Written by Everett Bogue | Follow me on Twitter.
Over the last two months I’ve met a lot of incredibly amazing people who are living with mostly nothing.
These are brilliant and beautiful people who are living out of bags, with Macbook Airs plugged into coffee shop outlets wherever they find their home to be next.
When I first started living with less than 100 personal possessions, I thought it was a fringe lifestyle. I even thought that maybe minimalism was simply rebranding poverty, for a moment or two. This idea is obviously wrong, because when you make way more than you spend and never have to worry about money anymore, you’re obviously NOT living in poverty.
The reality of the situation is these minimalist digital vagabonds are positioned at the forefront of our society’s future evolution.
We’re creating a new level of freedom that hadn’t existed before. A legendary group of worldly explorers that are exempt from certain burdens of society. This is freedom at the highest level.
Imagine if Kerouac, Thoreau, or Goethe had the ability to separate their location from their income. Wouldn’t that have changed everything? Well, this digital-tribal generation really has fundamentally rocked the idea of how to qualify for a fully-lived life.
Last week I met up with a remarkable girl who I’ve been following on Twitter for a long time, Crystal Silver — Crystal’s been living nearly out of a bag for years. She’s been formulating a way to save the world, and the plans are solidifying. Now she only needs to act. She will do this by acknowledging that her plans will never be perfect, that the world doesn’t need perfection, it needs leaders. People who see the future, people who can see how all of the pieces fit together. Crystal is one of those people who actually has attained this freedom lifestyle.
Why? Because she knows the secrets of how to live a life where you don’t have to report to anyone –bureaucracy is crap of the past.– She doesn’t have to worry about a steady $5,000 paycheck from doing busy work all freaking day long. She doesn’t have to mindlessly conform to the idea of what society wants you to be, because she strategically decided to embrace the future evolution of humanity.
Here’s the real deal about the future of the humans on this planet — a very real future that you can have if you don’t make the decision to join us.
- What if you lived in a world where man-kind lived in harmony with nature?
- What if you lived in a world where you didn’t have to work 40-60 hours a week in a job you didn’t care about?
- What if all of your income was automated, so you could spend your time practicing yoga or raising the money necessary to loan $11,000 to entrepreneurs in the 3rd world via Kiva?
These things are possible, but it all starts with a choice.
Do you choose artificial consumption, are do you choose true freedom?
The truth is that we don’t need anything. I know this because I don’t have anything, I haven’t had anything for way more than a year now.
Not having anything is actually having everything. When you’re not caring about junk, you’re opening a world of experience that previously was completely unreachable. You blocked that world out with your unconscious consumption of crap you did not need.
The reality of everyone’s situation is that artificial desires are crowding out our ability to see the true purpose of our lives. You’re lost at the shopping mall, searching for happiness in plastic pieces of crap and mass-produced “designer†clothing lines from China.
When really, all you needed to do was stop and drop everything. Look up at the stars and realize that you’re just a small little piece of the puzzle, and the smaller you can be the more the ultimate truth of why you’re here will speak to you.
I realize this is hard to hear, but someone has to say it. Wake up, you’ve been duped. Reality is broken, we need to fix it. The way to fix it is simple, and you already know the answer.
The only action left is to act — the only person left to act is you.
Why should you eliminate artificial desires?
Because our evolutionary path begs of us to find a way to make life easier for everyone. We didn’t always sit at desks, we didn’t always build massive fortresses of solitude far away from each other in the suburbs. We didn’t always eat melted down corn (which is basically a hugely deformed grass that took over the human race) formed into corn patties, flakes, and fed intravenously to animals which were intended to eat only grass.
So, we had no choice but to change. No pill regiment will cure the aching feeling that you feel deep inside you that’s telling you that you need to wake up to this idea of a new world that’s forming in the collective subconsciousness.
A new world where we share with each other freely. Where we treat every fellow human as they ought to be, instead of who we think they have been. A new world where we live in green cities, and allow the countryside and forests to regain the energy we’ve relentlessly mined from them.
The remarkable element to all of this we actually want this digital-tribal dream of our generation. I’ve spoken to thousands of people directly over the last year about the pursuit of this world, and our minds are in alignment.
We all want an easier world, where artificial desire has been vanquished, where the health of our human body and mind are paramount and in alignment with the continued health of the planet.
Yes we can do this.
One by one we’re starting to demonstrate that it can actually work, by beginning to live this new idea of a world-wide dream.
As the only way to demonstrate a better way of living is to actually pursue a life worth living.
Will you stay behind in a dying world of fake-plastic-desires or join us as we create a new, easier, better future?
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Oh, FYI! The notorious Leo Babauta, owner of less than 50 things and resident leader of the exploding San Francisco blogging scene has a new book out — Focus: A Simplicity Manifesto in the Age of Distraction. (Not an affiliate link, Focus doesn’t have an affiliate program.)
Leo generously allowed me to contribute a chapter on creating distraction free workspaces anywhere in the world — I think you’ll find that article surprising. One of my personal heroes, Gwen Bell also contributed an incredible chapter on taking digital sabbaticals — a skill that all of us need to master if we’re going to successfully avoid insanity in the digital world.
