4 ms·

> There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money. You say that, and yet > places to go Travel is expensive

> There’s just so, so much to experience in life, and so little of it has anything to do with money. You say that, and yet > places to go Travel is expensive. > people to meet If you live in a small town and want to start meeting people radically different from the people you usually meet, you should probably move to a larger city. Large cities are expensive. > cuisines to taste Eating out is expensive. > things to learn, books to read These are perhaps the ones that require the fewest resources, and even these require enough of a work-life balance that you're not completely exhausted by the time you finish at your third job. Depending on how your economic circumstances are, a healthy work-life balance might not pay the bills. Now, for the upper middle class readership that HN is most likely composed of, sure, the costs of all these activities are negligible. But I think it's a stretch to say that a homeless person on the street should "get out there and really start living." To do that, they need enough money to get to a stable situation first, and the sort of money that's trivial for us to come by is not always so trivial for everyone else...

adrianN 6y ago
Comfortable, fast, safe, travel is expensive. Just traveling itself is relatively cheap, you just need a backpack and shoes.
- ajmadesc 6y ago
  You really don't understand. You need to be able to take more than a day off without getting evicted/loosing your car or eating oats most days. Go tell people that they don't need a home, their job and it's meager benefits like healthcare, and they should just be more stoic.
  - adrianN 6y ago
    I just counted "a sufficiently stable life that it's still there when you return" as part of "safety" and "comfort". If traveling is a priority for you, you can live the life of a wandering monk, with the associated downsides.
freethinky 6y ago
I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.

adrianN 6y ago

Comfortable, fast, safe, travel is expensive. Just traveling itself is relatively cheap, you just need a backpack and shoes.

ajmadesc 6y ago
You really don't understand. You need to be able to take more than a day off without getting evicted/loosing your car or eating oats most days. Go tell people that they don't need a home, their job and it's meager benefits like healthcare, and they should just be more stoic.
- adrianN 6y ago
  I just counted "a sufficiently stable life that it's still there when you return" as part of "safety" and "comfort". If traveling is a priority for you, you can live the life of a wandering monk, with the associated downsides.

freethinky 6y ago

I'm not from the US. But in Europe nothing of this must be expensive. I'm almost 40 and lived almost always in shared flats (ca. 2500€ year). Often we got a very old cheap farmhouse half an hour away from a bigger town, which is still accessible by public transportation. Food I sometimes buy and sometimes we get it from places where they would throw it away. Also planting our own stuff. Sure you have to sometimes eat zucchini for a week, or now pumpkin for several weeks :D but you get creative. While travelling I used internet pages like Couchsurfing & HelpX and many others. Some months I spent less than 50€. I met a lot of amazing people on the way which lead to a lot of very nice opportunities. What I learned this way that it is trivial for me to find a place to sleep everywhere on the world. People are helpful and when you help them, they often give you new opportunities, at least that was almost always the case for me. Overall the most expensive things for me is the yearly health care (ca. 3500€). When I work, normally, for one year, this allows me quite easily live for 3-4 years. Knowing this gives me also quite some peace. The good thing is I met people abroad, which also realized that travelling in a more simple fashion could really be very cheap and gave up their job, started to travel around. So far several Couchsurfing couples visited me back from countries which are not really known to make the average person rich (an the couples I met, by no means were). I don't claim I figured out live, but it is definitely possible to life differently.