Authors: Mark Boyle
Receiving is very important, as it allows the giver the experience of being generous and kind. Without a receiver there can be no giver and being able to give is one of the greatest gifts bestowed on us. However, it was also vital to keep the integrity of my experiment intact in a very real and everyday way.
I’d constructed this concept in my head long before a Hollywood movie of that title helped me articulate it. The movie is about a child whose teacher asks the class to come up with an idea that could change the world for the better. The boy suggests that if one person helped three people with something important, in the faith that each of them would go on and help another three, and so
ad infinitum
, then not only would a lot of caring, kindness and love spread exponentially around the globe, it would also eventually come back to benefit the original giver. Probably at precisely the moment that they needed it most.
I have tried to use pay-it-forward economics to replace traditional bartering. It’s about giving and receiving freely. With traditional bartering, both parties agree a ‘price’ before any work is done; they then carry out what they have agreed until a full exchange has taken place. To me, this isn’t much different to money, though it has the benefit of being local and, more often than not, involves things that are important and mutually beneficial. It also creates a more real relationship. However, it lacks an essential spiritual quality: unconditional giving. There
is something about unconditional giving that transforms relationships and builds bonds in a way that traditional bartering never could.
When somebody does something for you just for the love of it, with no expectation of anything in return, it is very powerful, especially in the twenty-first century, when we are taught to look after ourselves before everything else. Pay-it-forward is all about unconditional giving. Nature works on this principle: the apple tree gives its fruit unconditionally, without asking for cash or a credit card. It just gives, in the faith that its benefactor will spread its seed further afield, giving the world even more apples.
How does pay-it-forward apply to my experiment? I never agree terms beforehand with people I help; I just help. It’s a relationship based on trust. I do it in the faith that my requirements will be met whenever I need (not want) something, whether that help comes from the person I helped or from someone I’ve never met, whether it comes five minutes after I’ve helped someone or two years later. Cliché enthusiasts call this ‘what goes around comes around’. I believe it’s nothing more complex than this: if you spend your time putting more love into the world, then it is reasonable to believe you are going to benefit from a world with more love in it.
Pay-it-forward is a beautiful theory and I believe that if we practiced it more fully, the world would be a much friendlier place. We are often too short-sighted and too self-absorbed. We take and we hoard but this creates what is, really, a very false sense of security and abundance. By giving and sharing we could all be so much better off materially, emotionally and spiritually. Not only would we have access to a larger pool of material resources, we’d have a wider network of friends and the warmth that comes with doing something just because we can.
Respecting other people’s wishes is an essential part of life and sometimes involves compromise. Even though I planned to live off-grid, I inevitably found myself in other people’s houses and workplaces. If I had to do what bears do in the woods, I could have pulled out a spade, dug a hole in the back garden and had a crap; in other words, absolutely shocked my hosts.
However, the point of my experiment was not to annoy and completely alienate the 99% of the population who still use money and sewers; staying steadfastly true to my beliefs in such instances would have been counter-productive. This is what I call my ‘law of respect’. I stood up for what I believed in but my focus is on effecting the most positive change in the longer term and on bringing people with me on the journey, if they want to come. If you respect someone else’s way of life they are far more likely to respect yours.
We’re soon going to have to make the transition to a world without oil; it is a finite resource and we are using it remarkably quickly. Not only are petroleum-based products incredibly polluting but using them puts pressure on governments to find new sources of oil; a pressure that has, increasingly, resulted in wars around the world.
I didn’t want to be responsible for that, so for the whole year no new fossil fuels were to be used in my name. If someone wanted to help by offering me a lift because they thought I was exhausted, I would politely refuse. I would allow myself to hitchhike, as the driver would be going that way anyway. I would only accept lifts when the journey was impossible by foot or bicycle and very sparingly, as the year was not about freeloading on others. I would never hitch the eighteen miles to Bristol to see
friends or to get food or wood, but I would do so to travel between countries.
Not only did I not pre-pay any of the normal bills we tend to accumulate, I didn’t even have any bills, as I set myself up to be completely off-grid. Setting up my infrastructure didn’t happen overnight. In some respects, I’d been preparing for it my whole life. However, more practically, I took six months to build up to the year, which I decided would start on November 29, 2008, better known as ‘Buy Nothing Day’ or, as the last Saturday in November, the day the Christmas buying frenzy officially kicks off in the United States.
When I first started to think about living for a year without money, I didn’t think it would be that difficult. While I always definitely enjoyed having a bit of spare cash at my disposal, it had been a while since my days of rampant consumerism. However, the more I started to explore the rabbit hole that is freeconomic living, the more of a warren it became. Not because it’s so difficult in itself, but because we in modern western societies have become very conditioned to our comforts and, more critically, have lost many traditional skills. Humans lived without money for a long time – over 90% of
Homo sapiens
’s time on the planet. The problem is that it has become something of a lost art.
One of my first realizations was that there is a huge difference between living on a very tight budget and not being able to spend a single penny. The US Census Bureau classifies a household that lacks the resources to meet the basic needs for
healthy living as impoverished. In official terms, a typical household earning less than about $22,000 is considered to be in poverty. Or some kind of living hell on earth. According to the US Census Bureau, around 12% of Americans live in poverty.
Poverty is a funny phenomenon. It is always defined financially and always relative to what other people earn. It is possible to be extremely happy despite having little money and being officially categorized as poverty stricken. You can also be really unhappy despite earning a high wage. Those who always want something more will always live in poverty, regardless of how much they earn, while those who are content with what they have will always feel they have an abundance. Most poverty in the West isn’t material poverty, it’s spiritual poverty, a state of mind in which fulfillment comes only from the pursuit of material gain. Much of the material poverty in places such as Africa stems from the spiritual poverty of the West, as institutions such as the World Trade Organization and International Monetary Fund (IMF) continue to cripple ‘developing’ nations with debts and restrictions designed to enable western governments to supply the extravagant products and cheap food we, as consumers, demand.
With a bit of organization, I found I could quite easily live on £5,000 ($7,500) a year, even after rent. The problems begin when you cannot use money at all, turning what would normally be a small purchase into a huge undertaking. Let’s say you live on a tiny wage of $50 a week and your pen runs out. Pens are, monetarily, cheap; almost anyone can run to the nearest store and pick up a new one for 30 cents. Without money, this becomes an entirely different prospect. It doesn’t matter if pens are unbelievably cheap, it doesn’t matter if they drop to 5 cents; without money, you simply cannot buy one. Instead of spending the equivalent of two minutes’ work at the US minimum wage, you’d have to spend three-quarters of a day making a new pen
from inkcap mushrooms. This is the difference between living frugally and living completely without money. This reality scared the hell out of me.
Journalists and reporters, it seemed, sensed the enormity of my experiment long before I did. In the early stages, often the first question they asked was ‘how are you going to do this?’ They hoped for a short sound-bite they could fit into their interview or article. Yet how do you explain succinctly how you are going to live without money for an entire year?
I found the best answer to this question was to be honest about how I had prepared. When I decided to live for a year without money, the second thing I did, after formulating my rules, was to get a notepad and list every single thing I consumed; as it stood, there and then. I called this my ‘breaking-it-down’ list. To structure my thoughts, I categorized my list into food, energy, heating, transportation, entertainment, lighting, communications, reading, art, and so on. The list eventually took up half the notepad – and that was the list of someone who considered himself quite a moderate consumer. I’d shudder to think of the list an A-list celebrity would come up with. I worked my way down the list, trying to figure out how I could acquire all the things I would normally need in ways that didn’t involve money. It became clear, after just a couple of pages, that most of the stuff would involve me having no more than one degree of separation from what I consumed; either I would make it myself or know the person who produced it.
This was a perfect starting point. It provided me with lots of really useful information with which I could make decisions. How many new skills would I have to learn either before or during the experiment? How much was the necessary
infrastructure going to cost? How much time would each activity take? As this year was about consuming less and having a closer relationship with the things that remained, my list-making enabled me to establish my basic level of subsistence, the things I really couldn’t do without, and my priorities for the rest.
One of the greatest things about this process was that it forced me to ask myself how important each item was. I love bread; it’s a deep-rooted addiction. The ‘breaking-it-down’ process made me realize that to have bread I would have to get my grain, take it home in my bike’s trailer (which always takes a bit longer on busy roads) and grind it into flour using a hand-cranked grain mill. I would have to make my sourdough starter and (for the first batch) wait five days. During these five days I would have to make a cob oven outside. Once that was made and fit for use, I would have to fire it up, then look after it constantly for a couple of hours as my bread cooked. By which time I would probably be too tired to eat the delicious loaf I had spent a week preparing.
I subscribe to the ‘Permaculture’ ideology. Permaculture is about creating human habitats and food production systems by designing models that mimic natural patterns. These models not only eliminate almost all waste and save lots of energy, but also save a lot of work. While I certainly wouldn’t call myself lazy, I don’t believe in using more kilojoules of energy to make food than that piece of food will supply, or it would make more sense to lie down and read a book. However, there is always a middle way. The listing process made me realize that, if I wanted bread, I was going to have to come up with a new solution. And I did. I decided that although I loved bread, it would have to be a treat. Instead, I would sprout the grains. This means sprinkling a layer of rye grains along a couple of stacked, perforated trays and rinsing them with water twice a day until they sprout. This only takes five minutes and so is much less effort, for more nutritional
gain, than making bread. Although not quite so pleasing to taste and smell!
This is just one example from a list of hundreds. Another benefit of the list was that it enabled me to figure out how much I would have to save and then spend to create the infrastructure necessary to make this year happen. It may sound ironic, or even contradictory, to hear me say I had to save and spend money to make my year without money happen. But I never said I wanted humanity to stop using money tomorrow, any more than I would like to see humankind stop using oil next week. Much as I would love to see both happen one day, currently it would cause catastrophe, as our entire infrastructure is based on the abundance of both. I view money in the same way as oil; if we insist on using it, let’s at least stop using it for non-essential or destructive goods and services. Let’s start using both these resources to build a new infrastructure that will enable us to be truly sustainable in the long term. For me, it is not about revolution, but about evolution, transition, and transformation.
To get the basic infrastructure I felt I required in order to live without money, it looked as though I was going to have to save around £1,600 ($2,400) in four months, at the same time as putting in the work needed for it all to come together in time. This figure was based on me buying everything (such as a home) either new or at the higher end of what it could cost if I were to buy it second-hand, as I didn’t want my year to fail before it had even started. However, I had no intention of buying everything. My plan was to see how much I could get for free by using other people’s waste, which was completely in keeping with the spirit of the project. This would be time-consuming, but possible.