
make a living doing something so personally meaningful that
you would do it for free.
"Do what you love and the money will follow" is an
irresponsible lie, a denial of the deep opposition between
money and love. The real rule is: "If you're doing what you
love, you won't care if you never make a cent from it,
because that's what love means -- but you still need
money!" So what I recommend, as the second element of
dropping out, is coldly severing your love from your
income. One part of your life is to make only as much money
as you need, at a job that you can come home from feeling
energized and not drained. And then the important part of
your life is to do just exactly what you love, with zero
pressure to make money. And if you're lucky, you'll
eventually make money anyway.
But how much money do you "need"? And what if the only jobs
available are low-paying and so exhausting that you come
home and collapse into bed? These questions lead to my own
level of dropping out, which is to reduce expenses to the
point that you shift your whole identity from the
high-budget to the low-budget universe.
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. Expensive health care is especially
insidious: not only is our toxic and stressful society the
primary cause of sickness, but the enormous expenses that
have been added in the last hundred years are mostly
profit-making scams that cause and prolong sickness far
more than they heal it.
This is the low-budget universe: I ride around the city on
an old cheap road bike, in street clothes, often hauling
food I've just pulled out of a dumpster. Sometimes I'll be
on a trail where I'll invariably be passed by people on
thousand dollar bikes in racing outfits. Why are they
riding around if they're not carrying anything? And why are
they in such a hurry?
I used to be envious of those suckers: I have to ride my
bike to survive and they're so rich they do it for fun. But
what is this "fun"? I get everything -- exercise, getting
from place to place, meaningfulness, the feeling of
autonomy, and doing what's necessary to survive -- all with
the same activity: riding my bike. They should be envious
of me: my life is elegant and theirs is disjointed and
self-defeating, making money which they have to turn around
and spend on unhealthful restaurant food because they don't
have time to cook, on cars because they have too many
obligations to get around by bicycle, and then on bicycles
or health club memberships to make up for sitting in their
jobs and cars all day, and even then on medical "insurance"
(a protection racket which for most people costs more than
uninsured care -- or there would be no profit in it) for
when their fragmented poisonous life makes them sick.
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.
Probably the most valuable skill you can learn is cooking.
For a fraction of the cost of
white-sugar-white-starch-hydrogenated-oil restaurant meals,
you can make your own meals out of high quality healthful
ingredients, and if you're a good cook, they'll taste good.
I eat better than anyone I know on $100 a month: butter,
nuts, dates, whole wheat flour, brown rice, olive oil, all
organic, and bee pollen for extra vitamins. From natural
food store dumpsters I get better bread, produce, meat, and
eggs than Safeway even sells, but if this is impossible in
your city, or you'd just prefer not to, you can still eat
beautifully on $200.
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.
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.
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. If the
"owners" come, they'll probably just ask you to leave, and
in some places there are still archaic laws from
compassionate times, making it legally difficult for them
to evict you.
I squatted a shed for two weeks in December 2002 and if
necessary I'll do it again. Also I have enough money saved
to buy cheap land -- the project is just too big for me to
do alone. Also I'm slowly learning wilderness survival --
which is iffy since wilderness itself is not surviving. But
I spend most of my time surfing housesits and staying with
friends and family.
To drop out is to become who you are. Do not feel guilty
about using strengths and advantages that others do not
have. That guilt is a holdover from the world of selfish
competition, where your "success" means the failure or
deprivation of someone else. In the dropout universe, your
freedom feeds the freedom of others -- it's as if we've all
been tied up, and the most agile and loosely tied people
get out first, and then help the rest.
But what if they don't? What about people who are outside
the system but still hyper-selfish? These people are not
what I call "dropouts" but what I call "idiots." The view
of this world as a war of all against all, where your
purpose in life is to accumulate "wealth," zero-sum
advantages and scarce resources for an exclusive "self," is
the view of the elite. The only reason to think that way is
if you are one of the handful of people in a position to
win. For everyone else, the value system that makes sense
is that you are here to help, to serve the greatest good
that you can perceive. Yet in America, rich and poor alike
are raised with robber baron consciousness, to turn us
against each other, to keep us exploiting those below us
instead of resisting our own exploiters, to keep all the
arrows going the right way in the life-depleting machine.
The frugality that I'm talking about is the opposite of
ungenerosity, because it frees us from a scarcity-based
system in which we cannot afford to be generous. For all
our lives we've been trained as prostitutes, demanding
money in exchange for services that we should be giving
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.
For strategy I look not to political movements like revolts
or strikes or radical parties, but to cultural movements
like gay liberation or feminism or pagan spirituality.
First define a clearly understood identity, then proudly
claim that identity, then build public acceptance through
entertainment and by each of us earning the support of
friends and family outside the movement. I'm envious of gay
people -- I've spent years mastering written language just
to halfway explain myself, and all they have to say is "I'm
gay."
If we had a word, what would it be? In a recent family bulk
Christmas mailing, I was "living the bohemian lifestyle,"
but I don't go to poetry readings or hang out in coffee
shops. "Anarchist" smacks of ideology, of people who bicker
endlessly about abstract theory, although maybe we could
adopt an insulting term used by theory anarchists, and call
ourselves "lifestyle anarchists." "Voluntary simplicity" is
too tame and politically correct, suggesting aging yuppies
trying to save the world by reducing households to one car
-- plus the life I advocate is not at all simple, just
unstressful. I'm too politically ambitious and
forward-looking to be a hobo or a tramp. In Eastern
tradition I could be respected as some kind of monk or holy
man, but I don't want to get "enlightened" -- I want to
make the whole world wild and free.
The word I've been using, "dropout," is a good start but it
has the same deep flaw as "primitive": it places our
dominating, parasitic, and temporary civilization in the
fixed center. We've got it inside out. On the physical
plane, nature is the center that holds, and "mainstream"
society is the falling apart, the irresponsible
life-wasting deviance. What I'm trying to do -- and what
we're all going to have to do in the next few decades if we
survive at all -- is drop back in.
