Back when we had our brick-and-mortar art and fine crafts gallery, all manners of people would stop in and visit... in large part because this is a tourist town and we had a curious location down some stairs below what looked like a subway train station entrance.
Among these visitors were quite a few people I could only describe as "homeless" but not indigent, and not with the kind of attached stigma that they were mentally ill or drug addicts living in cardboard boxes.
I suppose the best way to describe them was that they were nomads — digital or otherwise — and they lived their lives out of a backpack and sometimes a suitcase. Sometimes they would stay in a town for a few days sometimes they would stay for a few months or even longer.
Part of the reason I got to know quite a few of them was that we had a close friend who owned a big Victorian house not that far from the gallery and he would "rent rooms" to people who needed a place to crash.
It was all very under the table and he certainly didn't have a license to operate either a guest house or some kind of apartment building but the informal grapevine somehow knew to send people his way... and he would let people have a room or patch of floor for $25.00 a night or $500.00 a month... which was often considerably below what formal apartments went for.
Many of the people I spoke to were quite well-educated and well-traveled, and they just chose to drop out of the world most of us occupy.
A few would take temporary jobs as line cooks or dishwashers; sometimes temporary helpers for landscape companies; more than a few carried laptop computers or tablets and did some kind of online work even if it was "work" such as crypto trading or day trading stocks.
The common thread in 95% of the cases seemed to be this fact that they were comfortable with the life they had chosen. It was not a life that they had been forced into; it was a life they had freely chosen. The perceived benefits was the ability to shed most of the responsibilities most of us feel like we ”have to” assume and manage. For them, there was no have to.
Along with that they seemed to have a sturdy enough mindset that they were not put off or insulted by those around them viewing them primarily as fringe dwellers... or even undesirable.
Quite a few had held somewhat well-paying jobs that still fell short of supporting them, dur to cost of rents, healthcare and life, in general. I often heard some variation of of the assertion that it was much easier to be penniless as a roaming nomad than to be penniless with an $80,000 job that still wasn't enough to create a decent life.
On the upside, there were quite a few sympathetic people who would help them out in various ways. Personally, I remember giving away a fair number of $10 Subway sandwich gift cards (because I would get one every month from my bank for spending more than $1000 with my debit card) and they were generally appreciated. I wasn't really gonna use them (the cards), so I'd rather give him to somebody who could use a sandwich than try to persuade our kids that they should have them.
Part of my reason for bringing this up was that there was actually a time in my own life where I felt seriously tempted to just lay down all my burdens and take on a life with fewer attachments.
I wasn't quite a "homeless nomad" in the same sense as thoe gallery visitors, but I had the old delivery van from my freshly defunct gallery and retail store in Austin, Texas and I considered not renewing my apartment lease, just throwing a mattress and some stuff in the back of the van and driving around the country with no particular destination in mind.
This was during the earliest days of eBay, back when interesting collectibles were being traded in a giant peer-to-peer marketplace and I thought I would just drive around the country, scouring thrift stops and antique malls for hidden treasure and put stuff up for sale on eBay (because I was able to carry them around in the van) and then make my money by selling them and mailing them from the post office in whatever next town I would arrive at.
I was 37 years old, at the time, going nowhere in the IT industry and overall rather fed up with the entire idea of being a "Responsible Adult™."
I didn't actually make that decision but I got very close!
At the time, I had actually gone through a period of "real" homelessness one summer during my University years, so I had no particular fear of what it mean to "go without" the basic comforts of life.
Now we write 2026, and I am older and quite gray so the "voluntary homelessness" option looks less attractive... but I am also very aware of the growing number of people in the world who are "checking out" because they can barely get by from working their fingers to the bone in jobs with no future and no security.
Sometimes the preferable choice may not be the most conventional one.
Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!
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2026.09.30 23:58 PDT
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