Content warning: suicide
In the first year of the twenty-first century, a man standing by a highway in the middle of America pulled from his pocket his life savings – thirty dollars – laid it inside a phone booth, and walked away. He was thirty-nine years old, came from a good family, and had been to college. He was not mentally ill, nor an addict. His decision appears to be an act of free will by a competent adult.
In the twelve years since, as the Dow Jones skyrocketed to its all-time high, Daniel Suelo has not earned, received or spent a single dollar. In an era when anyone who could sign his name could qualify for a mortgage, Suelo did not apply for loans or write IOUs. He didn’t even barter. As the public debt soared to eight, ten, finally thirteen trillion dollars, he did not pay taxes, or accept food stamps, welfare, or any other form of government handout.
Instead, he set up house in caves in the Utah canyonlands, where he forages mulberries and wild onions, scavenges roadkill and wild squirrels, pulls expired groceries from dumpsters, and is often fed by friends and strangers. “My philosophy is to use what is freely given or discarded & what is already present & already running,” he writes. While the rest of us grapple with tax deductions, variable-rate mortgages, retirement plans, and money-market accounts, Suelo no longer holds so much as an identification card.
Yet the man who sleeps under bridges and prospects in trash cans is not a typical hobo. He does not panhandle, and he often works – declining payment for his efforts. While he is driven by spiritual beliefs and longings, he is not a monk, nor is he associated with any church. And although he lives in a cave, he is not a hermit: he is relentlessly social, remains close with friends and family, and engages in discussions with strangers via the website he maintains from the public library. He has crisscrossed the West by bicycle, hopped freight trains, hitched through nearly every state in the union, hauled nets on a Bering Sea trawler, harvested mussels and kelp from Pacific beaches, spearfished salmon in Alaska streams, and braved three months of storms atop an ancient hemlock tree.
“I know it is possible to live without money,” Suelo declares. “Abundantly.”
So begins The Man Who Quit Money by Mark Sundeen, the story of an exceptional man who not only has managed to live without money, but who is also, by all accounts (OK, I’ve only seen this book and a few entries on the blog he wrote), but by accounts that I find very believable, a man who is much happier living that way.
I like money. I first read this biography a few years after it was published in 2012 and, while I enjoyed the book, I didn’t even consider that the book would convince me to copy Suelo’s lifestyle. While it works for him, I still think that I like having money around, like (almost) everybody. In fact, when I decided to review this book, I was staying in a nice, comfortable hotel room on the opposite side of the USA from where I live, and one of my first thoughts was that the only reason I get this cozy place is because I’m willing to trade money for it.
But when I sat in my comfortable hotel room, it was late February 2022, and there were a few current events that had brought Suelo’s life back to mind. I was motivated to review this book by the response to the Canadian truckers. I was motivated by Russian travelers (with no particular association other than their nationality to invading Ukraine) who couldn’t get their money and couldn’t get out of whatever country they were in at the time. Hopefully, by the time this review appears online, we’ll be in a pause of the people-being-separated-from-their-money events, but this genie is not likely going back in the bottle. Suddenly, I’m not sure any runway of money or even fuck-you money, if you can get it, is all that secure.
This is somewhat different from the book’s story about choosing to “quit money”. Mostly, I will review the book on its own terms, but I will return at the end to the question, “What if money quits me?” Other answers have been proposed, but I haven’t seen anyone else look at the one suggested by Suelo’s life.
I admit that I expect the majority of people would look at a story of a man living mostly outdoors, in a cave, and think something like “What are you talking about? This is not a solution? This is as horrible as I ever imagined losing money would be.” To which, I would reply that this solution is not for you, but the story is interesting anyway, and I think there’s a minority bigger than you think (maybe 15-20%) that see this as possibly one of the least bad options in a bad situation, and I’m in that minority.
This section is the majority of my review. I think the best way to understand how Suelo lives is to understand his attitude, and to understand his attitude, one must understand his life.
Suelo grew up with strong Evangelical, biblical literalist parents in a group called the Plymouth Brethren. A couple of things happened in his youth that influenced his attitudes at the time and sent him towards the direction he ended up going.
First, when he was a child in 1969 – eight years old by my math (plus or minus 1 for rounding) – he saw a hippie-ish guy confront a couple that were showing up to church in a Cadillac wearing fur coats. “Is this what Jesus taught? Are you serving God – or money?” As a kid looking at this, he couldn’t get it out of his mind that the hippie looked more like the Jesus being described to him than the churchgoers did – a life of poverty.
Then, as a teenager, he went to Bolivia with a volunteer group that administered vaccines. Suelo’s parents had instilled in him, in addition to Christianity, some level of American exceptionalism, which did not match what he saw at all. Bolivia, at least at this time, in the 70s, was super poor. (I don’t know to what extent it still is.) There were kids with bloated bellies – that level of poor. But everyone was generous. Everywhere he went, they made sure he gets fed, despite their own risk of hunger. Back home three days later, he got yelled at for crossing some rich guy’s lawn. In Bolivia, he saw people living very good lives (in the sense of good as opposed to evil), compared to the lives in America.
When he went to college, he started out going to a school near his parents in Western Colorado, but then decided to transfer to the University of Colorado in Boulder. At this point, I should point out that his parents are of the insular Evangelical type: they believe in avoiding becoming part of the larger world because it can corrupt you. And of course, Boulder is the opposite of staying in an Evangelical bubble, but Suelo thought that if his beliefs were true, they would stand up to going to Boulder.
While in Boulder, he developed this eclectic group of mostly Christian friends that liked to talk about comparative religion. He read the Tao Te Ching, and it helped bring him to this theory of the Holy Spirit in the feminine side of God. He gave talks to Evangelical groups, and even had Pastors who say that they’ve thought of his theory themselves.
There’s another thing that came up too in Boulder – he’s gay. Initially, he wasn’t bothered that he didn’t really feel an attraction to any of the women that he knew. Not being married yet, sexual attraction would have been a temptation anyway. But eventually, he came to realize that he did have an attraction to men during his time, and he wasn’t sure what to think about it.
After college, he joined the Peace Corps and they sent him to Ecuador.
In Ecuador, he was again disappointed by a rich Christian not behaving as the Christ in the bible seemed to. He went to see a Christian missionary there, expecting to see some guy in a humble shack. Instead, the missionary lived in this big, suburban house with a whole bunch of cattle, and his missionary thing was to give people a better life by teaching people to be partners in his cattle business. I think I can understand what the missionary was thinking, but to Suelo, the people in the missionary cattle ranch were living less like Christ than the other people around. (Also, Suelo was and is much more of an environmentalist than I am.)
In any case, his Peace Corps assignment was to be a “Health Extentionist”. I have some vague idea what the Peace Corps might have meant by that, but the people he meets in South America don’t seem to. While he showed up with a card that identified him as a Health Extentionist and knew enough Spanish to translate the term, the locals seemed to understand, “Doctor” when he said that and came to him with their medical issues, expecting him to treat them.
Initially, he resisted, but eventually just gave up and went with it. He went into Quito and got antibiotics, aspirin, acetaminophen, Benadryl, and epinephrine, and a book, Donde No Hay Doctor, about how to administer care when there’s no doctor for miles. He sent “a few serious cases” as the book calls it, to the closest clinic (and raised $200 from a congregation in Boulder for a woman’s surgery), but he did a lot himself, including delivering three healthy babies there.
For some reason, Suelo found the Peace Corps disillusioning. I don’t quite understand why – he seems to have done a lot of good – so I’ll quote him in a letter from his time there: “I feel very strongly, now more than ever, that any influence I have on these people should be on the individual level – helping and sharing knowledge on a one-on-one level, with my life, not with set programs.”
In Ecuador, Suelo sent a letter to his parents telling them he’s gay. His parents, upon receiving the letter (heavily damaged in the mail but not the part where he says he’s gay), told the Peace Corps that Suelo was mentally ill and needed to go home. The Peace Corps sent Suelo a message: “Urgent. Call parents.” He went to Quito and called his parents, and then the Peace Corps let him go back to work. Apparently, it’s not that uncommon for Peace Corps parents to think their kids are going insane abroad, and this is how the Peace Corps deals with it.
Also, during this time, his parents started having their own problems in their church, and ended up backing out of the Plymouth Brethren, although they remained Evangelical biblical literalists.
All these things were bringing Suelo to think that the thing he had believed in were meaningless, when, after he accidentally eats a bunch of poison berries, he had what was basically a really horrifying bad trip, where he felt everything was in pain, he was losing his mind, and was going to die. He recovered, but when he smoked marijuana a few days later, it was even worse.
I ended up in the fetal position – twitching, convulsions…I was thinking I might die in this room by myself, in Ecuador, thinking about my family. What a stupid way to die.… I had this vision of a cross. I’m on the equator, this is where the tectonic plates come together, I’m at the center of the cross. Jesus on a cross was in my vision. I was saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
As Sundeen puts it: “Finally he had tapped into the eternal - but it wasn’t joy and forgiveness. It was misery and suffering. It wasn’t heaven, it was hell.” These feelings would stick with him for years. It was like a revelation, an epiphany, except that usually we use that word for good things.
After the Peace Corps, he got a job at a homeless shelter in Denver. The homeless were treated horribly and disrespectfully in the shelter. There’s one scene in the book that is out of Oliver Twist, as Sundeen puts it. One of the homeless asked the manager for a carton of milk, and the shelter manager tore into him. “This milk is for the babies! And you’re so damn selfish that you’d drink all if we let you. The answer is no. You should be ashamed for even asking.” (emphasis in original)
The clients – the people that stay at the shelter – had chores they were required to do. Suelo was supposed to lock the clients in until the chores were done. Understandably, he found this unsafe, undignified, and not how to treat people. He decided not to do it and to resign. Typing up a resignation letter, he realized that if he gave it to the manager, she would just shred it or something. Instead, like Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, he posted the letter all over the shelter.
Suddenly, he was a hero (and kept his job). Everybody liked him. It triggered an investigation, and they actually found that the manager was running this sort of milk ring – she’d been selling milk belonging to the shelter for her own personal money. For a little bit, it seemed great, but then the investigation found unacceptable radiation levels in the shelter and the whole place got shut down. So it went from everyone loved him to everyone hated him, and he was fired with all the other staff and had to look for another job. That was his second helping profession job.
The third was for Traveler’s Aid, helping stranded clients get assistance with bus tickets, and the like. Clients would come in that needed help to get out of town, and he would try to see if they could be approved for assistance, but there was a disconnect. The organization needed clients to have a place to stay and at least potential employment in their destination (otherwise they would be just paying people to move around the country), but people with existing jobs and homes didn’t usually need help. He learned to fudge the paperwork somewhat, and no one there seemed to care as long as there was some answer in the right blanks.
The book tells one story, where a client was looking for a bus ticket from Denver to Phoenix, and the client had called a drywall outfit there that had told him they were always looking for workers. Suelo called the place to verify the offer of employment. But the call, by letting the boss know it involved a charity case, made the boss lose interest – he didn’t want to hire bums, they don’t work out. Suelo goes away and tears up the paperwork, gives him bus fare from his own money, and tells the client that he’s approved.
That was his third helping profession job.
There’s another thing. Doing this work 8 hours a day, he had come to hate the homeless. He didn’t want anything to do with them at the end of the day. And with this on top of everything else, by this time, he was only sleeping an hour to an hour and a half a day, and felt terrible. At this point, it was 1991. He was about 30 years old. He took his car into the mountains and tried to drive off a cliff. The car went down some, but it got hung up before it really got over the cliff. Suelo’s survival instinct came in as he was passing in and out of consciousness. He climbed up to the road and was rescued and treated.
Suelo’s suicide attempt made it clear to his friends and family that he needed help. About a year and a half later, he took up a friends’ offer to move to Moab, Utah. Moab was and is a good fit for someone with his views. Moab, at this point in time, was still recovering from having been a busted Uranium boom town and just starting to find its new identity as a tourist town. There were a lot of hippie-ish types and adventure guides – happy to be out there in the scenery.
He worked odd jobs and met a lot of similarly-minded people (including Sundeen, his eventual biographer). Eventually, he got another helping profession job at a women’s shelter as the homeless coordinator. This job finally worked (!), although it was part time and he still needed to get odd jobs from time to time.
It just so happened that at the same time as getting the women’s shelter job, he decided to move into a cave for the first time – with all the river guides and hippies, it was kind of chic in Moab to live on the land, and there was a gap between when he had to move out of where he lived and a house-sitting arrangement he had coming up. This made him the “homeless homeless coordinator” at the women’s shelter. He loved that title and used his status for credibility with clients, breaking the hierarchy between clients and staff that he saw in his previous jobs.
He was on a wide variety of psych meds, and also changed his treatment. Talking to a naturopath doctor he knows, he slowly went off all of that and onto St. John’s Wort. This is definitely not medical advice – I’m not a doctor, I’m just sending this to a doctor’s blog, but it worked for Suelo.
Even more importantly, the doctor diagnosed him with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, and put him on antifungals and digestive enzymes, suspecting a pathogen from his time in Ecuador. It was a huge difference, suddenly he had lots of energy to travel around in the canyons.
Philosophically, he got back into the passages in the bible that fit with what his was doing, like “Do you not worry about your life – what you will eat or drink, or about your body – what you will wear. Is life not more important than food? Or the body more important than clothes? Look at the birds of the air. They do not sow or reap or store away in barns. And yet your heavenly father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?” (Matthew 6:25-27) It was a breakthrough – just accept what comes.
Then something came up. Two women he knew invited him to go to Alaska with them. Initially, he didn’t want to do it, but he thought about all this stuff he’d been reading and decided he should go along with it – that whatever opportunities present themselves should be taken. So he gave notice at the women’s clinic and they headed off to Alaska. I will describe this trip in a lot of detail, because it was on this trip in 1997 that Suelo became convinced that he could live without money: that the Lord/nature/circumstances will provide. The Lord/nature/circumstance also almost killed him on the trip, which doesn’t seem to bother Suelo as much it as does me.
The first case of providence: in driving up there, a leaf broke spring in their car, and when they pulled into a restaurant, there was a guy right there in the restaurant that could fix it. Later, they were driving down the road and realized they were going to run out of gas before they got to the next town. So, just hoping to find something, they turned off on some road. They found a house – and not only did they have gas there – they got invited in for fresh cookies.
In Alaska, the group split up. Suelo got a job on a small boat slinging fish – throwing newly caught fish to shore. He hated it, so after one month, he quit and decided to head out into the wilderness. As part of his whole nature/the Lord/whatever will provide he left half his food on a picnic table at the trailhead. Rather quickly, he had only cooking oil left from his packed food, was eating mostly berries, and getting really tired of it.
Then he met another guy, a young man named Ander from Spain, who was doing the same thing, trying to live off the land and also happy to find someone that spoke Spanish. What are the odds so far away from the Spanish-speaking world? And the guy speaks the only foreign language Suelo knows. They stayed together and learned to spear salmon and (very providentially again) found an abandoned backpack with food.
Eventually, they came to a river formed by the runoff from a glacier. For whatever reason, these two decided they were going to go across it:
The river was too deep and fast to wade across. As they explored upstream, they found that in the transition zone between glacier and river, shallow water poured over a series of ice ledges. The men had no crampons or climbing gear, nor any experience on glaciers, but they decided they could cross. They waded across a cold channel and climbed onto the slick glacier, their toes instantly numb as the boots filled with ice water. The glacier was smooth and undulating, with a series of rivulets and pools where the runoff swept across. They took long steps over the cold channels. But then they reached a wider rivulet. The crystal water was so clear that Suelo couldn’t tell how deep it was. Maybe two feet. Maybe six? The only choice was to jump. Suelo gathered his courage and with a few baby steps leaped across the gap, splatting on the ice on the other side but sliding chest-deep into the freezing pool. The cold water knocked the wind from his lungs. His clothes and backpack were soaked, adding another fifteen pounds to the load, and he clawed his way up and out onto the ice. Now Ander made the same jump, and was submerged over his head into the basin before Suelo pulled him out. Surging with adrenaline and panic, the men darted across the ice field, both dunking a few more times, before scrambling up the banks to dry ground – wet, shivering, and scared.
They built a fire to dry themselves and dry their clothes, but as soon as the flames flickered, the clouds darkened and rain began to fall. Suelo didn’t see any chance of getting dry. They were too cold to cross the river back to where they started.… Both men understood that if they didn’t do something soon, they could freeze to death.
This is not yet the almost dying I was referring to.
Ander went off to look for shelter and, consistent with the plot pattern so far, found an empty cabin. They went into the cabin. It had firewood, and they warmed up and recovered. After a few days, the rains let up, but when they headed out, the owner of the cabin flew over so low they could hear him cussing at them to leave. (Apparently, there’s no place to land by the cabin.) He appeared to have a gun. It was basically “get off my lawn” again, but with bigger stakes. The men hid into the cabin until the plane went away, wrote a note thanking the owner, apologizing for the trespass, but noting that it saved their lives.
They wanted to go back where they came from, but the rains had swollen the river and made the crossing that was bad before completely impossible. Exploring the river, they found a cable connected to a boat on the other side, but had no way to retrieve the boat. Then tried to cross by moving hand over hand along the cable, but it dug into their hands. They both fell off back into the water and could only scramble back onshore on the same side they came from, now freezing and cold again and as desperate as they ever were.
At this time, Suelo was 37 and Ander was 20. Suelo’s paternal instinct kicked in, and he told Ander to stay there and he would find help. He went back to where they crossed before and tried the impossible – crossing it there. He was getting pulled in, drowned in the water.
Your pack or your life, he thought. And in an instant he slipped his shoulders from the straps and let the current take the pack. Free of the load, Suelo scratched his way onto the ice and lay there panting. Surely, he must be almost across. But he wasn’t. He was less than halfway, perched on a block of ice in the middle of the river.
Gasping there on his knees, Suelo dropped his head to the ice and began bawling. The show of confidence he’d made for Ander was gone. He was cold and shivering and scared. Upstream, the glacier appeared a living beast, a dragon opening its jaws to consume him. He was going to die there.
But then something occurred to him as he lay there sobbing in a heap. I have finally, literally, reached the point of having no possessions, no attachments, no relationships. I have nothing but the clothes on my back. I have hit bottom. It is just me and Nature. This is the point I have been trying to reach all along. And with that realization, a burst of energy shot through his veins. I am alive. All those years of wondering whether or not life was worth living, of thinking that God had condemned humans to living Hell - that was nonsense. I want to live! The desire was new and exotic, and filled him with power.
Suelo stood. He faced the ice dragon.
“Fuck you, glacier!” he called.
Abandoning his plan of pool-hopping across the ice, Suelo dove head-first into the river and swam. The current swept him quickly downriver as he kicked his boots and crawled with numb hands. Suddenly, though, his mittened hand scraped rock. Then another rock. He opened his eyes and saw an alder bush. He hoisted himself by a branch and wormed onto the shore, panting, weeping, overjoyed. (italics in original)
From there, he went to where a bunch of RVers were camped – yelling, trying to get help, and mostly people looked at him scared and didn’t do anything. Finally, someone offered him a ride to the inn in town. Behind the counter at the inn was the owner of the cabin in the woods – the man with a gun in the airplane.
Before Suelo could speak, the man rose in anger.
“You stupid idiot,” cried the man. “That’s private property. You have no right being over there.”
Suelo slunk back and fell into a chair like a boy in the principal’s office.
“All you dipshits from the Lower Forty-eight,” lectured the man. “You come up to Alaska for some dickhead adventure and expect us to bail you out when you get in trouble.”
Suelo watched the angry lips move but heard nothing. He shriveled. Just minutes before, he’d slain the dragon, swimming the river to save his life, and now he felt like a runt. He recalled his moment of hitting absolute bottom on that hunk of ice. This was worse. In fact, this was worse than death. Would he never put an end to that nagging childhood feeling of being the weakest? Well, if could stand up to the glacier, he could stand up to this guy.
He lifted his trembling body out of the chair. He walked resolutely toward the man. He inched close enough to smell him, and to drip water onto the wooden counter between them.
“I don’t care what you think of me,” Suelo said. “I need help. I’ve got hypothermia and my friend is dying across the river. Whatever you think, put it aside and help me.”
Something clicked. The man called his wife to fetch some food and dry clothes. He called a geologist he knew who could operate the cable car. He took Suelo back to the river, and they sent a package of food across the cable with a note saying to hang tight, that help was on the way.
And so eventually, they rescued Ander. Everybody was safe and warm and dry.
Next, Suelo decided to hitchhike back home. He only had $50 and decided to see how much he could get away with not spending. When he got back, he had $45, and the $5 that he spent was on stuff he didn’t really need to spend on: candy bars and coffee. So there you go – he hitchhiked from Alaska back to Utah – it cost him $5 and he didn’t really need to spend the $5. He was convinced that he could live without money.
But there was a problem: he was actually in debt, and there is no honor in quitting money while in debt. He had a student loan. In fact, he hadn’t really been that good at making payments on it. And his parents were co-signers of the loan.
He went back to working at the women’s shelter. His previous pattern had been to get a place to stay in town and, at some point give up on it and decide to move onto the public land. This time, he immediately went into the caves, and did everything he could to pay off the loan, and in one year he had paid it off.
So he believed that he could quit money, but he was still not ready. He was aware of Sadhus in India that live without money in a sort of holy noble beggar tradition that no longer exists in Christianity. He was thinking that maybe he should go seek their guidance, when, not of his own accord, but because a friend of his wanted to go to India, he ended up getting an offer to go to India.
The plan was that they were both going to go to Thailand, because it’s in the area and a nice place to go, and, then, from Thailand, they were to go to India. His friend got sick and couldn’t go. He decided to go to Thailand and arranged to meet up with his friend there in a month.
He had a monastery in mind that he wanted to see in Thailand. When he went to look for it, he got completely lost. Finally, he gave up, but was still lost and couldn’t even get back to where he was staying. While he was walking around lost, this monk came out of a hidden door in the wall near him to check on what he was doing, and it turned out Suelo was right in front of the monastery he was looking for. So once again, the Lord/nature/circumstances/whatever put what he needed right in front of him.
The monk signed his name on a leaf, told him to come back the next morning (insanely early, at 5:00) and Suelo began daily meditation training through a bunch of uncomfortable and difficult assignments. Eventually, he was supposed to go without sleep and track every time he nodded off. Quoting Suelo:
I was getting so tired, and sick of it. This is so much effort. It’s just not natural. I was trying to tabulate in the Lotus position, half the night or more. Finally I just took the scrap of paper and slid it aside. I couldn’t sit in lotus anymore. The hell with it all. I got out of Lotus and slumped, head on my knee.
And suddenly everything went silent. Complete bliss. Everything turned blank and blue. Except I saw a person with his head on his knee. Who is that? Is it me, or the Buddha? I didn’t know who it was. Complete silence. Blue light. No feeling, no thought, no anything. And I thought: “I have to go back.” I wasn’t sure why. I lifted my head up, and I was back in the room. I could hear every chirp outside. I got up and felt I’d had the best sleep of my life, so energized and awake.
I started laughing. I almost felt like someone was watching me. It was a trick, all these hoops and games, to make me quit. Because that’s what it’s about – that moment of giving up. Wow. It was so funny. I laughed out loud. I started walking around the monastery, pitch-black, quiet as ever, and I was laughing. I thought, “Well that’s it. This is what I came here to learn.” The whole idea of going through all these nonsense things made sense. They were supposed to be nonsense. If you don’t go through the nonsense, you won’t realize it’s nonsense, therefore it’s not nonsense.
That does sound like something a Buddhist would say, doesn’t it? But the big deal here is that after his previous horrible vision in Ecuador, he finally had a positive vision.
He went on to India. The sadhus he found were a mix of complete scammers, sort-of scammers (“sadhus” that don’t think of themselves as scammers but had bank accounts so they could take breaks), and the occasional good role model legit sadhu that helped him decide that he really wanted to quit money.
But he couldn’t quit money in India – he’ll never see his family again.
He still didn’t imagine yet that he could do this alone. His next step was to find a commune in Oregon, where the people live without money. It didn’t work out for him. The commune grew a little food, but not nearly enough to feed its members – the members lived without money, but the commune survived by business ventures: running a café and having a post office contract to deliver mail.
They had a requirement of a 40-hour work week to stay there, and a lot of the work was just busywork, people trying to avoid loafing or being seen as loafing. The members didn’t seem happy, and this wasn’t the idea, so he left.
He had a sister in Seattle, and so, next, he tried getting a regular job and staying with her. The job was helping Spanish-speaking people navigate bureaucracy. He didn’t have a car anymore, but he could drive his sister’s car to his first day of work. It took 2 hours in the traffic. The phone was constantly ringing. People were speaking too fast for his Spanish ability, and he was constantly having to slow them down. At the end of the day, there was a traffic ticket on the car. It took 2 hours again to drive home, and none of the other drivers looked happy either. Suelo called up his work and left a voicemail, apologetically quitting after 1 day.
Suelo did some research and found a commune that fit his philosophy better in Nova Scotia, Canada, so he headed across the continent to see it: by bus and then by ferry to Nova Scotia. The place was in the hinterlands, and at the ferry landing, he still had a ways to go, and was down to $50 again. He has decided to keep the money as “his emergency insurance against the occurrence of some Bad Thing, whatever it might be”.
With some difficulty, he hitchhiked to the final spur road, 10 miles from his destination. He walked the final distance, arrived at dusk, and the place had been abandoned. There’s a log where he could see that there’s been no entries for over a month, and the well had gone dry two months before that.
He spent the night there and left the next morning. He didn’t get a ride until dusk, when a man went out of his way to give a ride to the nearest town.
He wondered if this was this the Bad Thing? No, it turned out that he still didn’t need his $50. He had a friend in Halifax. (He has so many friends!) Halifax was not really near him, but it’s in the same province. When he sent an email to his friend, the guy agreed to pick him up in a few days. By this time, Suelo could go a few days without money, so staying around didn’t cost him anything.
His friend also happened to know a woman who also wanted to quit money, and when they are introduced, Suelo finds out that she was actually at that commune. The two started hitchhiking.
It was generally easier to get rides than before because he’s now with a woman, and they headed off to travel down the US seaboard. At one point, though, in Pennsylvania, the two get stuck waiting been for a couple hours without getting a ride at all. Flurries of snow were falling. Again, he started to wonder, “Is this the Bad Thing?” Finally, it hits him that:
the fifty dollars was not the cure for his anxiety, the fifty dollars was the cause of it. The Bad Thing would happen, sure. No amount of money, not fifty dollars, or a million, could keep it at bay. Because after all, what was the worst Bad Thing? Death. Mortality. The End of Time. That was the thing he was afraid of. But the Bad Thing came to everyone eventually, and when it arrived, not even money could buy it off.
Money perpetuated the fantasy of immortal earthly life, the illusion that we could determine the future. Suelo was ready to reject this illusion once and for all. The fifty dollars was merely keeping him from what he needed most: faith.
He took out his $50. He got a postage stamp and a $20 bill and, because he’d never actually paid for the parking ticket he got back in Seattle, mails $20 back to his sister. Then he took the remaining $30, left it in a phone booth, and walked away. This is the dramatic moment that on page 1, that Sundeen called leaving his life savings in a phone booth and giving up money.
But actually, the next Spring, Suelo got a tax refund of $500, and decided he was back on money. Staying in a commune in Georgia, he put a deposit on a driveaway car, and headed off back to Utah where he wanted to attend a wedding, surprising hitchhikers on the way by picking them up in a fancy Mercedes.
But he ditched the remainder of the money later “because it felt like a ball and chain”.
In fact, one of Suelo’s problems, if I can call it that, is that sometimes people give him money. His initial policy was that he had to get rid of it by sunset and shouldn’t think about getting something he needed – if he spent it, he would just get himself something he would like. Then sunset turned into sunrise whenever sunset wasn’t always a convenient deadline. Finally, he decided that if he got money, he had to immediately give it away.
In fact, he ended up ditching hundreds of dollars, when he worked on a fishing boat for a second time, after he had quit money. In this case, because knew someone who had a salmon boat and wanted to see the Bering Sea, he arranged with his friend for him to fly him up to Alaska and he worked on the salmon boat.
Word got around that there was this eccentric guy working for free, and it was actually kind of resented by the other workers. Whether to limit this resentment or just from a feeling of guilt, and the end of season, his friend gave him $500. Suelo took the money and hid it on the boat as they closed it up for the season. In Anchorage on the way home, when he told his friend what he did, Suelo’s friend insisted on giving him another $200, which Suelo took and left in a bus shelter.
To me, this is someone that has really, really tried and finds that he really, really doesn’t want money around, the sort of person who might (and actually did) write on his blog, “I don’t see money as evil or good: how can illusion be evil or good? But I don’t see heroin or meth as evil or good either. Which is more addictive & debilitating, money or meth?” For Suelo, the implied answer is money, or at least that the two are close.
Apparently, it’s not hard for Suelo to find food. Mark Sundeen writes:
In all my visits with Suelo over the course of two years, he never appeared hungry or the slightest bit worried about where his next meal was coming from. Occasionally I cooked for him at my house or took him to a restaurant, but for the most part, he was the one feeding me. When I packed food up to his cave, so complete was his hospitality that I sometimes forgot to break out the grub. He had found his version of abundance.
So how? Well, Suelo isn’t much of hunter, in case you were thinking that. He does seem to eat berries a fair amount. There were also a few main sources of food from town. Although many of these only survive a few years, there were many around at the time the book was being written.
Dumpster diving is surprisingly productive. When Sundeen went dumpster diving Suelo as part of writing the book, they found:
6 loaves Pepperidge Farm bread
2 bags bagels
1 bag of white potatoes
4 russet potatoes
1 box organic strawberries
2 packages raspberries
2 packages blackberries
1 grapefruit
7 packages sliced mushrooms
1 onion
1 squash
27 ears of corn
There are drawbacks – at one point in the book Suelo bites into some meat, and finds it tastes moldy, but this is a perfectly reasonable grocery haul.
Suelo is also willing to live off charity, as long as the charity is freely given. He was a regular at a daily free lunch program in Moab, until it ended. Also, there are work-for-food deals at a food Co-op in Moab and, for a time, at a farm in the area. At one point, Moab even had an abandoned field of melons. (Some landowner was expecting disaster once Obama took office and planted all kinds of stuff, but by the time to sow the field, the disaster had not occurred, and he wasn’t harvesting the field.) There are just places to find food for Suelo because he is open to them.
Another thing to point out is that Suelo will, in a pinch, ask for food. He has asked for leftovers in restaurants before, and usually people are actually happy to give him leftovers. Sometimes, they’ll be angry and mean to him, but usually, it's the opposite.
How to get clothing is not even mentioned. I just had to bring this up because “food, clothing, and shelter” is the standard phrase. My experience with poor people I’ve known is that it’s not an issue for them either. It’s pretty easy to find donated clothing around. Probably that’s also in dumpsters. Particular brands of clothes, that’s a different thing, but not a necessity of life. (Suelo is apparently kind of stylish, though.)
He lives in a cave. It is a 2-hour commute from town (by bicycle and foot), which is inconvenient, I’m sure, but not usual for America any more.
His cave house is free, but it’s illegal. Initially, he just openly set up in a cave in an only occasionally visited area, leaving a note in his cave “Feel free to camp here. What’s mine is yours. Eat any of my food. Read my books. Take them with you if you’d like.” And visitors seemed happy with this.
But a ranger showed up and wrote him a ticket. For $120. And, of course, Suelo doesn’t use money. Or have an ID anymore – that would cost money. So he went to court. (The Ranger came back to give him a ride. This is not like an arrest, this was just to help him from my impression. People really seem to like Suelo and actually like to help him. He has a lot people doing this sort of thing. I think part of why he gets this treatment is him just being matter-of-fact, and not confrontational about what he’s doing.) The judge, not finding jail reasonable for a small offense, asked Suelo what the sentence should be. Suelo suggested community service at the women’s shelter that he again worked at (now as a volunteer), and the judge accepted.
He completed the community service and moved to a more hidden location. Suelo seems to have gotten good at hiding: he even lived homeless on a college campus (in a nature reserve on the University of Florida campus), on an island in Portland, Oregon, and he also moves when needed: he’s lived in about a dozen different caves near Moab.
Suelo also has a reputation as a good house sitter, and sometimes is just bouncing from one house sitting assignment to another. Sometimes, when traveling, he’s gotten housing by just walking up to a church or monastery and asking.
Maybe the ranger story makes you wonder if there are other times when authority demands money. As far as I can tell, this hasn’t happened, even though Suelo has no ID. Police have asked him what he’s doing when traveling on the road, he’s answered, “walking in America” and that seems to appeal to their patriotism and not cause a problem.
The only other time in the book that was kind of like this was when he got a hospital bill, and his volunteer work at the women’s shelter also came in handy that time as well. He was visiting his brother, and while helping him build shelves, he accidentally gashed his thumb to the bone. Suelo’s not a doctor, but he played one in South America, and would have given himself stitches, but his sister-in-law would have none of that plan, so she took him to the hospital. This produced a $1,000 emergency room bill to pay (and a clean and stitched thumb).
And there’s still no honor in quitting money in debt.
Suelo arranged with the women’s shelter that they track his time like an employee but pay his wages directly to the hospital. But when Suelo later decided to write the hospital a letter “asking if they thought it was ethical to charge one thousand dollars for seven stitches,” the bills stopped, and life went on with only about $400 paid.
There is a discussion of medical care, and it does seem as if he is more vulnerable if injured than he would be in normal life. He is still friends with the homeopathic doctor. He accepts free stuff as long as it’s freely given – and has received free eyeglasses and dental care. (He was going without eyeglasses for a time, and he was willing to go like that forever and live in a nice, new pretty blurry world, but it was a problem that people that knew would get upset when he didn’t recognize them.) He chipped a tooth in a Go-kart accident before he gave up money but didn’t get it fixed until later when he was off money and a dentist offered to do it for free. (Painful teeth are sometimes a thing, but, apparently pine pitch fixes the pain – again not medical advice).
There is one story where, again, he actually thought he was going to die. He’d eaten cactus before, but one particular type he tried made his heart race so much that he thought he’s going to have a heart attack. He was so far out of town, he couldn’t even get to a hospital if he wanted. So he lied down and wrote a note: “Well, life has been good, rich, and full. I died happy. Don’t worry about me. We all die. I ate some poison cactus. I love everybody.” After some rest, he woke up and barfed, after which he felt fine.
Suelo has gotten into dances and concerts by having friends pay or by just telling the bouncer that he lives without money and asking to be let in. He travels a lot: freight train hopping isn’t brought up after the introduction, but hitchhiking seems common. He has a lot of family and friends around the country, and they seem to be happy and honored to see him when visits. There’s lots of free events, especially when he lived on a university campus.
As part of his living without money, he sat in a tree in Oregon and successfully prevented a forest from being logged. I imagine that there would have been more value in cutting the trees down and in turning them into wood products then there was by keeping them planted as trees, but I bring this up for its meta-level implications. I, too, long for time to work on common good causes that don’t pay.
One of the things that people accuse Suelo of is being a mooch. Suelo himself, doesn’t respond to this on the accuser’s terms. His philosophy is that the human inclination to believe in obligation, credit, and debt is a failing to be overcome.
Sundeen, however, takes on the question and argues that Suelo is not a mooch, even accepting the terms of the accusation. Quoting one of Suelo’s friends: “My estimate is that he [Suelo] gave back at least twice the value that he received,” listing “pet watching, tree pruning, car repairing, and spiritual counseling” as all things that Suelo does for free.
As far as I can tell, just accepting and living without money, or least moving in that direction, is the most pleasant way that I can think of to plan for financial cancellation, although I’m still in a search mode. In part, I’m just more outdoorsy than 90% of Americans. Perhaps this is also laziness or, ironically, attachment to money since all other plans I’ve seen so far cost time and money in near term.
But there’s another problem with the alternatives. Cash/Bitcoin/prepper bunkers are all things that can lead to suspicion from authorities – the very suspicion that could lead to the problems I want to protect against.
But I see an obvious downside on the societal level. Suelo’s strategy doesn’t scale. (Suelo seems to think his lifestyle does scale, but there isn’t much on this topic in the book.) The only reason dumpster diving works out is because of the ratio of people living in the retail economy to the dumpster diving economy. It might work for a canceled individual, but not a canceled society.
The gift economy works at Burning Man. Maybe the Burning Man gift could be extended to a whole year, even though now it’s only a week long. But even for that week, the gift economy can only get things from stores in San Francisco or Reno to Burning Man – I don’t think it’s reasonable that this so-called “economy” would ever get productive farms or factories or mines or transportation systems. That was my prior coming in to the book, and the book has nothing to change my prior.
Because Suelo keeps a webpage and a blog and has a Wikipedia page, I know that in 2015, three years after the book was published, he moved back in with his aging parents who needed assistance due to their health, and, in that role, he has needed to go back to using money. According to his web page, he would like to go back off money, and plans to do so when he is done caring for his mother, his only currently surviving parent.
In one sense, this is a failure in that he had to back on money, but I see this as a benefit to quitting money: this is exactly the sort of thing that most people wish they could do but can’t. As with the tree sitting, Suelo’s lifestyle allowed him to be available when the need arose.
(I told you he was stylish.)
https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Quit-Money/dp/1594485690
