The Moneyless Man Read Online Free Page A

whether it were even possible.
    In June 2008, I decided that I was going to give up money for at least a year and resolved to start at the end of November, onInternational ‘Buy Nothing’ Day. When I told my friends, they thought I’d gone crazy. Why, they asked, was I doing something so extreme (a word that often gets used about my way of living)? But what is ‘extreme’? To me, buying a plasma screen television for a couple of thousand pounds seems extreme. And given that some of the problems we will face in the future, such as climate change and ‘peak oil’, are, according to many leading scientists, likely to be extreme, how can we possibly expect the solutions to be moderate?

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THE RULES OF ENGAGEMENT
     
    I come from a very sporting family and before I decided to give up money, I longed to be a mega-rich professional soccer player. Soccer didn’t teach me a lot that is relevant for moneyless living but it did show me that every game needs clear rules. Before I did anything else, I resolved to create a set of rules that I could easily explain and which I would follow for the duration of my moneyless year.
    Those who inquire about the rules of this experiment mostly fall into two groups. On the one hand are those who are surprised that I would even be thinking of rules. Their logic says that it’s my game and I have no opponents, so why not just do as I feel fit at any given moment? On the other hand are those who want to know the answer to every conceivable scenario I could possibly get myself into.
    The logic of the first group is somewhat flawed; I do have a couple of opponents. The scarier of the two is my inner demon,which inevitably is weak when exposed to temptations like a ride into town on a wet winter’s evening, a shot of whiskey with my friends in front of the fire and, of course, chocolate. Without rules, I know I would sometimes have given in, and once I had succumbed, the floodgates would be opened. Knowing your weaknesses will always be one of your greatest strengths. I was less worried by my other opponent: potential critics. When you do something like I was doing, so publicly, you leave yourself open to all sorts of criticism if it fails. I’ve built up a really good relationship with almost all the journalists I have worked with; the ones I’ve been fortunate enough to meet have shown a lot of integrity and we have had mutually very beneficial partnerships. However, journalists are paid to get great stories and some publications prefer it juicy. I would be pretty naïve if I thought every producer and editor on the planet was out to promote the message of Freeconomy. One newspaper, whose name I will omit, held a meeting in which the editor asked his team whether or not they should send out an undercover journalist to see if they could catch me spending or accepting money. On this occasion, I happened to know the roommate of one of the editors in the meeting. How prepared they were to create a story one way or another, I’m not sure.
    So what were these rules that were going to dictate the parameters of my existence for twelve months?
1. THE FIRST, FUNDAMENTAL LAW OF ‘NO-MONEY’
     
    For one whole year I would not be able to receive or spend money. No checks, no credit cards, and no exceptions. Everything I needed or wanted in those twelve months would have to be achieved without either cash or its proxies. I closed my bank account, even though I knew it would be difficult to open a new one with no financial activity for a whole moneyless year.
2. THE LAW OF ‘NORMALITY’
     
    Normality is not a word often used in the context of my experiment. The law of normality, however, was my most crucial rule as it provided the intellectual framework for making decisions in the myriad scenarios I’d find myself in during the year. Without this law, I wouldn’t be able to undertake my experiment and live a relatively normal life.
    If somebody asked if something was within the rules of the