How I became a poet by learning how to live without money
You need 10,000 hours to achieve mastery of a skill. Or so the saying goes. When I decided I wanted to become a poet, I assumed it would take me even longer—perhaps ten years of unencumbered devotion. But how could I buy myself that much time? After all, I was twenty years old and had no savings whatsoever. I needed money to live and I needed to work to make money. But what if that logic was a lie? What if I didn’t need money?
Over the next few years, I set out to discover if I could live money-free. I attended a string of wilderness survival schools, where I learned primitive skills such as tracking, trapping, foraging, shelter building, and how to make fire from sticks. Somewhat ironically, from the anarchists who hung out at these off-the-grid schools, I learned even more about urban survival: how to dumpster dive for food, clothes, shoes, backpacks, camping gear, medical supplies, painkillers—you name it. As it turns out, in this country, anything you can buy you can also find for free if you know where to look and have enough patience.
By the time I was 23, I’d turned my survival skills into an entire lifestyle. I’d reduced my expenses to $3,000 per year, which covered my dirt-cheap rent ($195/month) and emergencies—that was it. I didn’t spend money on anything else. I went to no restaurants, no bars, no cafes, no concerts, no malls. I stopped buying food altogether, eating solely what I could find in the trash. Finding food in the trash also provided my life’s daily structure, turning me into a total night owl. Each night, starting around midnight, I was on the hunt for hours and hours, and after carting home my spoils I spent more hours cleaning, sorting, labeling, and adding up how much money I’d “saved.” It would be safe to say that I was pathologically frugal.
I won’t sugarcoat it: this lifestyle, with its extreme asceticism and total rejection of the consumer culture all around me, came at a great cost. Since I didn’t frequent any establishments, it became profoundly difficult to meet new people or to do “normal” activities with the people I already knew. After all, a social life in a capitalist culture is a life of spending. By shunning money I shunned much of the world.
I also faced an array of extreme and ever-present health hazards. Besides the obvious fact that dumpsters are essentially huge Petri dishes for bacteria, they’re also home to rat poison, mold, used latex gloves, floor sweepings, rusty nails, and toxic levels of bleach. Each night, after picking out and hauling home food, I faced profound anxiety over the swarms of germs and chemicals that might—that must—be lingering, invisibly, on its surfaces. These health concerns and social stresses took their toll, but they were costs I was willing to pay to pursue my dream of becoming a writer, and I doubled down, continuing to chip away at life’s expenses.
Once I was confident that I could keep my budget near zero, I took to the road because I wanted to avoid paying rent (and see the country). I bicycled across the US twice; hitchhiked to the Yukon and back; hopped freight trains through the South, Midwest, and up and down the West Coast; and walked on foot across Croatia and Bosnia through the Dinaric Alps. During these travels, I slept outside every night—under bridges, on the fringes of trainyards, under bushes in public parks—unless I was fortunate enough to have a stranger invite me into their home, a gesture of human kindness that, no matter where I traveled or who I met, was surprisingly common. These trips, from start to finish, were essentially free; on one of my bicycle tours, I kept track: the trip was six months long, covering 4,000 miles across 19 states, and cost a total of $200 dollars.
When I wasn’t traveling I covered my modest rent by working about four hours a week as a personal trainer at the YMCA and spent the bulk of my time reading. I devoured books. I drafted poems. I’d heard that Joseph Campbell spent his twenties reading nine hours per day, and I aimed to emulate that level of focus and commitment. Years passed. I kept drafting. At 28, I felt I had enough decent poems to apply for a fully-funded MFA program, something I hoped would cover costs while I continued to learn how to write. I applied. I got in. And honestly, that was one of the most affirming and euphoric moments of my life. For the next two years, my MFA program paid me twenty times what I’d been living on per year—an amount of money I could hardly fathom. Rather than indulge in this fresh abundance, I spent almost none of it, and graduated with enough savings to cover my frugal lifestyle for another ten years. I moved home to Minnesota. I kept writing.
But now I was in my thirties and still hadn’t published a book. I’d been writing for more than ten years, with no tangible results, nothing I could hold in my hand, nothing I could point to as proof I was an author. The situation was beginning to look sad and embarrassing—even shameful. People who loved me worried about the fact that I had no backup plan, a thin resume with massive gaps in work history: what if this whole writing thing didn’t pan out? But I was stubborn. I knew how to get by on next to nothing, and I cared about writing too much to quit. So I carried on, dumpster diving for my food and working on my book, year after year.
Ultimately, the project was a failure: I never eliminated money from my life. Rent kept its grip on me, and as I grew older, fresh expenses seemed to sprout every time I turned around. I’d fallen short of my dream. But even so, I’d managed to buy myself enough time to learn how to write. At 20, I’d imagined it would take me ten years to become a poet—in the end, it took me closer to fifteen. Finally, I published my debut collection, The Low Passions, which focuses on my travels. After its publication, I had a beautiful full-circle moment in which I was able to hand-deliver a copy of my book to one of the strangers who had taken me into their home all those years ago. This October, I published my second collection, Disease of Kings, which centers on my years of living (almost) without money.
I don’t recommend my own approach to becoming a writer. Sure, it was hard, and demanded a pretty strong stomach for foul odors, but more to the point, it was hyper-specific: it suited me because of who I am; it won’t suit others. However, I do recommend believing in your vision and chasing after it with everything you’ve got, even at great cost. You have this one life. No one knows why we’re here, or what it’s for—it’s up to you to decide how you want to spend it. Again and again, the world will tell you no. The people around you, often from a place of love, will tell you no. And who could blame them? They’re not you. They can’t see what you see or feel what you feel. Only you can manifest your personal vision, and only you will truly know what it’s worth to you.
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