7 ms·

A great excuse to drop a link to this legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke Richard Louis Pro

by sjaak 6y ago

A great excuse to drop a link to this legend: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Proenneke Richard Louis Proenneke (/ˈprɛnəkiː/; May 4, 1916 – April 20, 2003) was an American self-educated naturalist, conservationist, writer, and wildlife photographer who, from the age of about 53, lived alone for nearly thirty years (1969–1999) in the mountains of Alaska in a log cabin that he constructed by hand near the shore of Twin Lakes. Proenneke hunted, fished, raised and gathered his own food, and also had supplies flown in occasionally. He documented his activities in journals and on film, and also recorded valuable meteorological and natural data.[1][2] The journals and film were later used by others to write books and produce documentaries about his time in the wilderness.

throwaway4good 6y ago
I thought classic text on this was Thoreau's Walden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. Just as when you were a child or when you become old, society will give you more than what you are capable of producing.
- stepbeek 6y ago
  > As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. Can't I just produce enough to support myself? Why would that be immoral?
  - rob74 6y ago
    As long as you still don't rely on others when you get sick or old, I guess it would be ok...
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      There is always the age old pension scheme of having a child to make up the difference
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - Daho0n 6y ago
        If you want to give back having a child is the worst you could do. Not having a child would give more.
- sjaak 6y ago
  Without contesting your moral stance: what makes you think this man didn't contribute more than he took over the course of his life? He moved to nature at the age of 53 and stayed there until right before he died. If anything by not consuming housing and healthcare he 'took' less than his peers of the same age.
  - throwaway4good 6y ago
    I am sorry, I didn’t meant to speak about the morals of any specific person but instead of the general idea. Both Proenneke and Thoreau have made massive contributions, no doubt about that.
- beefield 6y ago
  Of course, if everyone did that, we would have a problem. But this is not a linear thing. If more people would do this than currently does, rest of the society could enjoy more of some of the scarce resources, thus as a society we would be better off. Thus UBI to let more people do things like this.
- ArnoVW 6y ago
  I'm pretty much an utalitairian, and I agree that that should be the objective. But it does raise an interesting point. Do people in "civilised society" produce more than they consume? Some, maybe. But the average person? I have no statistics to base it on, but I'm not convinced. Yes, we extract a lot of value. From the earth, from others (directly, or indirectly). But perhaps the depressing fact is that in terms of raw creation of value, perhaps "playing even" is not even such a bad "score"?
  - jonplackett 6y ago
    I’ve wondered about this too. I’m guessing a lot of the effort going into society is from other countries. People picking fruits and growing food is hard working going in. But it probably becomes a problem of definition. Is a tech CEO / Wall Street banker giving or taking value if they enable millions of people to do work but consume a great deal themselves. Everything’s all too muddled up
    - WanderPanda 6y ago
      I think dicounting for corruption, the material/monetary amount is a very good proxy for value. So I would say the average ceo yes, but companies relying on government spending (Palantir I’m looking at you) maybe not
    - catmanjan 6y ago
      I think the value needs to be traced to an essential need, only those functions resulting in food, water, shelter count as intrinsic value - by this definition tech CEO's contribute less than an average farmer
      - jeffwass 6y ago
        You say only farmers and home builders create value. But the farmers and home builders who work at scale require tools and resources created by industry, which in turn require raw materials, an ability to process these materials, and an ability to transport them. So are people working in those industries any less important than the farmers and home builders themselves? Further, those industries are capitally intensive and require a financial network to raise and allocate the capital required so these industries can function. In a nutshell - everything is connected. How do you simply decide where to draw the line of who is contributing an essential service and who isn’t?
- ic0n0cl4st 6y ago
  > Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. Consider how much of the fruits of our labor ends up in landfills and this seems like a somewhat disastrous philosophy to me.
- narag 6y ago
  As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. I feel that this view is terrible, not sure about why. Maybe because even if they can't stand others, you still want them to keep suffering. I think life is no bargain. Living in society, I try to be nice with others and most of the time I'm on the nicest group of people AFAICT. But living by certain codes, such as strict non-violence or considering that we all are indebted with society, I can't agree. Moral purism just seems wrong to me, if it makes any sense.
  - the_af 6y ago
    Agreed. I think it's terrible because it reduces human life to a game of input-output, expressed in seemingly economic terms ("produce"? What the hell does that mean?). In a way, it's also a technologist's outlook, but there are other outlooks, many more ancient and elaborate.
  - Cullinet 6y ago
    I read your "indebted with society" and the word that formed in my thoughts was "indenture". if you are saying that we're become indentured to modern society, I have never thought of it like this before but I am immediately inclined to agree with the idea given how much intellectual and practical learning and effort as well as usually some form of capital it requires to be able to live quietly somewhere on the fruits of your self catering labor. I suspect that if more people were able to access such a a life, then the quality of life for everyone might be notably improved.
    - angry_octet 6y ago
      It isn't an indenture in the sense that you can leave the country. But society definitely makes a large speculative investment in every individual. Encouraging women to have children, parental leave, public hospitals, childcare, school, arts and science for public enjoyment and edification... Back in the pre-Victorian era this was certainly not the norm. All these costs were self funded, and unsurprisingly people were uneducated, but parents still invested for their future by educating their children. It reminds me of the thought: if you're a hunter-gatherer and you hunt and kill a deer, you can only eat so much. You have no preservation system. What is the best way to store it? In someone else's belly. So society begins with a community, where by cooperation we achieve more together than we could individually. I feel that this is where these isolationist/survivalist ideas break down. Even the young man building the cabin is relying on years of education, knowledge about tools and construction, and of course food and medicine. I'm also not sure I would consider this sustainable if it can only be accessed by a fraction of the world's population. The irony is that this image of off grid living is funded by the >30 million hours of screen time from people in high income, high carbon economies. My computer is using 130W just watching it, though lower on mobile I guess. So should we ban entertainment? No, because it sparks the imagination and cooperation, the force multipliers of society.
- Turing_Machine 6y ago
  Well, Thoreau wasn't quite as self-sufficient as is often believed. For instance, he used to bring his laundry home for his mom to do.
- tygtty 6y ago
  The ever growing bureaucrat class does not produce anything. They invent new rules and substitute religions to siphon off economic value while sitting at their desks, commanding and intimidating the productive part of the population.
  - ethbr0 6y ago
    Anarchy doesn't scale.
    - emteycz 6y ago
      You can minimize the bureaucracy, erasing it completely is not the only option.
    - krageon 6y ago
      "X doesn't scale" is not an interesting argument because nothing has to. Society can very easily be small, done thousands of times.
      - ethbr0 6y ago
        I didn't think it needed more saying. Happy to hear arguments why "anarchy doesn't scale" is false. Small societies, done thousands of times, sound a lot like individuals. Unless you're proposing some sort of overarching organization principle by which these individuals agree to abide, in which case...
- emteycz 6y ago
  No person implicitly owes anything to anyone. It's more than enough that anything a person does within society is taxed.
- Dumblydorr 6y ago
  Arguably, he did produce more than he consumed. By his story, journals, film, and data, he has spawned numerous discussions and adaptations and inspired wonder. This is a lot more contribution than many adults in bizarre esoteric fields today.
- user3939382 6y ago
  In reality he lived basically at the edge of town, not in the middle of the woods and his experiment was short lived. To your point, I would argue that your moral responsibility is at least to break even, which you can’t do in isolation because your parents in most cases sacrificed a huge chunk of their lives and resources raising you.
- blacktriangle 6y ago
  At this point we're drowning in people who consume more than they produce, anybody who gets to break-even I'd consider doing a moral good.
- tomcooks 6y ago
  The only problem with Walden is that said cabin was far from detached from civilization
- tarsinge 6y ago
  There are plenty of companies and whole industries people working for contribute negatively, so at least it's fairly neutral.
- supernovae 6y ago
  When society and American capitalism becomes moral, then we can discuss the morality of those who don't conform... until then, with homelessness, poverty, starvation, disease, substance abuse, crime and such happening in "modern society" without much regard for those suffering in it I can't fault people whose only means to escape it may be isolation from the system(s) that don't give them the same privileges we have to debate this from the comfort of our computers/tech/internet and access to ycombinator
- NoSorryCannot 6y ago
  Ah, morality and the purpose of existence, topics that are famously settled and not open to serious debate or conflicting interpretations.
- wing-_-nuts 6y ago
  >Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. >As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. This is just a fascinating moral outlook to me. One has the responsibility to look after one's parents, but why is there any moral imperative to be 'productive'?
disabled 6y ago
This family is even more fascinating: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus... Lykov Family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family The Lykov family (Russian: Лыков, romanized: L'ikov) is a Russian family of Old Believers. The family of six spent 42 years in partial isolation from human society in an otherwise uninhabited upland of Abakan Range, in Tashtypsky District of Khakassia (southern Siberia). Since 1988, only one daughter, Agafia, survives. In a 2019 interview, Agafia explained how locals were in contact with the family through the years and in the 1950s there was a newspaper article about their family. Agafia Lykova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova
- Clewza313 6y ago
  More sad than fascinating: lots of kids dying of malnutrition and starvation etc. The Vice documentary is pretty incredible though: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wdp339/agafias-taiga-life-full-length https://www.vice.com/en/article/wdp339/agafias-taiga-life-fu...
jksmith 6y ago
This. Great video documentary. Another, more hippy fun: Yukon Passage - a NatGeo production.
marttt 6y ago
See also: Pentti Linkola: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola And Lasse Nordlund (I think he was called "optimistic Linkola" or "positive Linkola" somewhere :): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasse_Nordlund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasse_Nordlund
leafmeal 6y ago
Here's a link to the site with the documentaries about him https://www.dickproenneke.com/ https://www.dickproenneke.com/ If you are at all intrigued by this, I highly recommend them. Buying a DVD may seem dated, but I promise, these are worth it.

by sjaak 6y ago

throwaway4good 6y ago

I thought classic text on this was Thoreau's Walden: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. Just as when you were a child or when you become old, society will give you more than what you are capable of producing.

stepbeek 6y ago
> As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. Can't I just produce enough to support myself? Why would that be immoral?
- rob74 6y ago
  As long as you still don't rely on others when you get sick or old, I guess it would be ok...
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    There is always the age old pension scheme of having a child to make up the difference
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Daho0n 6y ago
      If you want to give back having a child is the worst you could do. Not having a child would give more.
sjaak 6y ago
Without contesting your moral stance: what makes you think this man didn't contribute more than he took over the course of his life? He moved to nature at the age of 53 and stayed there until right before he died. If anything by not consuming housing and healthcare he 'took' less than his peers of the same age.
- throwaway4good 6y ago
  I am sorry, I didn’t meant to speak about the morals of any specific person but instead of the general idea. Both Proenneke and Thoreau have made massive contributions, no doubt about that.
beefield 6y ago
Of course, if everyone did that, we would have a problem. But this is not a linear thing. If more people would do this than currently does, rest of the society could enjoy more of some of the scarce resources, thus as a society we would be better off. Thus UBI to let more people do things like this.
ArnoVW 6y ago
I'm pretty much an utalitairian, and I agree that that should be the objective. But it does raise an interesting point. Do people in "civilised society" produce more than they consume? Some, maybe. But the average person? I have no statistics to base it on, but I'm not convinced. Yes, we extract a lot of value. From the earth, from others (directly, or indirectly). But perhaps the depressing fact is that in terms of raw creation of value, perhaps "playing even" is not even such a bad "score"?
- jonplackett 6y ago
  I’ve wondered about this too. I’m guessing a lot of the effort going into society is from other countries. People picking fruits and growing food is hard working going in. But it probably becomes a problem of definition. Is a tech CEO / Wall Street banker giving or taking value if they enable millions of people to do work but consume a great deal themselves. Everything’s all too muddled up
  - WanderPanda 6y ago
    I think dicounting for corruption, the material/monetary amount is a very good proxy for value. So I would say the average ceo yes, but companies relying on government spending (Palantir I’m looking at you) maybe not
  - catmanjan 6y ago
    I think the value needs to be traced to an essential need, only those functions resulting in food, water, shelter count as intrinsic value - by this definition tech CEO's contribute less than an average farmer
    - jeffwass 6y ago
      You say only farmers and home builders create value. But the farmers and home builders who work at scale require tools and resources created by industry, which in turn require raw materials, an ability to process these materials, and an ability to transport them. So are people working in those industries any less important than the farmers and home builders themselves? Further, those industries are capitally intensive and require a financial network to raise and allocate the capital required so these industries can function. In a nutshell - everything is connected. How do you simply decide where to draw the line of who is contributing an essential service and who isn’t?
ic0n0cl4st 6y ago
> Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. Consider how much of the fruits of our labor ends up in landfills and this seems like a somewhat disastrous philosophy to me.
narag 6y ago
As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. I feel that this view is terrible, not sure about why. Maybe because even if they can't stand others, you still want them to keep suffering. I think life is no bargain. Living in society, I try to be nice with others and most of the time I'm on the nicest group of people AFAICT. But living by certain codes, such as strict non-violence or considering that we all are indebted with society, I can't agree. Moral purism just seems wrong to me, if it makes any sense.
- the_af 6y ago
  Agreed. I think it's terrible because it reduces human life to a game of input-output, expressed in seemingly economic terms ("produce"? What the hell does that mean?). In a way, it's also a technologist's outlook, but there are other outlooks, many more ancient and elaborate.
- Cullinet 6y ago
  I read your "indebted with society" and the word that formed in my thoughts was "indenture". if you are saying that we're become indentured to modern society, I have never thought of it like this before but I am immediately inclined to agree with the idea given how much intellectual and practical learning and effort as well as usually some form of capital it requires to be able to live quietly somewhere on the fruits of your self catering labor. I suspect that if more people were able to access such a a life, then the quality of life for everyone might be notably improved.
  - angry_octet 6y ago
    It isn't an indenture in the sense that you can leave the country. But society definitely makes a large speculative investment in every individual. Encouraging women to have children, parental leave, public hospitals, childcare, school, arts and science for public enjoyment and edification... Back in the pre-Victorian era this was certainly not the norm. All these costs were self funded, and unsurprisingly people were uneducated, but parents still invested for their future by educating their children. It reminds me of the thought: if you're a hunter-gatherer and you hunt and kill a deer, you can only eat so much. You have no preservation system. What is the best way to store it? In someone else's belly. So society begins with a community, where by cooperation we achieve more together than we could individually. I feel that this is where these isolationist/survivalist ideas break down. Even the young man building the cabin is relying on years of education, knowledge about tools and construction, and of course food and medicine. I'm also not sure I would consider this sustainable if it can only be accessed by a fraction of the world's population. The irony is that this image of off grid living is funded by the >30 million hours of screen time from people in high income, high carbon economies. My computer is using 130W just watching it, though lower on mobile I guess. So should we ban entertainment? No, because it sparks the imagination and cooperation, the force multipliers of society.
Turing_Machine 6y ago
Well, Thoreau wasn't quite as self-sufficient as is often believed. For instance, he used to bring his laundry home for his mom to do.
tygtty 6y ago
The ever growing bureaucrat class does not produce anything. They invent new rules and substitute religions to siphon off economic value while sitting at their desks, commanding and intimidating the productive part of the population.
- ethbr0 6y ago
  Anarchy doesn't scale.
  - emteycz 6y ago
    You can minimize the bureaucracy, erasing it completely is not the only option.
  - krageon 6y ago
    "X doesn't scale" is not an interesting argument because nothing has to. Society can very easily be small, done thousands of times.
    - ethbr0 6y ago
      I didn't think it needed more saying. Happy to hear arguments why "anarchy doesn't scale" is false. Small societies, done thousands of times, sound a lot like individuals. Unless you're proposing some sort of overarching organization principle by which these individuals agree to abide, in which case...
emteycz 6y ago
No person implicitly owes anything to anyone. It's more than enough that anything a person does within society is taxed.
Dumblydorr 6y ago
Arguably, he did produce more than he consumed. By his story, journals, film, and data, he has spawned numerous discussions and adaptations and inspired wonder. This is a lot more contribution than many adults in bizarre esoteric fields today.
user3939382 6y ago
In reality he lived basically at the edge of town, not in the middle of the woods and his experiment was short lived. To your point, I would argue that your moral responsibility is at least to break even, which you can’t do in isolation because your parents in most cases sacrificed a huge chunk of their lives and resources raising you.
blacktriangle 6y ago
At this point we're drowning in people who consume more than they produce, anybody who gets to break-even I'd consider doing a moral good.
tomcooks 6y ago
The only problem with Walden is that said cabin was far from detached from civilization
tarsinge 6y ago
There are plenty of companies and whole industries people working for contribute negatively, so at least it's fairly neutral.
supernovae 6y ago
When society and American capitalism becomes moral, then we can discuss the morality of those who don't conform... until then, with homelessness, poverty, starvation, disease, substance abuse, crime and such happening in "modern society" without much regard for those suffering in it I can't fault people whose only means to escape it may be isolation from the system(s) that don't give them the same privileges we have to debate this from the comfort of our computers/tech/internet and access to ycombinator
NoSorryCannot 6y ago
Ah, morality and the purpose of existence, topics that are famously settled and not open to serious debate or conflicting interpretations.
wing-_-nuts 6y ago
>Actually I don't think it is moral. This idea of going somewhere remote and just living off the land. >As an adult you are supposed to produce more than you are consuming. This is just a fascinating moral outlook to me. One has the responsibility to look after one's parents, but why is there any moral imperative to be 'productive'?

disabled 6y ago

This family is even more fascinating: For 40 Years, This Russian Family Was Cut Off From All Human Contact, Unaware of World War II: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-russian-family-was-cut-off-from-all-human-contact-unaware-of-world-war-ii-7354256/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/for-40-years-this-rus... Lykov Family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lykov_family The Lykov family (Russian: Лыков, romanized: L'ikov) is a Russian family of Old Believers. The family of six spent 42 years in partial isolation from human society in an otherwise uninhabited upland of Abakan Range, in Tashtypsky District of Khakassia (southern Siberia). Since 1988, only one daughter, Agafia, survives. In a 2019 interview, Agafia explained how locals were in contact with the family through the years and in the 1950s there was a newspaper article about their family. Agafia Lykova: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agafia_Lykova

Clewza313 6y ago
More sad than fascinating: lots of kids dying of malnutrition and starvation etc. The Vice documentary is pretty incredible though: https://www.vice.com/en/article/wdp339/agafias-taiga-life-full-length https://www.vice.com/en/article/wdp339/agafias-taiga-life-fu...

jksmith 6y ago

This. Great video documentary. Another, more hippy fun: Yukon Passage - a NatGeo production.

marttt 6y ago

See also: Pentti Linkola: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentti_Linkola And Lasse Nordlund (I think he was called "optimistic Linkola" or "positive Linkola" somewhere :): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasse_Nordlund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lasse_Nordlund

leafmeal 6y ago

Here's a link to the site with the documentaries about him https://www.dickproenneke.com/ https://www.dickproenneke.com/ If you are at all intrigued by this, I highly recommend them. Buying a DVD may seem dated, but I promise, these are worth it.