Recently I’ve come across an astonishing number of stories about people who, either voluntarily or involuntarily, end up living without money altogether or with such a radical reduction in “income” that by conventional standards they’d be considered in the throes of abject poverty. The common thread running throughout? Invariably, they’re happier having abandoned the old story of “more is better,” preferring instead to create for themselves a new reality in harmony with their soul’s calling (and the planet itself). I’d like to use this entry to honor a few of those living with such beauty, grace, and serenity.

We are experiencing a period of liminality unlike anything the human species or planet has experienced before. A century and a half have elapsed since Henry David Thoreau allowed Walden to flow through him, yet perhaps now more than ever this wisdom seeks to be rekindled and embraced once again:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
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I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

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Here are a few to start (I’ll update this entry periodically):

My Free, Tiny House
The core values of the tiny house movement are that living simply in small spaces empowers us. Committing to a tiny house removes many of the burdens we accepted when we bought into the idea of a “normal” American lifestyle. Instead of focusing on how much we can afford, the tiny space forces us to consider how little we really need.

In Japan, Living Large In Really Tiny Houses
The Japanese have long endured crowded cities and scarce living space, with homes so humble a scornful European official once branded them rabbit hutches. But in recent years, Japanese architects have turned necessity into virtue, vying to design unorthodox and visually stunning houses on remarkably narrow pieces of land. In the process, they are also redefining the rules of home design.

Millionaire gives away fortune which made him miserable
Austrian millionaire Karl Rabeder is giving away every penny of his £3 million fortune after realising his riches were making him unhappy.

Living without money
“It’s true that communism didn’t work,” she says, “but human beings need to learn to be a little bit different before we can learn to share what we have. We are going to run out of oil in ten years. We don’t have infinite resources. That just isn’t sustainable.”

Broadband, Yes. Toilet, No.
Time holds a higher value for them than the more lucrative jobs they might have had with their advanced degrees. Absent the need to work 9 to 5, there is time for snowshoeing in winter and gathering wild nettles to eat in the spring.

My free and easy life
“I am more optimistic today than I was when I walked away from my old life. The world is not the hostile, dangerous place I imagined, and I feel a greater sense of its possibilities. I get by, not just because of empty houses, wasted food and discarded consumer goods, but because of the people I rely on and who rely on me, strangers and friends.”

I live without cash – and I manage just fine
“What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don’t own a plasma screen TV, people think you’re an extremist.”

The Economics of Happiness
Not everyone is welcoming this new research program. The results are terrifying Milton Friedman’s disciples. Consider this: once people have an annual income of about $10,000 per capita, further income does little to promote happiness.

Nine Billion Little Feet
Still, if ever there were a time to show some guts, it’s now. Not by protesting ­ — which has become a security state supervised liberal pussy sport — but by giving up the material life, the consumer life. Damned near all of it. Including all those leftie and alternative books from Amazon — sitting on our asses reading and drinking green tea just because we can afford to is just another type of inaction and consumerism. It’s the only real act of protest possible by the prisoners of our consumption driven monolith. True, you’ll be just one iPodless and carless little guy throwing a single stone at the United States of Jabba the Hutt. But assuming you’re still capable of any kind of life after the stellazine mind conditioning we’ve all been administered for past 40 years, I’ve got folding cash that says you will own your life in a way that seemed previously impossible.

Peak Moment 160: A Young Couple Find Freedom in Simple Living
Rather than follow the customary American dream, Tammy and Logan sold their home and car, and moved to a bikeable/walkable neighborhood in Sacramento, California. After reading Derrick Jensen’s writings, this couple used Your Money or Your Life as a means to get out of debt and, they feel, regain their lives and their future.

The Next Little Thing?
“It’s a very exciting moment,” said Shay Salomon, a green builder in Tucson, Ariz., and the author of “Little House on a Small Planet” (Lyons Press, 2006), “because it feels like a chapter of American history might be ending, the chapter called ‘Bigger is Better.’

What is the Tiny House Movement?
What are Tiny Houses? The Tiny House Movement? Tiny Living?

Small House Society
Our desire is to support the research, development, and use of smaller living spaces that foster sustainable living for individuals, families, and communities worldwide.

CNN Profiles the Tiny House Movement