($75). For lights, dynamos don’t require batteries; a friend who is petrified of cycling nowadays gave me one.
COMMUNICATIONS
While it is great being able to communicate with people, especially when what you are doing may be a resource for others, it’s not exactly necessary for survival. Even if I had been cut off from all or most forms of communication, it wouldn’t have meant I couldn’t live without money; I just wouldn’t be able to share the experience as effectively.
Two things that have completely changed the way we live since the 1990s are cell phone technology and the Internet. I have a love/hate relationship with the phone; when socializing, I prefer to just go and see people. But I knew that if I wanted to communicate to the world about my year without money I was probably going to need a phone, at least for the first few weeks. How to run a cell phone without money was an issue. I had a ‘pay as you go’ phone – with no contract and no bills – but I thought I might get cut off if I didn’t put credit on it every three months. Friends thought I should put lots of credit on beforehand but this wouldn’t have been living without money and would certainly have violated my ‘normality’ rule. So, I put no credit on and hoped for the best. This meant I could only receive calls but it was better than nothing.
The farm has a landline phone and they were more than happy to let me receive calls for interviews (radio stations don’t like interviewees to use a cell phone because of the poor sound quality). They were also happy for me to make some calls, as I was working so much, but I didn’t feel that spending their moneyshould form part of the experiment. The farm also had some WiFi flying around, which residents at the farm were already using. This meant that I could easily keep up with my commitments to the Freeconomy Community.
EVERYTHING ELSE
My main goal in the run-up to the start of my year was to ensure that I had thought about and prepared methods of providing shelter, food, heating, energy, transportation, and communication. There were many other areas of everyday living I could have thought about and several things I couldn’t possibly predict I might need. However, I decided that I was just going to have to deal with everything else as it arose. There really is only so much preparation you can do and I decided to put faith in the old maxim that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
With that, I put away my list, relaxed my shoulders and resolved to curtail my use of money as much as possible immediately, as a trial for the year itself. I thought it would be wise to get in a bit of practice before I started what was going to turn out to be a very public experiment.
4
BUY NOTHING EVE
THE WEEK BEFORE
When you are preparing for a momentous change in your life, the reality often doesn’t kick in until a few weeks beforehand. Then you start thinking about how it is really going to affect your life, wonder why the hell you decided to put yourself in such a position, and occasionally, inevitably, ask yourself whether you can get out of it.
It was only during moments of complete exhaustion that I felt like that. I decided to launch my moneyless year by putting on a ‘Food for Free Freeconomy Feast’ in Bristol. I aimed to make a free, three-course, full-service meal solely from waste and foraged food, for as many people as I could. The problem was I was already quite stressed about everything else I had to do in the run-up to the start date. And here I was taking on a mammoth mission right at the beginning; making what was already going tobe a demanding day even more difficult. I also decided that it would be a good idea to start living the no-money life a week early, giving myself the luxury of a trial run, with the idea that before Buy Nothing Eve, I could acquire any infrastructural requirements I had overlooked.
It turned out that this wasn’t even close to being a
COMMUNICATIONS
While it is great being able to communicate with people, especially when what you are doing may be a resource for others, it’s not exactly necessary for survival. Even if I had been cut off from all or most forms of communication, it wouldn’t have meant I couldn’t live without money; I just wouldn’t be able to share the experience as effectively.
Two things that have completely changed the way we live since the 1990s are cell phone technology and the Internet. I have a love/hate relationship with the phone; when socializing, I prefer to just go and see people. But I knew that if I wanted to communicate to the world about my year without money I was probably going to need a phone, at least for the first few weeks. How to run a cell phone without money was an issue. I had a ‘pay as you go’ phone – with no contract and no bills – but I thought I might get cut off if I didn’t put credit on it every three months. Friends thought I should put lots of credit on beforehand but this wouldn’t have been living without money and would certainly have violated my ‘normality’ rule. So, I put no credit on and hoped for the best. This meant I could only receive calls but it was better than nothing.
The farm has a landline phone and they were more than happy to let me receive calls for interviews (radio stations don’t like interviewees to use a cell phone because of the poor sound quality). They were also happy for me to make some calls, as I was working so much, but I didn’t feel that spending their moneyshould form part of the experiment. The farm also had some WiFi flying around, which residents at the farm were already using. This meant that I could easily keep up with my commitments to the Freeconomy Community.
EVERYTHING ELSE
My main goal in the run-up to the start of my year was to ensure that I had thought about and prepared methods of providing shelter, food, heating, energy, transportation, and communication. There were many other areas of everyday living I could have thought about and several things I couldn’t possibly predict I might need. However, I decided that I was just going to have to deal with everything else as it arose. There really is only so much preparation you can do and I decided to put faith in the old maxim that ‘necessity is the mother of invention’.
With that, I put away my list, relaxed my shoulders and resolved to curtail my use of money as much as possible immediately, as a trial for the year itself. I thought it would be wise to get in a bit of practice before I started what was going to turn out to be a very public experiment.
4
BUY NOTHING EVE
THE WEEK BEFORE
When you are preparing for a momentous change in your life, the reality often doesn’t kick in until a few weeks beforehand. Then you start thinking about how it is really going to affect your life, wonder why the hell you decided to put yourself in such a position, and occasionally, inevitably, ask yourself whether you can get out of it.
It was only during moments of complete exhaustion that I felt like that. I decided to launch my moneyless year by putting on a ‘Food for Free Freeconomy Feast’ in Bristol. I aimed to make a free, three-course, full-service meal solely from waste and foraged food, for as many people as I could. The problem was I was already quite stressed about everything else I had to do in the run-up to the start date. And here I was taking on a mammoth mission right at the beginning; making what was already going tobe a demanding day even more difficult. I also decided that it would be a good idea to start living the no-money life a week early, giving myself the luxury of a trial run, with the idea that before Buy Nothing Eve, I could acquire any infrastructural requirements I had overlooked.
It turned out that this wasn’t even close to being a
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