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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

There are multiple monastic traditions of shunning all material things, some of which include housing.