from home, even if for most workers that is more an occasional glitch in their office-based lives than a regular occurrence. More than that, the internet has lowered the barrier for working alone or in small groups, particularly in the knowledge industries (remember Asimov’s creative elite?). Anyone with a bit of nous and a smartphone can set up a broadcasting operation from the living room (YouTube), an online shop from the spare bedroom (eBay) or a record company from the attic (SoundCloud). No premises, no fixed hours, no rules. You might not make much money with any of the above examples, but who needs money? Mark ‘Moneyless Man’ Boyle does not have a job because he lives, as the name suggests, without money. He uses the internet to find free stuff (such as the campervan he lives in), grows and forages for food, and makes his own soap and toothpaste. He cooks on a homemade outdoor stove, burns wood for heat and has acquired a solar panel for his laptop, on which he pens books, blogs and manifestos – about living without money. It’s an extreme approach to getting a longer weekend, but Boyle isn’t the first person to quit the rat race and try living without a job. Other adherents of a truly cashless society are Daniel Suelo, who stopped using money in 2000, Heidemarie Schwermer (1996) and Tomi Astikainen (2009). And he won’t be the last; from Silicon Valley to the Great Barrier Reef a trend is gathering pace. People are slowly relinquishing their possessions. In a quiet way, and possibly without realising it, you’re one of them. Calm down. No one has drained your bank account. Your suitcase will probably be on the carousel at your destination, full of the same
things you stuffed into it before heading to the airport. And, yes, sadly you still have to go to work. But, while those moneyless men are a small and unusual group of people, they are also a useful barometric indicator of the pendulum beginning to swing away from corporations and back towards individuals. Successful businesspeople are beginning to turn their backs on the diminishing material returns to be had from climbing coporate ladders and beginning to reach instead for goals of fulfilment and happiness. As we outsource production and turn our minds to knowledge
conomy – the idea of giving away things you don’t want (like that campervan in the back yard) is gaining traction. And the next step could well be the direct (and untaxable) exchange of services and products. Before the universal exchange of money, the blacksmith would shoe the baker’s horse for a few loaves of bread and a bag of flour. Who says that can’t happen again? Not Matt Monohan, a Silicon Valley start-up CEO who has renounced most of his possessions and started evangelising a lifestyle of reciprocal benefit. He sold his flat and car, preferring to find ad hoc solutions to his needs. He has happily traded spending his money on possessions for a life of free-spirited travel, opportunity and experience. He isn’t living without money, but the drift away from ownership is significant because it represents a much more realistic vision of how life and work – and the oft-cited balance between the two – might look in the future. For now, we are still working too hard. We increasingly work in knowledge industries where the tasks have a more elastic nature than, say, manufacturing. We are still addicted to an ultimately unfulfilling über-boom in consumerism. But we are seeking help – never have Workaholics Anonymous meetings been more popular. If the first step towards helping ourselves work less is admitting we have a problem, we can seek solace in that. We are relinquishing our possessions, slowly but definitely. The pendulum seems to hang at the top of its arc, but if we can get over our fear of abandoning a model that has been in place since the Industrial Revolution and embrace a new one based on flexible hours, multiple roles and the return of the meritocracy, it’ll swing into its inevitable glide towards a happier future.
Money isn’t going to disappear, but the idea of possession is already starting to wane industries, so our love affair with ownership begins to fade. Money isn’t going to disappear, but the idea of possession is already starting to wane. The decline of physical media for storing music and films is well documented. CDs, tapes and records have all but been usurped by computer files. And rather than own those files, people have started to rent access to them via a monthly subscription to a streaming service. The best known is Spotify. The same is happening to video as services such as iTunes and Netflix allow members to rent films and TV shows as temporary downloads. None of this is new, or surprising. But look further and you will see other signs that we are becoming happier with frugality. Home swap holidays are a good example. Free-
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Open skies / December 2013