—Systemic change begins with personal change—
From Jo's About page:
I have been living a low-impact, money-less life since March 2015. I will continue living without money for as long as I can and I will continue to live low-impact for the rest of my life.
While living as low-impact as this is not for everyone, I strongly encourage people to reduce their personal footprint as much as possible.
It would help if we asked this simple question before making any purchase: “Is this something I want or something I need?” Go for the things we really need and leave the rest – great advice from my mother and a great way to minimise impacts. It’s amasing how little we need to be happy.
For readers in Australia a good place to start, if you have internet access, is Shop Ethical.
An inspiration for me, and a source of information, is Irishman Mark Boyle. Mark lived money-less in the UK for three years. You can read more about him and get some tips here.
There are many others choosing to reduce their footprints to this extent around the world. There are also, sadly, millions who have no money when they need it and struggle for survival on a daily basis through no choice of their own. It is partly for these people, as well as for our own, that I do this. I don’t want to add to the structural injustices existing in our world that make it possible for so much poverty to exist.
These are some thoughts about why I am living a low-impact (and currently money-less) life:
We jumped in to talking about her Spodek Method commitment. She lives in a suburban area. There's a place near her that borders on bush, which I guess is Australian for undeveloped land. This spot with a bench designed for experiencing nature has been a short walk away from her for a long time, yet until now she never experienced it. Even this time, she put off acting on the commitment. Then she went. You'll hear what it did for her. I had to compare her description to what many people derive from big vacations to Hawaii or Bali, but she spent nothing, didn't have to plan, and didn't pollute or deplete. Her sharing about her experience recreating a wonderful past experience led to her sharing many unique challenges of living without money. Jo will lead you to think differently about your world and relationships to your loved ones and nature.
Can you imagine living without money? Humans lived without money for 250,000 years, so it's not necessary for life. Money seems like an invention on par with the big ones, like fire, the wheel, writing, and language. Right off the bat, Jo shares how her life before choosing to live without money was stressful, with less freedom or free time. If you thought having more money would give you more freedom, more free time, and less stress, her experiencing the opposite may prompt you to consider the basics of human interaction. What does it mean about our lifestyles, values, and beliefs that having zero of our culture promotes having more of actually giving us what we want? In earning a doctorate in experimental science, maybe the most fundamental thing I learned is that no matter what I expect or want, nature is always right. If my theory predicts one thing but nature does something different, nature is right and my theory is wrong. Jo's experience suggests something wrong at the heart of economic theory. Anyway, you'll hear how she learned of the possibility of living without money and acted on it. You'll also hear our mutual appreciation and admiration of our living without things society teaches us we can't live without. We're not extreme. More like we're conservative and loving.