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Meet the minimalists living out of a hard drive
- DannoHung 16y agoMan, I hate traveling. I can understand the appeal of a spartan lifestyle, but I can't understand the appeal of not knowing where your head is going to rest tonight.
- elai 16y agoGuidebooks, smartphone map search, a prepaid cellphone & SIM and planning a day or two ahead solves all of that! Also staying more than one day. A few of these people aren't long term nomads although, they're more freeloaders or bums. The first guy has an apartment!
- iliketosleep 16y agothis might be a trend of the future. people are more mobile these days, and physical possessions can keep people tied down. i once thought about what i really need, and 80% of it is on my computer! time to start a remote backup company :)
- nickpinkston 16y agoBrain uploaders are missing that backing up your brain would create a clone of your mind - not transfer your conscious experience inside a digital world. Vacations of this nature would be your clone telling you the good time they had.
- arethuza 16y agoYou're talking about memories
- metamemetics 16y agoWhich is why you would slowly replace brain matter with technology, cortical column by cortical column, until there was nothing left ;) But honestly I think biotech could progress to the point to where biological aging is neutralized. Cells break down and make copying failures for only a few specific reasons. I think the biological will be preserved and merely augmented with better human-machine interfaces. Also cloning yourself or making a digital backup from yourself isn't that much different from having kids. Both are to ensure the survival\existence of data whether its encoded genetically or not.
- gaius 16y agoThe DJ has now substituted his bed for friends' couches How does this scale when no-one has free crash space to give...? It's like those TV shows where a family give up the corporate rat race and go and run a B&B or a vineyard in the country, who are their customers apart from corporate workers? It's not a revolution if only a small percentage of the population can ever do it.
- jdietrich 16y agoIt doesn't scale, it's not intended to scale. If millions of people were vagabonding, we could look at an array of possible options, the most obvious being an AirBnB-style approach to renting rooms for days or weeks at a time. If you're happy to share a house, it's already cheaper to spend a month each in Paris, Amsterdam, London, Berlin, Edinburgh and Barcelona than it would be to stay in Paris, including airfare. Housing is currently relatively illiquid because the demand for liquid housing is minimal. There's a big gap between "the place you live for years at a time" and "the place you vacation for a week or two" because that's what the market demands. The backbackers hostel only came into existence when airfares became affordable and young people started travelling internationally. Same with Spanish resorts and the package holiday, same with seaside B&Bs and the railway. If technology allows it and people demand it, we'll see it appear quite quickly. Your second point is the same faulty logic that presumes "we'll always need people to actually make things/sweep the roads/other menial labour". Mechanisation and automation supplants the need for most of those workers, freeing them up to do work better suited to humans - usually in the service industry. The majority of westerners work in the service industry already, it only stands to reason that they will become more skilled and more specialised. There is absolutely no reason why we can't have a huge number of people running small B&Bs or vineyards or boutiques or cafés. The trends behind this article make it clear that we can't expect to continue running an economy on selling 'stuff', the future economy is clearly based on cultural and social experiences.
- gaius 16y agoI presumed no such thing. The people they left behind are doing service work remember: they're accountants, lawyers, bankers, and so on. But how many corporate workers drinking does it take to make a vineyard a viable business? Or vacationing, a boutique B&B? Because if you have two B&B owners who simply swap to go on holiday, or two vineyards who simply drink each other's wine, then you've invented a perpetual motion machine.
- billybob 16y agoAn illusion. You're as attached to your digital possessions as you were to your physical ones. You just have different preferences.
- pchristensen 16y agoThat's fine, you just don't need to pay for space for stuff. Space is very, very expensive monetarily and psychologically.
- scott_s 16y agoSo is the psychological cost of never knowing where you will sleep.
- keegangrayson 16y agoI'm a touring musician and it's not that bad. I like waking up and not knowing where I am. I find that when I get comfortable I become stagnant.
- pchristensen 16y agoThere's a big difference between the space for you (important) and the space for 200 DVDs, or 60 changes of clothes, or a set of lawn tools, or rarely used sporting equipment, or ...
- scott_s 16y agoIndeed, there is, but at least one of the people profiled in the article doesn't even have a space for himself.
- hugh3 16y agoSpace is expensive monetarily, but how is it expensive psychologically? I find _not_ having enough space to be psychologically expensive. Nothing better than going for a walk through your own house, knowing it's all yours and nobody can invade it. But hey, different people have different preferences...
- chrislloyd 16y agoAs well as being a bad-ass programmer, Steve Dekorte is also a great example of this neavu-minimalism. His blog and Io show how deeply he has taken this "philosophy" (http://dekorte.com http://dekorte.com and http://www.iolanguage.com http://www.iolanguage.com). I also don't want to sound too creepy but he has a awesome apartment: http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266 http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10954098266 and http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299 http://twitter.com/stevedekorte/status/10901308299
- dieterrams 16y agoReminds me of another Steve, circa 1982: http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/y_walker08.html http://digitaljournalist.org/issue0712/y_walker08.html
- die_sekte 16y agoKlaus Biesenbach, not a programmer, also has a ultra-minimalistic apartment: http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2009/01/klaus_haus http://www.wmagazine.com/artdesign/2009/01/klaus_haus and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkfvPRejSQ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdkfvPRejSQ
- pchristensen 16y agoGosh I love the idea of doing this! Too bad my wife and kids won't go for it. :(
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoSlightly off topic...anyone know what kind of keyboard that is he had? Looks super useful being so small. Is it a Korg? This on: http://www.korg.com/nanoseries http://www.korg.com/nanoseries ? Confirmation?
- tricky 16y agolooks like an akai LPK25. The nanoSERIES keyboard is really hard to play - not very sensitive, keys are more like buttons. Used LPK25's are going for about $40 USD on ebay. Hoping to get one soon.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoThanks! Same here, would be awesome to have around since it's so portable. Appreciate the help.
- funkdobiest 16y agoIt does look like a Korg. From that picture his laptop looks like either a Dell or IBM, yet the article says he uses a MBP. Also I think it's kind of funny, the irony of this guy being a travel agent in this world where that job is becoming absolete due to the same technology that keeps from having to pay rent.
- lotusleaf1987 16y agoIt looks like a black Macbook to me. It just seems like more effort than getting a studio apartment and living lean. Simplicity is key. I need consistency.
- emanuer 16y agoSince almost 4 years now I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases. Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, I call home. I am very comfortable with the fact that I don't need to manage my possessions. And Dropbox, Google Apps and alike even made my fears of data loss a thing of the past. I enjoy moving to a different country almost every year, thanks to being a digital vagabond. I am taking a wild guess; The past 400.000 years of evolution in which our bodies and minds adapted to a nomadic lifestyle may still resonate in our genes. Only since a few thousand years were a majority of my ancestors bound to one place and this short period is unlikely to have had any genetic impact. A lack of constricting possessions is surprisingly rewarding (constricting in terms of hard to move). I suspect that this reward is universal to humans which would imply some kind of genetically predetermined preference. But it is just a wild guess. Yet I feel with my son's first birthday approaching this lifestyle will be hard to maintain.
- Dornkirk 16y agoAre you self-employed or do you work freelance or who do you work for and what do you do? I only ask because this is something I'm very much interested in doing myself, but I'm very apprehensive about making a big change like this due to job/money concerns.
- Daniel42 16y agoSame thing for me. I just got my CS master degree and now I want to discover the world with only my bike, my laptop and my reflex camera, a few month to a couple of years at the same place... But I'm worried by the first move. Where I live I got a lot of job opportunity but I don't know if I will be able to find a job in another country quickly enough and it doesn't work very well remotely.
- lzw 16y agoCountries love tourists but they are often wary of anyone who wants to "steal the jobs". Best to be in a situation where you're earning income without having to "work" in the country. If you have a popular web service or a iphone app you could do it. Since you just got your degree, my honest advice is this: 1) Be slow to accumulate stuff. 2) Exploit the location where there are a lot of jobs, but do it in a way that doesn't tie you down for 4 years. Do consulting or contracting, or become a co-founder of a startup that is a virtual company such that the company isn't tied to this location. You need some good work experience, which you might have gotten while getting your CS degree, but if not, get it, and get some savings to boot. 3) Start practicing it. Start working away for a week at a time. Unless you're independently wealthy you can't really spend your time without any work, so the challenge is working while you're a nomad. You might find this useful: http://microship.com/bike/index.html http://microship.com/bike/index.html
- jacquesm 16y agoTry that while raising a couple of children.
- joezydeco 16y agoExactly. How does this Neunomadic lifestyle last beyond a single generation?
- jacquesm 16y agoI don't even think you can make it last beyond a single generation, try this when you're 60+, when you are in need of a stable environment due to medical issues and so on. It's great in theory when you're healthy, in your early 20's to early 30's, when you are independent and have no dependents, when you are living in a climate that is favorable, and when you're living in a city. If any of those circumstances are not met you'll be either in a lot of trouble or you're most likely going to change. Those that don't have the option to change we call street people. And living off other people's couches and/or fridges and such does not make you an independent. I can see a good reason for doing with 'less stuff', but this extreme is simply not realistic on anything but the smallest of scales. It'd be tough if all your friends decided to do it tomorrow and you'd all want to sleep on each others' no longer existent couches...
- rdouble 16y agoMany retired people get rid of all their stuff and do the RV nomad thing. In the future when nobody has enough money to buy a house or a bunch of stuff in the first place we'll probably be seeing more nomadic seniors.
- jacquesm 16y agoAn RV is a mobile home, it has all the trappings of a home except for size, and for some of those RVs the size was bigger than my smallest apartment. It's just exchanging one set of stuff for a more mobile set of stuff, but not exactly minimalist. Those couples that I've met that did the 'RV thing' after their pension typically saw it as a way to do all the traveling that they had missed out on while in their working years, a way to reward a lifetime of hard work.
- mdh 16y ago"Another roof, another proof." - Paul Erdos http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Erd%C5%91s
- athom 16y agoI was about to mention this guy myself. Kudos!
- lzw 16y agoMy co-founder and I have been doing this for three years. We have two backpacks and we are nomadic. Interestingly, it isn't online services that have enabled this so much as a lifestyle choice. We value travel and figured it was cheaper to run our startup in most parts of the world than it was in our origin city. We don't use a lot of online services for our business. Biggest one is Gmail, really, and hosting. Things we couldn't take with us. I run a virtual machine on my laptop and under it I have a server that acts as our "intranet server" and so all of the collaboration tools, etc run there. I also start servers periodically while developing something that will eventually run in the cloud to test it out before running it online. We're geared to be able to work full time without access to the internet. We're expecting to be in places where there is no internet. However, for the past 3 years that we've been traveling we've had pretty much full time internet access so far. When we're without internet we use an ad-hoc wifi network so we always have our "local network" with us. Other than what fits in the backpacks we just have a couple boxes in storage. The most stressful experience has been going over all of our stuff and getting rid of it until we fit in the laptop. That took several months of work and because many of the possessions had a history it was not easy. But now, we can go anywhere anytime we want, just about. It is very liberating! Am willing to answer most questions....
- andresmh 16y agoDo you travel only to places with good internet connection?
- lzw 16y agoNot intentionally. It has sorta happened to be that way so far. Apparently this internet thing has been adopted widely. But the intention is to be able to be fully productive with only an occasional or intermittent internet connection. Really developed countries: We have internet where we stay. This is more common than we expected. Developed countries: We use mobile broadband for occasional net connectivity on demand, and use email and SMS to notify us about important events. So far all of our services are manage hosted so I've never gotten a "the server is down" message. Undeveloped Countries: Plan is to check in once a week with a cybercafe or wifi hotspot. GSM is a global standard and so, with an unlocked iPhone you can get pre-paid SIMs with dataplans. Fortunately for everyone Apple is now selling unlocked iPhones as a matter of course in countries with multiple iPhone carriers, like Canada, France, Germany and the UK.
- DanielBMarkham 16y agoI love this story. Sounds like a great life. For me I think this works best after you've done the kids thing, if you plan on doing that. But I strongly agree with the premise here: people are naturally nomadic
- mikaelgramont 16y agoI like how the reasoning behind the move to MP3s instead of discs is that MP3s don't wear out. Because, you know, hard disks don't wear out either... And with the whole move-to-digital thing, you might think you have less stuff, but what you're doing is transferring your belongings from one device to the next over time. Over the course of your life, you're gonna own dozens of laptops and the energy and the chemicals released to build those aren't free. Compare that to books and disks you bought once and for all (granted they don't wear out). Maybe the move to all-digital is for the better, but it's just not that obvious to me.
- rmc 16y agoYes harddrives wear out, but you can easily get a new harddrive and copy the stuff across seamlessly. It's like shelves for records. If you shelves that your records are on break, just get some new shelves and copy (i.e. move) your record collection across.
- lzw 16y agoOne of the biggest efforts in making this kind of a transition is the digitization of your life. This is a huge project, and some of the work is still ongoing. 1) Music and Movies. About the easiest as ripping CDs and DVDs is not that hard. 2) Photographs. There was a time when I shot on film, and so for all the images taken before then, they needed to be scanned. Scanning paper photos on a flatbed is not too bad, but scanning negatives is very slow and a very hands-on process. But it does produce the best results. 3) Books. This is the hardest. I stopped buying books about 5 years ago because ebooks weren't really ready to meet my needs then (I hate the kindle) and only started buying again now because the iPad does. But all these physical books. Scanning them is really a pain. Most of them just got tossed. We had huge collections of old instruction manuals that are long out of print and obsolete as well. Unfortunately, the books were an almost total loss. We flatbed scanned a few pages here and there and that's it. 4) Storage and backup. We've iterated several times in our strategy here. This is something to consider very carefully. The solution isn't the same between even the two of us, so you'll have to find your own. But keep at least 2 copies of everything in such a way as you always know what the prime copy is.
- rdouble 16y agoIn the past I've lived sort of like this and found it quite lonely and alienating. What the article doesn't mention is that nobody really wants to hang out with the weird guy with no stuff and no apartment. If you're single, only really strange and desperate people want to date you. I also found that the act of finding another place to stay quickly became tedious. In the past, nomads were out being nomadic with the rest of their huge nomadic tribe. They weren't just bouncing around settled society with a laptop by themselves.
- lzw 16y agoEverybody wants to hang out with a traveller. They all have questions. People who would never dream of doing what we do, are happy to tell us their dreams about doing what we do, believe it or not. Everyone seems to find the idea romantic even if they could never do it. Back when I was traveling by myself I found it easier to meet women on the road than at home. I guess maybe you would think these women were "really strange and desperate" because many of them were also solo travelers. I do like the term "settled society", as there is a strong temptation to see people who don't do this as having settled for something adequate. Travelling only changes your location, it doesn't change who you are. Who I am is someone who has trouble meeting people, but found that travel provided more opportunity for social interaction and people more willing to be open with me.
- rdouble 16y agoPeople do want to hang out with a traveller - for an evening. There's also a difference between being a "traveller" and just being a guy with no home and no stuff. The article seemed to be more about the latter.
- gilgad13 16y agoMaybe I just don't get it, but the things keeping me tied to my apartment are my bed, shower and stove, not my shelves and shelves of physical media. I don't see how the digitalization of my live helps with those things.
- RexRollman 16y agoI recently started down this trail to simplify my life and draw down my personal property. I got rid of my DVDs because I simply wasn't watching them. I ripped every one of my CDs in FLAC format and then gave them away to friends. And these days, instead of a netbook and a desktop, I have only a single laptop running Arch Linux. The one thing I cannot move on from is my book collection. I love books and I have two bookshelves with 285 graphic novels and novels (according to my LibraryThing account). And I am starting to make use of sites like Project Guttenburg to read public domains works (using FBReader).
- samratjp 16y agoMan, it seems as if the only thing missing is a data bank where you can drop off your hard drive and the bank will store it for you and even lend out free space to others at an interest. Yay virtual currency.
- BrandonM 16y agoIt's not quite what you describe, but bank vaults are actually quite cheap. The computer expert firm I work for has two large vaults (something like 8 cu. ft. each) at a KeyBank where we store scores of hard drives. We make a trip every Friday to rotate our set of backup RAIDs. It's a very simple, straightforward process, and I think our cost is something like $40/month for both vaults. You could probably get a vault big enough for a 2 TB external drive for something like $5-10/month.
- sliverstorm 16y agoLiving a nomadic lifestyle can be fun, but I like knowing where I'm going to sleep. If I lived in the middle of a plains or was hiking down a trail, I know that I will be sleeping 'up ahead' or 'over there' or 'on the side of this trail'. However, in urban environments you actually have to find somewhere to sleep. I'm also fond of my textbooks, which haven't yet been satisfactorily digitized, and my motorcycles and associated tools and parts, which haven't been successfully digitized either.
- brianobush 16y agoNot really minimalists... they depend on others for things they need. If they were truly minimalists, they would live in one of those micro-shacks, hacking basic on an Apple I replica that is powered by solar power, while watching the tomatoes ripen.
- oiuytghyuj 16y agoNot planning on going quite that far - but we are thinking of saving $200,000 by buying a one bedroom apartment with a few Kindle's instead of a 2Bed place with lots of bookshelves. All the DVDs are already ripped to a couple of hard drives, the disks but in DJ CD files and the cases thrown away - that saved a 6' bookcase.
- Parabola 16y agoI spent the last 3 months living in a tent in the mountains of New Mexico. Between my laptop and my cell phone's tethering, there was no issue at all getting work done. And it was an incredible experience. If you were willing to move to warmer climates during the winter you could do this all year no problem.
- etherael 16y agoit's hard to ruthlessly trim down your meatspace profile to really be able to just up and leave at the drop of a hat, My 27" iMac and xbox + games are the two pieces that just don't travel well, everything else has been easy enough, even my addiction to large monitors when working I've managed to deal with; http://www.lg.com/au/it-products/monitors/LG-wide-screen-monitors-E2340V-PN.jsp http://www.lg.com/au/it-products/monitors/LG-wide-screen-mon... This thing + my notebook and some clothes is fairly easily backpackable. I'm stuck in Sydney on contract for the next seven months but I think at the end of it I might just dispense permanently with the iMac and the xbox, the feeling of freedom you have from not being tied to any physical location is something I can't recommend highly enough.
- tomwalker 16y agoIf anyone wants a place to crash in London, email me