I guess the best example I can think of is Chris McCandless
Then there’s the North Pond Hermit of Maine but I suppose people would not classify him as free of mental illness.
Just wondering how many people are out there living in caves, walking around, hiking trails, hopping trains, or living in National Forests full time who really aren’t mentally ill and just choose that lifestyle. What do you think?
I never used drugs, and arguable didn’t have mental health issues. I just… ran out of money, and wasn’t making more fast enough to keep having an apartment. I was homeless for about two months before I got back on my feet.
There’s a lot of people like that, who just… didn’t have the money to stay housed continuously.
Most people are just one or two missed paychecks from being homeless. It’s not some personal failure to be a homeless, just what happens in a society when their aren’t safety nets and majority of wages don’t cover rent.
It happens, it could happen to all of us.
I imagine most of those just go off grid. Being a homeless wanderer is very hard. Much easier to shun society from inside a cabin.
Most of them live in their car.
I don’t know about that last part, but like I was hit by a driver riding a bicycle to work and unless something drastic changes, in the next 10 years I will be one of those homeless people.
There is no social safety net in the USA. I was hit by a foreign political refugee with the competency of a 3rd grader, and that is being generous. I’m still able to walk and mostly function so long as I spend most of the day laying down. I can’t hold posture, am in constant pain about on par with a bee sting or worse, enough that it never escapes my conscious thought, and never sleep more than 4-6 hours, I’m a zombie of my former self. My problems are difficult to diagnose and our litigious society means neurosurgeons are not willing to look very deeply into complicated cases as risking decades of schooling is not on their priority list. If your radiologist’s report from an MRI fails to show an easy diagnosis to treat, no reputable neurosurgeon will chase problems any deeper. It is easy to fall through the cracks. Like my damage is thoracic. That region is rarely damaged and is like 5% of all cases a neurosurgeon treats. I’m the kind of person you see homeless out there or a Fentanyl statistic eventually.
I’m above average smart by most people’s admission, but simply turning my head left can send me on a 2-3 week spiral of extraordinary pain and little to no sleep.
Do they have any persistent pain clinics where you’re from?
I went to pain management for a few years. I was miserable. For me, pain drugs just dull my mind until I don’t care any more. I can’t do or care about anything interesting when I take those. Anything for sleep causes major problems too. I must toss and turn constantly, even when sleeping or I lock up in terrible ways. There was one time I couldn’t even walk or sit upright at all for 3 days. I have to lay down most of the time and spend 1.5-2 hours doing a physical therapy routine most days to be able to have the most overall consistency day to day.
That’s the vagabond lifestyle, and yes there’s a modest number of them. It’s apparently a hard life, but at least you’re pretty much completely free.
They’re basically hippies, they mostly bum rides. Dumpster diving is popular. People give them stuff too. You meet more in places where winter isn’t really a thing, just cuz winter gets kinda cold, and they can go where they want, so they don’t really stay there.
Winter is not just kinda cold in many places, it’s downright fatal.
I’ve met quite a few people like this and anecdotally there seemed to be a trend. Nearly all of them lost someone or had something horrific happen to them and just weren’t interested in any of it anymore. I’ve yet to meet anyone that all of the sudden found some sort of peaceful enlightenment.
I’ve met two. Used to work with them on a ranch when I was a kid. Cool guys, wouldn’t live in the same place for more than three months.
One of the dudes carried around a tiny TV with a built in VHS and a handful of movies. The other guy was just heading South, I think maybe going to Mexico.
When they decided to move on they just left, no goodbyes or heads up… just gone one day.
Were you able to ask them why they lived that way? Was there anything odd about them? Like could they function socially and hold down a regular long-term job?
Never asked them directly, figured they tell me if they wanted to but it never came up.
Nothing notably odd outside of their lifestyle. Neither one did drugs or drank. The VHS guy crashed in the ranch manager’s garage, which was my neighbor, so I’d chill with him and watch movie sometimes. They both had a great sense of humor.
They showed up to work on time everyday, worked hard, and just did normal stuff off-hours. No reason they couldn’t stay in one place as far as I could tell. I was 17 at the time, so I could have missed some cues, but nothing made them stand out.
We all made $5.25 under the table and got free lunch. It was a pretty good gig for a teenager and someone that didn’t care about taxes. I guess once they got enough money under their belt to move on, they did.
There was a sub for this on the other site. I think it was called vagrant?
I was this person. Most people who do this are what people would usually call travelers. People who do it voluntarily, like I did, usually had enough money to get to another interesting place or buy a meal anytime they are hungry. Many people have odd jobs in remote places that preclude housing (I have had these jobs too). Some people are also begging as they travel. I never begged. I worked whenever I needed money. Generally speaking, living like this without facing extreme difficulties is exclusively a white male privilege from a country with a strong passport. Non-white people are routinely arrested. Women are routinely raped. Weak passports get deported.
Non-consecutively I spent a little over 4 years living in a tent or on the ground in some capacity. The longest period of time I lived exclusively in a tent was 14 months consecutively.
I hiked backcountry trails, city streets and traveled extensively through a number of countries. I rode a bicycle for some of those years as well. In total I walked somewhere around 1500-2000 miles and rode between 3000 and 4000 miles. The farthest I have ever walked in a single day is 30 miles. The farthest I have ever cycled in a single day is just over 120 miles. The longest period of time I spent in a single national forest was 5 months, but I worked in the back country there for 3 of them so I don’t know how to count that. There are thousands of people who work in the back country for many many months on end doing things like trail maintenance throughout the US.
Not quite homeless, Paul Erdős was a nomadic mathematician. He use to travel to universities, couch-surf with a mathematician, and solve a problem with them.
He would say, “another roof, another proof.” As a result, he has a huge number of collaborators. The stat Erdős number is like the six degrees from Kevin Bacon game.
People seemed glad to have this oddball stranger as a house guest.
The majority of homeless people are homeless because housing is to expensive, and the majority of homeless drug users started after becoming homeless not before
It is generally not recommended to diagnosis like you just did. Being weird is not in of itself mental illness. Also to be fair I think the plot was he was looking for his biological father.
But yeah I think there are mentally stable people who just decide that wandering the earth is what they want to do. I don’t really get it but they probably don’t get me so it works out.
I literally did just that for a summer a few years back. An extremely exhilarating adventure, but I got bored of that crap after a while.
And no, I have never consumed any hard drugs nor would I ever given a fifth of a third of a quarter of the shit I saw on the road.
Aww, come on, first one’s free!
You couldn’t pay me enough to ever do anything like that
As a recovering addict myself, I can confirm that the worst thing about hard drugs is that they actually are as good as advertised. If it weren’t for that, they’d be so easy to quit.
Well, I’m glad you’re breaking out of the cycle. I have seen with my own eyes how that shit turns humans into literal, and I mean LITERAL zombies.
I know too well. William S. Burroughs calls it being the “de-anxietied man”. I call it being bulletproof.
Unfortunately, along with removing anxiety, fear, and regret, heroin also removes empathy, responsibility, and integrity. If it weren’t for that one little thing, it would be so perfect. /s
Well, I know a guy almost like you describe, chooses it, says he’s more free. He does love him some crack though.
Pretty sure anyone who has ever done crack has loved crack. That’s why it’s crack.
I know there are. I’ve met a few. There’s a whole scene for this kind of thing in San Francisco.
I have been watching a YouTube called “cheap RV Living”that interviews a lot of people that live in their car/suv/van nomad living. (Also watching tons of others too, but this is the main channel).
Soon I will need to move so I’m converting my suv into a mini camper. Going to travel and find land to live on. Love being able to live cheaply and freely. No more motel/hotels.
I don’t know. Probably. The world’s a big place with a lot of people.
There’s a guy who sits out in front of my cafe every day. You wouldn’t think he was homeless if you saw him, but I see him out there all day every day. He goes to the gym a few doors down for showers and to the laundromat around the corner to wash his clothes. He doesn’t look like he’s on drugs or anything. He’s in his 50’s, his hair is always combed, he’s always clean, appears lucid, etc. He looks like a regular guy you would see at an office job.
The weird thing about him is he does absolutely nothing. No book, no phone, nothing. He just sits there and stares into the parking lot for hours. I don’t know how he does it. We used to say good morning to him and, after he never responded, we kinda just stopped paying him any attention.
Most of the homeless people around here are drugged out zombies. They literally look like they just came off the set of The Walking Dead. This guy in front of my place is the one I notice all the time because of how normal he looks.
