I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful. I had a good stretch of time between jobs (fortunately voluntarily) a while back and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life.
During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group of scouts: a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch (beginning with walking to fetch the relevant supplies). Now when I am back to work, I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym, because there is not time to do both.
I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
iberator 13 hours ago [-]
> I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful.
>I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
Trust me mate. Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD. I am homeless for 3 months now and it's absolutely devastating for my soul and morale.
Having no "safe harbour" takes away all enjoyment from "freedom". I was an avid hiker as well in the past :)
buran77 9 hours ago [-]
People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives. You see this with the coder who dreams of the farmer's life, or that of a "rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond", or even that of a soldier.
It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that makes the poison. Things are very different when they become your life and there's no safety net. It's why almost anyone can walk a line drawn on the ground where mistakes are totally forgiven, but very few can walk a high rope with no safety net.
adregan 2 hours ago [-]
I often think of Thoreau when my mind drifts to romanticizing farming:
> I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
tbrake 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know about romanticizing a hard life but I'll definitely get hit with a very strong sense of wanting to escape and leave it all behind.
It hits me every summer like clockwork tbh - leaving a nicely typed 2 minutes notice on my VP's desk and just taking my chances as a traveling beach bum. Akin to wanderlust, I'm filled with the urge to just go off into the unknown.
In my heart of hearts I know I'm a soft city boy though. I wouldn't last a week.
mothballed 5 hours ago [-]
You would adapt rapidly.
I was fired from a city job.
Started hitchiking and living outside. Eventually worked on a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, worked the oil fields in the Dakotas, fought in a civil war in another country, hiked state-long parts of the PCT, hung out with tree-dwelling hippies in the doug-fir forests etc.
I would live that life again in a heartbeat if I didn't have a child to support, which was pretty much the end of my adventures. If you're single you can pretty much work day labor 25% of the year and have plenty enough to live inna-woods. The reason why most 'homeless' people seem so miserable is they are too mentally ill or drug ridden to do some fairly basic things to make their lives living outside 100x better; if you are sober and able bodied and able-minded it is a cakewalk.
mrbombastic 1 hours ago [-]
You have any write ups? Sounds like quite the interesting life
8 hours ago [-]
HanClinto 2 hours ago [-]
> People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives.
The film Sullivan's Travels from 1941 is a film that explores the concept of this romanticization. It's a good movie whose storytelling and comedy still hold up today. I think more people should be aware of it.
Trivia: This is also where the movie O' Brother Where Art Thou got its name.
theoreticalmal 9 hours ago [-]
The romanticized farmer aspect always gives me pause as well. Farming is a very difficult job that requires many hours of work every single day, every day per year. Even if you had enough money left over from some other job to get to go travel, you could never find the time to do so after becoming a farmer
jjkaczor 7 hours ago [-]
As a child, I spent about 4-5 years on both a family farm and then followed by about 6-months at a large commercial egg production farm (my father took a job as the farm manager, came with free housing) - it cemented within me the desire never to toil in the fields or take care of animals outside of pets.
Yet of course - my kids and grandkids who were raised in suburban environments ALL romanticize farming...
10729287 6 hours ago [-]
It’s not even fun in stardew valley to be honest.
nonameiguess 6 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, one of my ex-girlfriends from my 20s had a dad that did this. He was an engineer and quit to become a farmer, building his own generators and living off the grid powering his operation with waste vegetable oil he obtained for free from the same restaurants he sold artisan vegetables to. He lived in a different state and I only met him once, but it actually did seem like a pretty great life and he was clearly happy with it.
The problem to me when I see this kind of life suggested as something people should try to do is that it isn't universalizable. There are only so many restaurants in any given city that need artisan vegetables. There is only so much land near such cities that can grow it. Even if all people who try are equally able, very few would succeed in doing this.
mothballed 5 hours ago [-]
My grandfather was a farmer. "Out in the fields" or in the workshed practically all day everyday. But he also loved to hunt, had a rental gig on the farm for poor people that wanted to live in shacks "down by the river" (they built the sheds themselves), and would constantly be pointing out to me all the stuff in the house he had built himself (he could have easily gotten them just as cheap and without any additional labor by mail order -- this was post WWII).
Another words, farmers back in that time would pretend they were busy all day. But actually spent a lot of the time "out in fields" bullshitting hunting, hanging with their friends at the river, or having fun building random shit in the workshop out of leisure rather than necessity. I didn't have the heart to tell the women in my family he probably didn't come home sooner because he didn't want to hear nagging or whining children, because it was blatantly obvious to me what the situation was.
lo_zamoyski 4 hours ago [-]
As you say, farming is difficult, so if you're going into it with the expectation that it is idyllic, you have another thing coming. There is no "time off" on the farm. Some may enjoy that, but most people dreaming about it wouldn't.
It's much better to examine one's motivations for romanticizing the farm. Is it escapism from reality and the suffering endemic to it (in which case, you are only multiplying it by avoiding it)? Is it pride (too good to work)? Is it an impulse toward "immanentizing the eschaton"? Does your current job suck? Is the environment bad? Is it because you're living your life in a meaningless way?
Worth exploring.
throwaway894345 8 hours ago [-]
> People with comfortable enough lives sometimes have this attraction to the very romanticized versions of otherwise very hard lives. You see this with the coder who dreams of the farmer's life, or that of a "rover, wanderer, nomad, vagabond", or even that of a soldier.
Some people even go camping for recreation.
buran77 8 hours ago [-]
Exactly, it's the dose that makes the poison. A week of camping is fun, a lifetime of camping is hell.
macintux 1 hours ago [-]
And living off the land was much easier (not that it was ever easy) when there was land to live off of.
64d032fe 8 hours ago [-]
Hard, in this sense, does not necessarily mean negative or bad. And the safety nets are often illusions (see: insurance, for one example).
There's a balance of course, but I believe most people would benefit from harder lives (in the natural/physical sense). Modern life being more comfortable and easier is actually bullshit. If your life is driving through traffic hours a day to go to a place to sit in front of a computer by yourself to send out messages by chat and email, that is a very hard life. You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
buran77 8 hours ago [-]
> Hard does not mean negative or bad
It does when it applies to your life. (Edit to reply to your edit) A bit of physical activity doesn't make your life harder. A lot of it might. And almost only hard physical activity is pure punishment, even literally used as such in labor camps.
> the safety nets are often illusions
Safety nets are sometimes illusions, they are mostly helping. Like an airbag they only need to work once to prove their worth.
> see: insurance, for one example
Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you.
Do you know many people who wish for a hard life? For the homeless life? To not have any sort of insurance?
> There's a balance of course [...] You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
The balance.
nonameiguess 5 hours ago [-]
> Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you.
This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my house flood from a burst pipe on the top floor, had my HVAC condenser struck by lightning, had a city dump truck crush my parked car. Insurance has saved my ass so many times that I could pay a hundred grand a month in premiums for the rest of my life and still come out ahead.
People are so headline fixated that they only ever see the claim denials and think that's all that ever happens.
thoroughburro 1 hours ago [-]
> People are so headline fixated that they only ever see the claim denials and think that's all that ever happens.
I’ve experienced plenty of my own claim denials. In fact, I had to stop treatment of my chronic condition due to the last one. This is certain to cause my knees to fail in a few years.
You think they only exist in headlines? Then get your own head out of the news and talk to real people.
hamdingers 5 hours ago [-]
What a horrific misattribution. Doctors, nurses, the people who built and maintain the facilities they work in, and generations of researchers saved your life.
Insurance is the rent-seeking middleman that exists between you and them for no purpose other than to shave a percentage off forthemselves.
nonameiguess 4 hours ago [-]
That is ridiculously unfair. We're talking totals in the tens of millions for these procedures. You can make a very good argument it should be paid for by some other public means and I would not necessarily disagree with you, but given that doesn't currently happen, insurance did a lot more than just skim off the top. They paid for the work. And I'm not aware of any society out there right now that publicly provides free to the consumer home and auto repair.
I agree that the providers themselves, along with the basic science and engineering that made their work possible in the first place, deserves the bulk of the credit, but nobody was attacking physicians and scientists here.
For what it's worth, in plenty of other Reddit-style "everthing sucks and I'm pessimistic about technology" threads, I'm out there touting these same stories as examples of science and technology making the world better, as many of these procedures either weren't possible or had far worse success rates as recently as 20 years ago. This just wasn't one of those threads.
hamdingers 3 hours ago [-]
I appreciate this backpedaling, but within the context of the thread your first comment credits insurance with your 7 orthopedic surgeries, and to that my response is more than fair.
I'm not sure what to make of the non sequitur to reddit threads though.
close04 1 hours ago [-]
Your take is non-sensical and obtuse, and the attitude is not much better so I’d hold off on the celebratory self-pat on the back.
The people who do the job should get a lot of the credit. But none of them do it for free. Insurance is there to make sure you can pay those people for what needs to be done in the aftermath of very unlikely but very high impact events. A lot of people pay very little so a few people don’t have to pay a lot.
The industry has a lot of failings but this doesn’t wipe out the utility of the service.
farrelle25 10 hours ago [-]
> Having no "safe harbour" ...
Yes this is soul destroying - the psychological effects are brutal. Not having any little place as a 'base'.
I was homeless in Europe for a few weeks and it really crushes someone. I can see why so many rough sleepers take alcohol / drugs. Just to numb everything. I used to drink a few cans every night before trying to find a place to sleep.
Another crushing thing: as a commenter below said - on average people look down at you as if you were dirty etc. I found that so hard too.
I wish you the very best wherever you are ... really hope your situation will get better somehow please God...
(edit: oh just realised something - not implying the OP takes any substances or anything... just talking in general how I had to resort to alcohol in my situation)
2 hours ago [-]
halper 12 hours ago [-]
I can relate to that, having not always been in such fortunate circumstances as I am now. I hope that your situation improves!
mycall 4 hours ago [-]
> Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD.
You can have money or food supplies and still be a homeless traveler. While it is common to assume homeless is broke, sometimes adventure and not being strapped to a certain, civilized life is the goal. I'm always amazed how far legs can take you.
IncreasePosts 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe that's because you're homeless and don't want to be. The Leatherman could have settled down, per the article he "had money", but he just didn't want to.
I was intentionally homeless for 4 months, just riding my bike all around western Europe, just setting up my tent in a random woodland every night. I didn't have a safe harbor, except for the knowledge that I could get a job and rent an apartment if I wanted to.
It was not hard at all. In fact, I loved every minute of it. I lived/worked on a farm and slept on a bed for 2 weeks(WWOOFing), and I could not wait to get back out on the road again.
theteapot 12 hours ago [-]
> .. it's absolutely devastating for my soul and morale.
Why? Stay strong my friend.
borski 12 hours ago [-]
For one thing, because everyone around you looks at you like you are dirty and the scum of the earth, on average.
And that’s before you get to the fact that each night you need to find a place to sleep and nobody wants it to be near them.
It’s immensely depressing, and hard to stay resilient.
theteapot 32 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I hear you. It would be de-stigmatizing if more people with mean were voluntarily "homeless" like the Leatherman. But people just wanna watch Netflix I guess.
dominicq 13 hours ago [-]
Yeah. The options for lots of leisure are either: a) be homeless, or b) be rich. Those of us inbetween always have to choose and make compromises.
In my life, this has forced me to quit on a bunch of things I would have continued otherwise, and to lean down things like my workouts and so on. This isn't necessarily bad, I like that I can now do 80% with 20% of time/effort, but still, would be nice to have more slack.
theamk 5 hours ago [-]
Or work as contractor / part-time.
I've had two experiences with people like that:
- At one place I've worked at (big corp), the QA department was full of contractors. One of the contractors was only working 9 months per year - they spent all summers in Australia. Everyone knew about that and accepted this. The contractor was great, and no one had problems with that (I am sure not having to pay them anything while they were away helped :) )
- At other place, a small startup, we had a team member who was in a band. He'd work for us for a few months, help us to finish a project and make sure customer is happy.. and then disappear for a few more months to tour the US. Again, he was a great programmer, and we always welcomed him back.
I am sure that not every place is like this (for example my current workplace is pretty bureaucratic and would not be happy with this arrangement), but things like this definitely exist.
borski 11 hours ago [-]
There is a third option, which is to move to a place with a much lower cost of living. This isn’t always possible, due to family or job, but it’s not exactly uncommon either. Remote work, in particular, has helped with this. Work fewer hours, for less money, but with fewer needs.
Doable, but it’s about what you prioritize and care about.
apt-apt-apt-apt 11 hours ago [-]
> Remote work, in particular, has helped with this. Work fewer hours, for less money
Honestly, this sounds like an armchair fantasy.
It sounds great on paper– tech jobs pay $150K, so just find a remote job and work half-time. Boom, less taxes and you still have $5K/mo plus tons of time!
IME though, 99% of jobs want to own you full-time. There are almost no roles where you can be part-time. The other alternative, independent contractor or Upwork, is also very difficult to start, even if you have good experience and skills.
borski 5 hours ago [-]
I didn’t say you could do it working for Amazon. There are plenty of law firms, medical offices, etc., that need software and IT help and are happy to have it part-time or provide flexibility. Sure, it won’t be FAANG, but that wasn’t what we were talking about here.
apt-apt-apt-apt 4 hours ago [-]
What kind of software development would law/medical/other offices need on a flexible basis? I'm having trouble envisioning a scenario where someone could realistically be a dev part-time.
borski 4 hours ago [-]
There is always a ton of work; off-the-shelf tools are rarely off the shelf and require set up, maintenance, etc.
A lot of writing glue code to build dashboards and things.
Nowadays, a lot of AI work to improve attorney and paralegal efficiency, etc.
Law firms have software devs and/or IT on staff, or they contract it out. Contracting rather than a W2 is also an option.
It’s not “fun.” But it pays well and is often doable remotely / part-time.
OJFord 8 hours ago [-]
Almost nothing is advertised as part time, but way more than 1% would be happily accomodating if you asked to reduce to x days/week, I think. Especially for people coming to that decision while in the job, vs. negotiating for it in an offer.
tasuki 8 hours ago [-]
c) The (lean) FIRE (financial independence / early retirement) way. If you do the math and can do without some of the pricier luxuries of "modern life", you really don't need much money at all.
stronglikedan 3 hours ago [-]
Surely you're taking a lunch break now that you're back to work, and that is enough time to hit the gym and scarf down some nutrients afterwards, leaving after work for family time. It only takes 15-20 minutes of activity per day to maintain fitness.
uncircle 9 hours ago [-]
> I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful.
What sounded wonderful to me was this sentence: 'One store kept a record of an order: "one loaf of bread, a can of sardines, one-pound of fancy crackers, a pie, two quarts of coffee, one gill of brandy and a bottle of beer"'
This was a time when food brands weren't really a thing, the store probably had one type of bread, one type of (local) canned sardines, one type of crackers, etc. Each shop had a different variation and "menu", so to speak, all completely unique to each other. These days there is no difference between grocery stores, they all sell big-brand stuff and only convenience/price is the differentiating factor. No wonder only Walmarts are left.
munificent 4 hours ago [-]
> a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch
I think about this a lot when it comes to AI automation for coding.
Yes, it's nice if an AI can speed up the sort of semi-mindless parts of programming. But I strongly suspect that I need those spans of time for my mind to do the background processing necessary for the actual intellectually challenging parts of the job.
I've written two books and anyone who has done that will telling that writing is exhausting. It's an act that is almost purely intellectual with very little menial labor. And it is so utterly draining that it's hard to do for more than a couple of hours a day.
I don't relish programming turning into that. I like the easy refactoring and bug fixing tasks because they provide a respite between periods of very deep thinking while still keeping me mostly focused on the overall problem domain. I suspect I would be an overall worse engineer if I lost those.
ThinkBeat 8 hours ago [-]
It may be romanic because you have not yet understood the real life
consequences of the "lifestyle".
The problems, health risks, and stress it brings with it.
12 hours ago [-]
aa-jv 8 hours ago [-]
I lived a pretty high life in Los Angeles for 15 years, and when the time came for me to move to Europe (I'm Australian), I had two weeks where I was basically homeless before the flight home - lease expired on the apartment, circumstances with couch-surfing were not ideal - so I tried two weeks living hard, to see what it was like, as I was also going to have a 6 month hiatus before Europe, back home in the Australian outback, which is a different definition of rough - so I thought, what the heck, why not see what its like. I'd lived in a bubble in LA for so long, the bubble had burst, so why not just try it for a couple of weeks and see how far I got .. I kitted myself out with a sleeping bag and a tent and all the rudimentary camping basics, and headed out of my cushy Los Feliz neighborhood, onto the streets.
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to myself. My gear was stolen within days, I got beat up and nearly stuck with dirty heroin needles at least 3 times, almost arrested twice, and yeah .. it just generally sucked. I was not prepared for the hardship.
6 months in the Australian desert after that experience definitely made me appreciate the Australian desert a lot more than I had previously, and I will never, ever try this experiment in an American city again.
Its not the street that'll get to you. Its the street life. If I were the only homeless bum in the area, I would've done better I think - but it was all too easy to filter out to skid row after having been chased out of pretty much every 'sanctity' spot I could find, under bridges and in the Griffith Park area - whether by cops or by other homeless people. It was pretty stupid of me, in hindsight. I really didn't need to do it, I was just trying to push my boundaries before heading into the Kimberley region to eat snakes and lizards. That was, by comparison, a far better experience than the reptiles of LA. Would not recommend.
noelwelsh 7 hours ago [-]
Where were you living in the Kimberley? I've only ever been to Broome in that region, but eating lizards definitely seemed optional.
aa-jv 3 hours ago [-]
Broome for a few days with family, then into the deep desert with Aborigine family members for a few months of walkabout and general western-society detox. I was very lucky to have been invited to see things most whiteys have absolutely no clue about. There are parts of the Kimberley/Pilbarra that are, quite simply, among the most spiritually rewarding places on the planet.
I would spend my days in serious anticipation of the night sky, a glorious spectacle which majesty is yet to be matched by any human thing I've seen since then.
It was awesome and something I do hope to do again before I perish. Probably the most impactful event in my life was waking up on a dry creek bed surrounded by camels, who had come in the night to sleep at my side, sharing the warm creek stone bed.
Catching snakes for tucker was fun too. ;)
dyauspitr 5 hours ago [-]
Being homeless in a city doesn’t sound like fun at all. Being homeless in a rural buffer outside cities seems much more pleasant.
5 hours ago [-]
aa-jv 3 hours ago [-]
It was. The distinct contrast between the hell of street life in LA and the wild, uninhabited, yet entirely less hostile, wild outback, definitely gave me context for a life lived, since then, in awe of the folly of humanity.
dyauspitr 6 hours ago [-]
This sounds wonderful until the winter. Seems wonderful in temperate or warmer climes.
protocolture 15 hours ago [-]
Crazy to me that they exempted him from the vagrancy laws. Like "Oh we can have one mysterious and entertaining vagrant".
titanomachy 15 hours ago [-]
Ten separate towns did so. And people left food for him, like Santa Claus. He must have meant something to them.
tristor 1 hours ago [-]
It mentions in his Wikipedia article that he had money although the source was unknown. The issue with vagrancy throughout history is not the vagrancy itself primarily, but the problems of theft and anti-social behaviors that go with it. Since this person had money, didn't steal, and seemed to mostly leave people alone, they weren't a problem and got an exemption because they were well known.
foreigner 14 hours ago [-]
Similar to Leslie Cochran in Austin.
sidewndr46 6 hours ago [-]
Was that actually a thing? He passed away before I ever met him.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
Was what actually a thing? Leslie? Leslie was definitely a person who existed, who was a sort of local weirdo. I met him, once, probably have a photo I could dig out somewhere.
hyperhello 7 hours ago [-]
"The law says no vagrants. We're allowed to have one."
philistine 6 hours ago [-]
No Homers Club
oldpersonintx2 14 hours ago [-]
Because he didn't scream at people, leave used needles in the street, or pass out in gutters.
Y-bar 10 hours ago [-]
”Homed” people do those things, quite often, yet I have to se any anti-vacancy laws.
It is telling that society regularly outlaws afflictions like homelessness or situations like vagrancy instead of targeting the specific instances of bad behaviour that ought to be the problem.
that_guy_iain 7 hours ago [-]
We outlaw homelessness because we don't want homeless people on the streets littering the place.
The bad behaviours you want to be outlawed are in fact already outlawed. It's just super hard to catch and convict on those. While it's a lot easier to prove someone is sleeping rough.
Y-bar 6 hours ago [-]
That’s two major problems baked into one.
First: We hide the symptoms behind a veneer of illegality which allows us to ignore the underlying causes.
Second: We intentionally write laws which has a proportionally negative effect based on social and medical class of citizens. A class which is already facing hardships.
”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
astroflection 3 hours ago [-]
There should be a majestic law that forbids both the rich and poor to use their position in public office to enrich themselves.
46 minutes ago [-]
chinaev 9 hours ago [-]
Gives me an idea of an ultra endurance event... Think "Ironman" of walking. Let's say participants would have two weeks to complete the 587 km course or some part of it and whoever finished first is the Leatherman.
Crazy things like people walking 1 mile every hour for 1000 hours, grabbing bits of sleep within those hours.
rtkwe 6 hours ago [-]
There already are, they're called ultramarathons [0], 587 km would be on the longer end for a regularly held race but it's only slightly longer than Dean Karnazes's record for an uninterrupted run which was 560 km in 80 hours [1] so it'd be a multi day race probably.
Usually the extremely long distance ultra events are held as laps around a limited area because it's hard to safely run a race over hundreds of kilometers over a long period. Each racer needs a support car usually in the really long distance events that do happen to be run on roads etc. blocking traffic and making sure if they do get into medical trouble they can get help immediately.
64d032fe 8 hours ago [-]
Do you have to walk? I get that power walking exists as a sport. But no way to easily disqualify people from running instead of walking. Plenty of ultras exist though this would be a cool theme.
It's only one loop so not really a backyard ultra.
Sesse__ 9 hours ago [-]
How would it differ from other long ultras?
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
It would be on the longer side of ultras and unique if it was actually run over the route (vaguely defined) that Leatherman took. But that's mostly because they tend to not be done that way because of the difficulties of supporting runners when the course is that long. The really long ultras are often lap based instead of being a course that's actually 100+km long or take place in remote areas with support cars following the runners.
chinaev 9 hours ago [-]
Cool origin story
codezero 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
steinuil 1 hours ago [-]
Hey buddy I think you got the wrong door, the rock shelter's two blocks down.
keyle 15 hours ago [-]
Sometimes you find the most random things on HN, you have to wonder how that came about.
Interesting character for sure, this leatherman.
redbell 10 hours ago [-]
OP here..
Yes, I agree that HN is the place to discover the most interesting, coolest and weirdest stuff on the internet but unfortunately, sometimes, these posts don't get enough traction in their first minutes and once they got pushed to the second page of newest submissions, they are technically dead!
Fortunately, HN had introduced what's called pool, or second chance, where the mods of the site periodically watch for past submissions and pick what they believe is interesting then throw it to the front page and see if it sticks by having users upvoting it.
Leatherman story was one of those cases. I submitted it three days ago without getting a single upvote and was surprised to see it made it to the front page this morning.
praptak 9 hours ago [-]
I remember getting a second chance with my submission for non-explosive demolition agents.
The mods didn't put it on the front page themselves but instead emailed me with an invitation to repost.
I don't know where, but probably here on HN, I read a very long version of the same story. The wikipedia version was surprisingly short. I remember reading it and feeling a lot of emotions. I think this is the version:
but it seems too new... I'm sure it was more than a year ago I read about it...
EDIT: that's definitely not the one. The one I read was by an author who had had a life-long obsession with the Leatherman and wanted to retrace his steps, on his own, and he had a family. It was a haunting piece.
EDIT 2: actually, looks like it is the article. I didn't scan far enough. I guess March 2025 feels a really long time ago.
marze 5 hours ago [-]
My brother has a friend who is the modern day equivalent. He travels North America by bike, eats pizza from cheap pizza restaurant dumpsters.
nartho 2 hours ago [-]
If he's eating from the dumpsters why not eat from the fancy restaurant's dumpster instead ?
hyperbolablabla 25 minutes ago [-]
I can think of a few reasons. People tend to overorder pizza more than other stuff. Pizza is also more robust than other foods, so it survives being thrown away more than other things. It's also very satiating, comprising bread, dairy and meat.
reader9274 14 hours ago [-]
"The more I read about this character, the more I don't care for him" - Norm Macdonald
afandian 13 hours ago [-]
That has to be the oddest Godwin’s Law ever.
Any why?
implements 10 hours ago [-]
Don’t want to edit Norm, but a (perhaps British sensibility) alternative is:
“The more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I like him”
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
This was actually the line Norm MacDonald usually used, though he might have had a similar punch line in several different bits.
regnull 8 hours ago [-]
Fun fact: you can visit his cave in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation, Westchester county. Interesting place. Not many people around. You can sit in the cave and try to imagine the life he lived.
A very different man, but the book 'The Autobiography of a Super Tramp' is a fascinating read from the hayday of the tramp - about one manes tramping across the UK and USA
The thing which that article leaves unsaid is that this lifestyle existed in the context of seasonal migrant workers (hobos) who were still necessary to the not-yet fully mechanized agriculture of the time.
One work which touches on this is Louis L'Amour's autobiography: _Education of a Wandering Man_ which is a great read.
rtkwe 2 hours ago [-]
There's still a lot of non mechanized agriculture in the US. Fruits especially are often hand picked. Strawberries in particular can be pretty grueling [0] because they're low to the ground. Even the semi mechanized version has the workers lying on their bellies rapidly picking as the tractor tows their platform along. [1]
Change one a to u and this might be about a president ^_^ I never noticed before how close those words were. And he'd probably like the prefix "Super".
triyambakam 15 hours ago [-]
I thought this might be about a multi tool from the Leatherman brand
10729287 13 hours ago [-]
Me too. And then wondered what kind of tool we would add to a Leatherman labelled The Vagabond.
elcapitan 10 hours ago [-]
As I would associate Vagabond primarily with the samurai manga, I would expect a full katana blade.
maxbond 13 hours ago [-]
A swivel knife for tooling leather. The saddle doubles as a bottle opener.
IncreasePosts 4 hours ago [-]
Fire starter
wyclif 11 hours ago [-]
For a sec I thought the same thing. Anyway, "Leatherman" is a totally great brand name. So good, I wish I'd thought of it first.
fhd2 14 hours ago [-]
Me too, got excited for nothing. But then I wondered - maybe that's where their name comes from?
szszrk 14 hours ago [-]
The brand's name came simply from Tim Leatherman, their founder. I don't know what is the real origin of his family name, though :)
gorfian_robot 5 hours ago [-]
Tim is still kicking and doing promo events. I ran into him under a tent selling tools in downtown Melbourne!
Podrod 12 hours ago [-]
One would assume it's an occupational surname like Tanner.
wyclif 11 hours ago [-]
I have to admit, when I discovered this I was a bit disappointed. For a long time I thought it was just a great brand name somebody came up with instead of the founder's last name.
lazide 10 hours ago [-]
A good last name is the best kind of brand name though?
It’s 100% commitment.
GuB-42 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, Li-ion batteries would have been so much better had they been called "Goodenough batteries".
And we already have Galvanic cells and Voltaic piles, so it wouldn't have been the first battery named after its creator.
sparky_z 14 hours ago [-]
Nope. It's named after its inventor, Tim Leatherman.
Not all who wander are lost. They may be just walking in circles.
comrade1234 10 hours ago [-]
"No visible human remains were recovered during the exhumation."
Seeing his picture and then reading this I fully expect that he's still walking the route as a zombie and always has been a zombie.
lelandfe 8 hours ago [-]
“Residents along the route, pleased with this plucky zombie, would take to leaving out plates of offal and brain for him near the graveyard”
rob 10 hours ago [-]
He's pretty popular here in Connecticut. You can hike to one of his "caves" with a trail near Black Rock State Park.
kaiken1987 47 minutes ago [-]
Yeah I remember hearing about him when I was a kid. Amusing to see a local legend posted to HN. Didn't even have to click the Wikipedia link.
fideloper 9 hours ago [-]
i grew up really close to that
yahoozoo 10 hours ago [-]
Is there a Wikipedia page that contains a list of interesting, real people like this?
farrelle25 10 hours ago [-]
This mightn't be exactly what you're looking for - but Leatherman seems an example of a class of people called 'Holy Fools'. (maybe because Leatherman carried a little prayer book)
The Holy Fools were semi-religious figures who acted strangely or pretended to be mad to challenge social norms and express spiritual truths.
They were common in Russia at one time and called: "yuródivyy"
In the West, some examples would be Francis of Assisi and Benedict Joseph Labre.
edit: In the USA I'd nearly call Johnny Appleseed one of the 'Holy Fools' and even Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
MereInterest 9 hours ago [-]
Not an official list, but there’s a few I’m aware of, each interesting in a different way.
original digital nomad or freelancers as they called it earlier
MoSattler 14 hours ago [-]
this kind of freedom, once possible, is now gone.
oersted 10 hours ago [-]
Is it? You just have to give up a lot for it. Perhaps you had less to loose back then, people were closer to this state of being, but that's not good, and it was probably much tougher to live like this at the time.
Thankfully the standard of living has been high enough for long enough for most people, that certain sacrifices are culturally unimaginable, but they are still there.
Freedom is not free.
If you refuse to make long-term commitments to other people and to society, you will loose the benefits of their commitments to you. Even ignoring other people, if you refuse to make long-term commitments to yourself or a certain goal, commitments that will require you to do lots of things you don't feel like doing, suspending your freedom, you will never build anything meaningful, anything that makes life worth living.
That's what being civilized is all about, collectively maximising our long-term freedom, instead of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of others freedom, instead of pursuing freedom in the present at the expense of greater freedom in the future. It's made us so much better.
Everyone still has the option to unplug from the matrix and go do whatever they feel like, good for you. But do not expect help if you don't help others, and do not expect much goodwill if you refuse to engage in our collective pursuit of making things better for all of us.
redleader55 12 hours ago [-]
Do you mean in the US? There are many countries around Europe with large populations of traveling folks - they even have cars and setup camps only to move further when they feel like it. As far as I know there are many countries where no one asks anything if you set a tent and spend the night, especially in the mountains, but more generally on land that is not privately owned.
borski 11 hours ago [-]
There are still plenty of homeless travelers who live in caves. We have plenty here in CA.
__turbobrew__ 6 hours ago [-]
As long as you don’t litter and cause forest fires nobody cares if you live in the bush/caves. Hell, if you have a birth certificate you can get free health care here while living in the bush!
dominicq 13 hours ago [-]
this guy was for sure a supernatural being
cfj 11 hours ago [-]
I think there's at least a 40% chance this was Radagast. His fate after the War of the Ring is unknown after all.
cryptos 15 hours ago [-]
Was the tool company named after this man?
sparky_z 14 hours ago [-]
No, named after the founder, Tim Leatherman.
Mistletoe 13 hours ago [-]
Since that picture terrified me I searched for more images of him:
During my time unemployed my pace of life was more like it is when you are on a camping/hiking trip with a group of scouts: a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch (beginning with walking to fetch the relevant supplies). Now when I am back to work, I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym, because there is not time to do both.
I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
>I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.
Trust me mate. Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD. I am homeless for 3 months now and it's absolutely devastating for my soul and morale.
Having no "safe harbour" takes away all enjoyment from "freedom". I was an avid hiker as well in the past :)
It's probably the assumption that something that can be a nice hobby on its best days, a short escape, must also be a nice life. But it's the dose that makes the poison. Things are very different when they become your life and there's no safety net. It's why almost anyone can walk a line drawn on the ground where mistakes are totally forgiven, but very few can walk a high rope with no safety net.
> I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. Who made them serfs of the soil? Why should they eat their sixty acres, when man is condemned to eat only his peck of dirt? Why should they begin digging their graves as soon as they are born?
It hits me every summer like clockwork tbh - leaving a nicely typed 2 minutes notice on my VP's desk and just taking my chances as a traveling beach bum. Akin to wanderlust, I'm filled with the urge to just go off into the unknown.
In my heart of hearts I know I'm a soft city boy though. I wouldn't last a week.
I was fired from a city job.
Started hitchiking and living outside. Eventually worked on a fishing boat in the Bering Sea, worked the oil fields in the Dakotas, fought in a civil war in another country, hiked state-long parts of the PCT, hung out with tree-dwelling hippies in the doug-fir forests etc.
I would live that life again in a heartbeat if I didn't have a child to support, which was pretty much the end of my adventures. If you're single you can pretty much work day labor 25% of the year and have plenty enough to live inna-woods. The reason why most 'homeless' people seem so miserable is they are too mentally ill or drug ridden to do some fairly basic things to make their lives living outside 100x better; if you are sober and able bodied and able-minded it is a cakewalk.
The film Sullivan's Travels from 1941 is a film that explores the concept of this romanticization. It's a good movie whose storytelling and comedy still hold up today. I think more people should be aware of it.
Trivia: This is also where the movie O' Brother Where Art Thou got its name.
Yet of course - my kids and grandkids who were raised in suburban environments ALL romanticize farming...
The problem to me when I see this kind of life suggested as something people should try to do is that it isn't universalizable. There are only so many restaurants in any given city that need artisan vegetables. There is only so much land near such cities that can grow it. Even if all people who try are equally able, very few would succeed in doing this.
Another words, farmers back in that time would pretend they were busy all day. But actually spent a lot of the time "out in fields" bullshitting hunting, hanging with their friends at the river, or having fun building random shit in the workshop out of leisure rather than necessity. I didn't have the heart to tell the women in my family he probably didn't come home sooner because he didn't want to hear nagging or whining children, because it was blatantly obvious to me what the situation was.
It's much better to examine one's motivations for romanticizing the farm. Is it escapism from reality and the suffering endemic to it (in which case, you are only multiplying it by avoiding it)? Is it pride (too good to work)? Is it an impulse toward "immanentizing the eschaton"? Does your current job suck? Is the environment bad? Is it because you're living your life in a meaningless way?
Worth exploring.
Some people even go camping for recreation.
There's a balance of course, but I believe most people would benefit from harder lives (in the natural/physical sense). Modern life being more comfortable and easier is actually bullshit. If your life is driving through traffic hours a day to go to a place to sit in front of a computer by yourself to send out messages by chat and email, that is a very hard life. You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
It does when it applies to your life. (Edit to reply to your edit) A bit of physical activity doesn't make your life harder. A lot of it might. And almost only hard physical activity is pure punishment, even literally used as such in labor camps.
> the safety nets are often illusions
Safety nets are sometimes illusions, they are mostly helping. Like an airbag they only need to work once to prove their worth.
> see: insurance, for one example
Insurance saved the livelihoods of millions of people, sometimes many times over. Rebuilding houses, repairing equipment, covering medical expenses, or critical services. Sometimes they fail you.
Do you know many people who wish for a hard life? For the homeless life? To not have any sort of insurance?
> There's a balance of course [...] You are forsaking nature and an eon of evolution to satisfy what exactly?
The balance.
This one always gets me. I've had 7 orthopedic surgeries in the past decade. I couldn't walk without a cane or tie my own shoes in 2016 and today I can skateboard, run marathons, and squat double my bodyweight. I've had my house flood from a burst pipe on the top floor, had my HVAC condenser struck by lightning, had a city dump truck crush my parked car. Insurance has saved my ass so many times that I could pay a hundred grand a month in premiums for the rest of my life and still come out ahead.
People are so headline fixated that they only ever see the claim denials and think that's all that ever happens.
I’ve experienced plenty of my own claim denials. In fact, I had to stop treatment of my chronic condition due to the last one. This is certain to cause my knees to fail in a few years.
You think they only exist in headlines? Then get your own head out of the news and talk to real people.
Insurance is the rent-seeking middleman that exists between you and them for no purpose other than to shave a percentage off forthemselves.
I agree that the providers themselves, along with the basic science and engineering that made their work possible in the first place, deserves the bulk of the credit, but nobody was attacking physicians and scientists here.
For what it's worth, in plenty of other Reddit-style "everthing sucks and I'm pessimistic about technology" threads, I'm out there touting these same stories as examples of science and technology making the world better, as many of these procedures either weren't possible or had far worse success rates as recently as 20 years ago. This just wasn't one of those threads.
I'm not sure what to make of the non sequitur to reddit threads though.
The people who do the job should get a lot of the credit. But none of them do it for free. Insurance is there to make sure you can pay those people for what needs to be done in the aftermath of very unlikely but very high impact events. A lot of people pay very little so a few people don’t have to pay a lot.
The industry has a lot of failings but this doesn’t wipe out the utility of the service.
Yes this is soul destroying - the psychological effects are brutal. Not having any little place as a 'base'.
I was homeless in Europe for a few weeks and it really crushes someone. I can see why so many rough sleepers take alcohol / drugs. Just to numb everything. I used to drink a few cans every night before trying to find a place to sleep.
Another crushing thing: as a commenter below said - on average people look down at you as if you were dirty etc. I found that so hard too.
I wish you the very best wherever you are ... really hope your situation will get better somehow please God...
(edit: oh just realised something - not implying the OP takes any substances or anything... just talking in general how I had to resort to alcohol in my situation)
You can have money or food supplies and still be a homeless traveler. While it is common to assume homeless is broke, sometimes adventure and not being strapped to a certain, civilized life is the goal. I'm always amazed how far legs can take you.
I was intentionally homeless for 4 months, just riding my bike all around western Europe, just setting up my tent in a random woodland every night. I didn't have a safe harbor, except for the knowledge that I could get a job and rent an apartment if I wanted to.
It was not hard at all. In fact, I loved every minute of it. I lived/worked on a farm and slept on a bed for 2 weeks(WWOOFing), and I could not wait to get back out on the road again.
Why? Stay strong my friend.
And that’s before you get to the fact that each night you need to find a place to sleep and nobody wants it to be near them.
It’s immensely depressing, and hard to stay resilient.
In my life, this has forced me to quit on a bunch of things I would have continued otherwise, and to lean down things like my workouts and so on. This isn't necessarily bad, I like that I can now do 80% with 20% of time/effort, but still, would be nice to have more slack.
I've had two experiences with people like that:
- At one place I've worked at (big corp), the QA department was full of contractors. One of the contractors was only working 9 months per year - they spent all summers in Australia. Everyone knew about that and accepted this. The contractor was great, and no one had problems with that (I am sure not having to pay them anything while they were away helped :) )
- At other place, a small startup, we had a team member who was in a band. He'd work for us for a few months, help us to finish a project and make sure customer is happy.. and then disappear for a few more months to tour the US. Again, he was a great programmer, and we always welcomed him back.
I am sure that not every place is like this (for example my current workplace is pretty bureaucratic and would not be happy with this arrangement), but things like this definitely exist.
Doable, but it’s about what you prioritize and care about.
Honestly, this sounds like an armchair fantasy.
It sounds great on paper– tech jobs pay $150K, so just find a remote job and work half-time. Boom, less taxes and you still have $5K/mo plus tons of time!
IME though, 99% of jobs want to own you full-time. There are almost no roles where you can be part-time. The other alternative, independent contractor or Upwork, is also very difficult to start, even if you have good experience and skills.
A lot of writing glue code to build dashboards and things.
Nowadays, a lot of AI work to improve attorney and paralegal efficiency, etc.
Law firms have software devs and/or IT on staff, or they contract it out. Contracting rather than a W2 is also an option.
It’s not “fun.” But it pays well and is often doable remotely / part-time.
What sounded wonderful to me was this sentence: 'One store kept a record of an order: "one loaf of bread, a can of sardines, one-pound of fancy crackers, a pie, two quarts of coffee, one gill of brandy and a bottle of beer"'
This was a time when food brands weren't really a thing, the store probably had one type of bread, one type of (local) canned sardines, one type of crackers, etc. Each shop had a different variation and "menu", so to speak, all completely unique to each other. These days there is no difference between grocery stores, they all sell big-brand stuff and only convenience/price is the differentiating factor. No wonder only Walmarts are left.
I think about this a lot when it comes to AI automation for coding.
Yes, it's nice if an AI can speed up the sort of semi-mindless parts of programming. But I strongly suspect that I need those spans of time for my mind to do the background processing necessary for the actual intellectually challenging parts of the job.
I've written two books and anyone who has done that will telling that writing is exhausting. It's an act that is almost purely intellectual with very little menial labor. And it is so utterly draining that it's hard to do for more than a couple of hours a day.
I don't relish programming turning into that. I like the easy refactoring and bug fixing tasks because they provide a respite between periods of very deep thinking while still keeping me mostly focused on the overall problem domain. I suspect I would be an overall worse engineer if I lost those.
It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to myself. My gear was stolen within days, I got beat up and nearly stuck with dirty heroin needles at least 3 times, almost arrested twice, and yeah .. it just generally sucked. I was not prepared for the hardship.
6 months in the Australian desert after that experience definitely made me appreciate the Australian desert a lot more than I had previously, and I will never, ever try this experiment in an American city again.
Its not the street that'll get to you. Its the street life. If I were the only homeless bum in the area, I would've done better I think - but it was all too easy to filter out to skid row after having been chased out of pretty much every 'sanctity' spot I could find, under bridges and in the Griffith Park area - whether by cops or by other homeless people. It was pretty stupid of me, in hindsight. I really didn't need to do it, I was just trying to push my boundaries before heading into the Kimberley region to eat snakes and lizards. That was, by comparison, a far better experience than the reptiles of LA. Would not recommend.
I would spend my days in serious anticipation of the night sky, a glorious spectacle which majesty is yet to be matched by any human thing I've seen since then.
It was awesome and something I do hope to do again before I perish. Probably the most impactful event in my life was waking up on a dry creek bed surrounded by camels, who had come in the night to sleep at my side, sharing the warm creek stone bed.
Catching snakes for tucker was fun too. ;)
It is telling that society regularly outlaws afflictions like homelessness or situations like vagrancy instead of targeting the specific instances of bad behaviour that ought to be the problem.
The bad behaviours you want to be outlawed are in fact already outlawed. It's just super hard to catch and convict on those. While it's a lot easier to prove someone is sleeping rough.
First: We hide the symptoms behind a veneer of illegality which allows us to ignore the underlying causes.
Second: We intentionally write laws which has a proportionally negative effect based on social and medical class of citizens. A class which is already facing hardships.
”The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrianism
Crazy things like people walking 1 mile every hour for 1000 hours, grabbing bits of sleep within those hours.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes#Running_highligh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_ultra
Interesting character for sure, this leatherman.
Yes, I agree that HN is the place to discover the most interesting, coolest and weirdest stuff on the internet but unfortunately, sometimes, these posts don't get enough traction in their first minutes and once they got pushed to the second page of newest submissions, they are technically dead!
Fortunately, HN had introduced what's called pool, or second chance, where the mods of the site periodically watch for past submissions and pick what they believe is interesting then throw it to the front page and see if it sticks by having users upvoting it.
Leatherman story was one of those cases. I submitted it three days ago without getting a single upvote and was surprised to see it made it to the front page this morning.
The mods didn't put it on the front page themselves but instead emailed me with an invitation to repost.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-w...
but it seems too new... I'm sure it was more than a year ago I read about it...
EDIT: that's definitely not the one. The one I read was by an author who had had a life-long obsession with the Leatherman and wanted to retrace his steps, on his own, and he had a family. It was a haunting piece.
EDIT 2: actually, looks like it is the article. I didn't scan far enough. I guess March 2025 feels a really long time ago.
Any why?
“The more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I like him”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_a_Super...
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1646104/
One work which touches on this is Louis L'Amour's autobiography: _Education of a Wandering Man_ which is a great read.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/SipsTea/comments/1kqv2yd/pov_manual... pardon the subreddit it was the best video I could find shortly.
[1] https://youtu.be/jmib5b7AhXg?t=24
It’s 100% commitment.
And we already have Galvanic cells and Voltaic piles, so it wouldn't have been the first battery named after its creator.
Seeing his picture and then reading this I fully expect that he's still walking the route as a zombie and always has been a zombie.
The Holy Fools were semi-religious figures who acted strangely or pretended to be mad to challenge social norms and express spiritual truths.
They were common in Russia at one time and called: "yuródivyy"
In the West, some examples would be Francis of Assisi and Benedict Joseph Labre.
edit: In the USA I'd nearly call Johnny Appleseed one of the 'Holy Fools' and even Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/podcasts/the-daily/old-le...
Thankfully the standard of living has been high enough for long enough for most people, that certain sacrifices are culturally unimaginable, but they are still there.
Freedom is not free.
If you refuse to make long-term commitments to other people and to society, you will loose the benefits of their commitments to you. Even ignoring other people, if you refuse to make long-term commitments to yourself or a certain goal, commitments that will require you to do lots of things you don't feel like doing, suspending your freedom, you will never build anything meaningful, anything that makes life worth living.
That's what being civilized is all about, collectively maximising our long-term freedom, instead of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of others freedom, instead of pursuing freedom in the present at the expense of greater freedom in the future. It's made us so much better.
Everyone still has the option to unplug from the matrix and go do whatever they feel like, good for you. But do not expect help if you don't help others, and do not expect much goodwill if you refuse to engage in our collective pursuit of making things better for all of us.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-w...