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Re: living without money(O.T.)



Hitchhiking only works if someone's got it together to buy a car.
Couchsurfing only works if someone has spent their money on a couch
(and a place to keep it in)

I'd love to live in a magic fairy land universe where everyone just
did the work they felt was "important."  I bet that land smells like a
pile of garbage... I bet that land would be a pile of garbage.   Who
wants to do that job?  Would the building I sheet rocked exist in that
land, because let me tell you I did not feel important doing that job.
 It did, however, give me the ability to buy my own couch, car and
rent a place to keep them in.

While traveling in Japan last September it struck us that the idea of
"menial labor" didn't really exist there like it does in the west.  It
seemed like everyone was proud of their job and worked hard at it
whether is was fast food worker or hotel manager. It made me feel
ashamed of our culture where your self esteem seems linked to the
"quality" of job you have and not the quality of work you do.

Here's a question I have.  If your tour can't even support itself in
terms of travel... why?  Wouldn't you be better off finding local gigs
and distributing your music all over the world via the internet?  Just
wondering...

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 7:10 AM, Daryl Shawn<highhorse@mhorse.com> wrote:
> I've done a number of long hitchhiking trips, and they were some of my 
>most
> formative experiences. I think it helped lead me to my current mode of
> traveling/touring, and even to the kind of work I can handle doing for
> money. I need to have control over my time. I feel very lucky to have 
>ended
> up in computers, which has enabled me to have complete flexibility, 
>working
> by the hour from anywhere. (The getting-paid-by-the-hour component is
> important - the concept of salary never sat right w/me).
>
> I wasn't necessarily going to share this here, but after some shakeup in 
>my
> personal life it has turned out that I'm not going to be based in Mexico
> anymore. For the time being I don't have a fixed address, I'm just 
>bouncing
> between friends and family in the eastern half of the US while preparing 
>for
> my next tour. I don't feel the need to have a solid home base, and with
> wanting to tour most of the time, it wouldn't be much of a home base 
>anyway.
> But my communities are VITAL to me, whether it's old friends or groups 
>like
> LD where there's common ground from which new friendships develop. That's
> where my solidity is.
>
> Funny, just last night a friend told me that there's a growing movement 
>of
> people doing something like what I'm doing, and then Stefan mentioned the
> couchsurfing groups (which I'm definitely going to follow up on). 
>Inspiring.
>
> Daryl Shawn
> www.swanwelder.com
> www.chinapaintingmusic.com
>
>
>> Its an incredible waste of human resources, that most people divide 
>their
>> life into "free time" and "go to work".
>> We are only free if all of our time is free time, including the work we
>> consider being important...
>> When I started to hitchhike again, I not only realized that suddenly I 
>was
>> much more free to go wherever I want to, its also a complete other way 
>of
>> social exchange. In the money world everything turns into a deal. But 
>still
>> most of social exchanges are not deals, they wouldn't work as a deal...
>> Just lurk on any of the couchsurfing groups, and you'll know that this
>> spirit is strong and makes happy...
>>
>> Deals (money involved) can be fine unless this way of thinking isn't
>> pushing all other social activities into the background...
>> Obviously it is possible to survive without money, but we could not
>> survive without our communities. And this LD community is a good 
>example how
>> things work extremely efficient without being a deal...
>>
>> Stefan
>
>