More than two decades ago, then-33-year-old Dan Price had a wife, two small children, a high-interest mortgage, and a stressful job as a photojournalist in Kentucky. He worried daily about money and the workaday grind.
I told myself, buck up and pay the bills, said Price. This is just the way normal life is.
Then he learned about what he calls the simple life. Price read Payne Hollow, a 1974 book about author Harlan Hubbards rejection of modernity and his primitive home on the shore of the Ohio River. Prices marriage dissolved soon after, and the whole family moved to Oregon, where he grew up. Price opted to move alone into a tiny cabin in the woods, then a flophouse, then a teepee, and finally into an underground Hobbit hole on a horse pasture near a river, where he still lives. During the winter, he decamps to Hawaii to surf and avoid the harsh weather.
Prices version of the simple life costs $5,000 a year, which he earns from publishing a wilderness zine and doing odd jobs around Joseph, his eastern Oregon town. I like being able to do what I want to do, said Price, who pays $100 a year for his land. I dont believe in houses or mortgages. Who in their right mind would spend their lifetime paying for a building they never get to spend time in because they are always working?
Price is part of a long tradition of eschewing the American dream of a house with a white-picket fence, from 1920s hobos to 1960s hippies. Nowadays, groups going back-to-basics are just as diverse, such as live-off-the-land types like Price, punky street kids, and twentysomethings living in modest group homes known as intentional communities. But they all have something in common: Theyve chosen poverty.
Some, like Price, have lived this way for decades. For others, its a decision spurred by the recession and its exposure of economic precarity. Either way, its often a political choice, one that questions a consumerist, deeply stratified society. The intentional poor are looking for something real that goes beyond commodity, said Karen Halnon, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of "Consumption of Inequality."
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Living on $5,000 a year, on purpose: Meet America's 'intentional poor' - In Plain Sight
I told myself, buck up and pay the bills, said Price. This is just the way normal life is.
Then he learned about what he calls the simple life. Price read Payne Hollow, a 1974 book about author Harlan Hubbards rejection of modernity and his primitive home on the shore of the Ohio River. Prices marriage dissolved soon after, and the whole family moved to Oregon, where he grew up. Price opted to move alone into a tiny cabin in the woods, then a flophouse, then a teepee, and finally into an underground Hobbit hole on a horse pasture near a river, where he still lives. During the winter, he decamps to Hawaii to surf and avoid the harsh weather.
Prices version of the simple life costs $5,000 a year, which he earns from publishing a wilderness zine and doing odd jobs around Joseph, his eastern Oregon town. I like being able to do what I want to do, said Price, who pays $100 a year for his land. I dont believe in houses or mortgages. Who in their right mind would spend their lifetime paying for a building they never get to spend time in because they are always working?
Price is part of a long tradition of eschewing the American dream of a house with a white-picket fence, from 1920s hobos to 1960s hippies. Nowadays, groups going back-to-basics are just as diverse, such as live-off-the-land types like Price, punky street kids, and twentysomethings living in modest group homes known as intentional communities. But they all have something in common: Theyve chosen poverty.
Some, like Price, have lived this way for decades. For others, its a decision spurred by the recession and its exposure of economic precarity. Either way, its often a political choice, one that questions a consumerist, deeply stratified society. The intentional poor are looking for something real that goes beyond commodity, said Karen Halnon, a sociology professor at Pennsylvania State University and author of "Consumption of Inequality."
...
Living on $5,000 a year, on purpose: Meet America's 'intentional poor' - In Plain Sight
