I guess the best example I can think of is Chris McCandless
Then there’s the North Pond Hermit of Maine but I suppose people would not classify him as free of mental illness.
Just wondering how many people are out there living in caves, walking around, hiking trails, hopping trains, or living in National Forests full time who really aren’t mentally ill and just choose that lifestyle. What do you think?
There used to be (still is?) a guy who lived in Albany NY known as the Mayor of Lark St. I think he said he had a degree, but he was willingly homeless. Made money running errands for local businesses. Everyone in the Lark St neighborhood knew this guy.
He seemed plenty sane to me.
Well, I know a guy almost like you describe, chooses it, says he’s more free. He does love him some crack though.
train hoppers come to mind.
Thanks for that link! The looks interesting…watching it now. That reminds me of the book Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac. They hop and ride a train up to San Francisco in the beginning of the book.
I imagine most of those just go off grid. Being a homeless wanderer is very hard. Much easier to shun society from inside a cabin.
Most of them live in their car.
Yes, I do believe there are some people that choose that life style.
Mental illnesses is what they say you have when you don’t fall in line.
Yeah, I met a retired guy who just went around the country using his pensioner’s bus pass and slept where he could.
You met Reacher?
I once met a man who was just trekking across the country. Took a rest next to me at the bus stop in my city with his a big ol’ frame backpack; one of those ones you would take on a long multi-day backcountry hike with a sleeping bag. He said he had just come down out of the mountains. Until then, I had not met a single person who even tried to make that journey in either direction on foot, but this person apparently would walk huge portions of an entire state on a frequent basis. You could tell he wasn’t like other homeless people. He actually seemed happy.
Not quite homeless, Paul Erdős was a nomadic mathematician. He use to travel to universities, couch-surf with a mathematician, and solve a problem with them.
He would say, “another roof, another proof.” As a result, he has a huge number of collaborators. The stat Erdős number is like the six degrees from Kevin Bacon game.
People seemed glad to have this oddball stranger as a house guest.
The first time my best friend and I did mushrooms, he told me the next day that he decided his calling was to give up all his worldly possessions and just travel the earth spreading the word of the Lord.
I told him that was cool, but to wait six months before starting his quest—besides, he had his whole life to walk the earth, and the blunt I just rolled was 20 minutes away from burn down. It’s been over 15 years, and he still hasn’t left for that pilgrimage…never would have guessed, lol. 🙄
Yes, actually. Very rare, but yes. Diogenes is probably the best example I could think of for that kind of behavior.
The same Diogenes that grabbed a chicken, plucked it, then threw it at a lecture? Dude was crazy.
Grabbed a chicken,
plucked itturned it into a man, then threw it at a lectureOk, maybe diogenes wasn’t the best example, but still.
I wonder how he would react to people talking about him 25 or so centuries later. I am betting he would be annoyed.
That or happy because people actually listened to him.
It is generally not recommended to diagnosis like you just did. Being weird is not in of itself mental illness. Also to be fair I think the plot was he was looking for his biological father.
But yeah I think there are mentally stable people who just decide that wandering the earth is what they want to do. I don’t really get it but they probably don’t get me so it works out.
There was a man here in north Alabama like this. He even sometimes pretended to be mentally ill, but he wasn’t - and he was actually very wealthy.
I literally did just that for a summer a few years back. An extremely exhilarating adventure, but I got bored of that crap after a while.
And no, I have never consumed any hard drugs nor would I ever given a fifth of a third of a quarter of the shit I saw on the road.
Aww, come on, first one’s free!
You couldn’t pay me enough to ever do anything like that
As a recovering addict myself, I can confirm that the worst thing about hard drugs is that they actually are as good as advertised. If it weren’t for that, they’d be so easy to quit.
Well, I’m glad you’re breaking out of the cycle. I have seen with my own eyes how that shit turns humans into literal, and I mean LITERAL zombies.
I know too well. William S. Burroughs calls it being the “de-anxietied man”. I call it being bulletproof.
Unfortunately, along with removing anxiety, fear, and regret, heroin also removes empathy, responsibility, and integrity. If it weren’t for that one little thing, it would be so perfect. /s
There are multiple monastic traditions of shunning all material things, some of which include housing.
Yeah, that sounds like the story of the The Buddha. I think he chained himself to a tree at one point and refused to eat.
Different religion but from the same area, Jain ascetics are the ones I am most familiar with that would fit more what you might have been wondering about.