> I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful.

>I do not want to be homeless or get rid of my family, but it sure would be amazing to "be able to" (of course I have a choice: I can just resign) just spend time spending time.

Trust me mate. Being homeless or a homeless traveler is HARD. I am homeless for 3 months now and it's absolutely devastating for my soul and morale.

Having no "safe harbour" takes away all enjoyment from "freedom". I was an avid hiker as well in the past :)

Yeah. The options for lots of leisure are either: a) be homeless, or b) be rich. Those of us inbetween always have to choose and make compromises.

In my life, this has forced me to quit on a bunch of things I would have continued otherwise, and to lean down things like my workouts and so on. This isn't necessarily bad, I like that I can now do 80% with 20% of time/effort, but still, would be nice to have more slack.

I lived a pretty high life in Los Angeles for 15 years, and when the time came for me to move to Europe (I'm Australian), I had two weeks where I was basically homeless before the flight home - lease expired on the apartment, circumstances with couch-surfing were not ideal - so I tried two weeks living hard, to see what it was like, as I was also going to have a 6 month hiatus before Europe, back home in the Australian outback, which is a different definition of rough - so I thought, what the heck, why not see what its like. I'd lived in a bubble in LA for so long, the bubble had burst, so why not just try it for a couple of weeks and see how far I got .. I kitted myself out with a sleeping bag and a tent and all the rudimentary camping basics, and headed out of my cushy Los Feliz neighborhood, onto the streets.

It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to myself. My gear was stolen within days, I got beat up and nearly stuck with dirty heroin needles at least 3 times, almost arrested twice, and yeah .. it just generally sucked. I was not prepared for the hardship.

6 months in the Australian desert after that experience definitely made me appreciate the Australian desert a lot more than I had previously, and I will never, ever try this experiment in an American city again.

Its not the street that'll get to you. Its the street life. If I were the only homeless bum in the area, I would've done better I think - but it was all too easy to filter out to skid row after having been chased out of pretty much every 'sanctity' spot I could find, under bridges and in the Griffith Park area - whether by cops or by other homeless people. It was pretty stupid of me, in hindsight. I really didn't need to do it, I was just trying to push my boundaries before heading into the Kimberley region to eat snakes and lizards. That was, by comparison, a far better experience than the reptiles of LA. Would not recommend.

It may be romanic because you have not yet understood the real life consequences of the "lifestyle". The problems, health risks, and stress it brings with it.

> I wonder what it says about me or my life that my first thought was that it sounded absolutely wonderful.

What sounded wonderful to me was this sentence: 'One store kept a record of an order: "one loaf of bread, a can of sardines, one-pound of fancy crackers, a pie, two quarts of coffee, one gill of brandy and a bottle of beer"'

This was a time when food brands weren't really a thing, the store probably had one type of bread, one type of (local) canned sardines, one type of crackers, etc. Each shop had a different variation and "menu", so to speak, all completely unique to each other. These days there is no difference between grocery stores, they all sell big-brand stuff and only convenience/price is the differentiating factor. No wonder only Walmarts are left.

> a lot of the time spent on routine things like fetching water, lighting fires and prepping food. I would spend hours each day on prepping the dinner from scratch

I think about this a lot when it comes to AI automation for coding.

Yes, it's nice if an AI can speed up the sort of semi-mindless parts of programming. But I strongly suspect that I need those spans of time for my mind to do the background processing necessary for the actual intellectually challenging parts of the job.

I've written two books and anyone who has done that will telling that writing is exhausting. It's an act that is almost purely intellectual with very little menial labor. And it is so utterly draining that it's hard to do for more than a couple of hours a day.

I don't relish programming turning into that. I like the easy refactoring and bug fixing tasks because they provide a respite between periods of very deep thinking while still keeping me mostly focused on the overall problem domain. I suspect I would be an overall worse engineer if I lost those.

Surely you're taking a lunch break now that you're back to work, and that is enough time to hit the gym and scarf down some nutrients afterwards, leaving after work for family time. It only takes 15-20 minutes of activity per day to maintain fitness.

This sounds wonderful until the winter. Seems wonderful in temperate or warmer climes.

> ... and ever since I have had a completely different outlook on life that is, sadly, not quite compatible with modern life.

I hear you. For about two years I got to live in a rural area, on the sea side, 45 minutes drive from the closest highway. 5000 people villages was a 15 minutes drive.

Chopping wood to then heat the house, having animals pass in front of me while I'd be reading HN under the porch before going to bed.

Walking just for the sake of walking from the house to the sea and then back.

Heny Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

Full quote: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/2690-i-went-to-the-woods-be...

That and the quote about cities being about mystification.

(3 minutes elapsed)

Ah, found it (first read it for someone posted here on HN btw):

Thomas Merton's Raids On The Unspeakable: "I am alien to the noises of cities, of people, to the greed of machinery that does not sleep, the hum of power that eats up the night. Where rain, sunlight and darkness are contemned, I cannot sleep. I do not trust anything that has been fabricated to replace the climate of woods or prairies. I can have no confidence in places where the air is first fouled and then cleansed, where the water is first made deadly and then made safe with other poisons. There is nothing in the world of buildings that is not fabricated, and if a tree gets in among the apartment houses by mistake it is taught to grow chemically. It is given a precise reason for existing. They put a sign on it saying it is for health, beauty, perspective; that it is for peace, for prosperity; that it was planted by the mayor’s daughter. All of this is mystification. The city itself lives on its own myth. Instead of waking up and silently existing, the city people prefer a stubborn and fabricated dream; they do not care to be a part of the night, or to be merely of the world. They have constructed a world outside the world, against the world, a world of mechanical fictions which contemn nature and seek only to use it up, thus preventing it from renewing itself and man."

Thankfully I still go to that place where I used to live, several times a year. Sky is so clear I can many stars.

Once my kid shall turn 18, I plan to go back live there.

I don't think us humans were meant to be stacked in cities and high-rises like ants. It's just like communism: great theory but wrong species.

> I have to choose if I want to spend time with my family or going with the gym

Wife does her gym at home: proper stuff in gym gear. Mostly just simple exercises: no crazy gear besides a few weights. No driving to the gym so twice the time saved. No need to shower at the gym or seat all sweaty in the car.

She does 20 or 30 minutes each day.

It mentions in his Wikipedia article that he had money although the source was unknown. The issue with vagrancy throughout history is not the vagrancy itself primarily, but the problems of theft and anti-social behaviors that go with it. Since this person had money, didn't steal, and seemed to mostly leave people alone, they weren't a problem and got an exemption because they were well known.

Ten separate towns did so. And people left food for him, like Santa Claus. He must have meant something to them.

Similar to Leslie Cochran in Austin.

Because he didn't scream at people, leave used needles in the street, or pass out in gutters.

"The law says no vagrants. We're allowed to have one."

OP here..

Yes, I agree that HN is the place to discover the most interesting, coolest and weirdest stuff on the internet but unfortunately, sometimes, these posts don't get enough traction in their first minutes and once they got pushed to the second page of newest submissions, they are technically dead!

Fortunately, HN had introduced what's called pool, or second chance, where the mods of the site periodically watch for past submissions and pick what they believe is interesting then throw it to the front page and see if it sticks by having users upvoting it.

Leatherman story was one of those cases. I submitted it three days ago without getting a single upvote and was surprised to see it made it to the front page this morning.

I don't know where, but probably here on HN, I read a very long version of the same story. The wikipedia version was surprisingly short. I remember reading it and feeling a lot of emotions. I think this is the version:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-w...

but it seems too new... I'm sure it was more than a year ago I read about it...

EDIT: that's definitely not the one. The one I read was by an author who had had a life-long obsession with the Leatherman and wanted to retrace his steps, on his own, and he had a family. It was a haunting piece.

EDIT 2: actually, looks like it is the article. I didn't scan far enough. I guess March 2025 feels a really long time ago.

There already are, they're called ultramarathons [0], 587 km would be on the longer end for a regularly held race but it's only slightly longer than Dean Karnazes's record for an uninterrupted run which was 560 km in 80 hours [1] so it'd be a multi day race probably.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultramarathon

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Karnazes#Running_highligh...

That was a big deal in the 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrianism

Crazy things like people walking 1 mile every hour for 1000 hours, grabbing bits of sleep within those hours.

Do you have to walk? I get that power walking exists as a sport. But no way to easily disqualify people from running instead of walking. Plenty of ultras exist though this would be a cool theme.

Now days, people call them backyard ultras.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backyard_ultra

How would it differ from other long ultras?

[dead]

That has to be the oddest Godwin’s Law ever.

Any why?

Don’t want to edit Norm, but a (perhaps British sensibility) alternative is:

“The more I hear about this Hitler fellow, the less I like him”

Me too. And then wondered what kind of tool we would add to a Leatherman labelled The Vagabond.

For a sec I thought the same thing. Anyway, "Leatherman" is a totally great brand name. So good, I wish I'd thought of it first.

Me too, got excited for nothing. But then I wondered - maybe that's where their name comes from?

I thought it might be about Marv Gomez.

Another, more recently, is the documentary Hobo; riding the rails in the 1990s:

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt1646104/

The thing which that article leaves unsaid is that this lifestyle existed in the context of seasonal migrant workers (hobos) who were still necessary to the not-yet fully mechanized agriculture of the time.

One work which touches on this is Louis L'Amour's autobiography: _Education of a Wandering Man_ which is a great read.

Change one a to u and this might be about a president ^_^ I never noticed before how close those words were. And he'd probably like the prefix "Super".

If he's eating from the dumpsters why not eat from the fancy restaurant's dumpster instead ?

This mightn't be exactly what you're looking for - but Leatherman seems an example of a class of people called 'Holy Fools'. (maybe because Leatherman carried a little prayer book)

The Holy Fools were semi-religious figures who acted strangely or pretended to be mad to challenge social norms and express spiritual truths.

They were common in Russia at one time and called: "yuródivyy"

In the West, some examples would be Francis of Assisi and Benedict Joseph Labre.

edit: In the USA I'd nearly call Johnny Appleseed one of the 'Holy Fools' and even Chris McCandless (Into the Wild)

Not an official list, but there’s a few I’m aware of, each interesting in a different way.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_Norton https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Dexter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eddie_Chapman

Yeah I remember hearing about him when I was a kid. Amusing to see a local legend posted to HN. Didn't even have to click the Wikipedia link.

i grew up really close to that

Can recommend this as well!

“Residents along the route, pleased with this plucky zombie, would take to leaving out plates of offal and brain for him near the graveyard”

Is it? You just have to give up a lot for it. Perhaps you had less to loose back then, people were closer to this state of being, but that's not good, and it was probably much tougher to live like this at the time.

Thankfully the standard of living has been high enough for long enough for most people, that certain sacrifices are culturally unimaginable, but they are still there.

Freedom is not free.

If you refuse to make long-term commitments to other people and to society, you will loose the benefits of their commitments to you. Even ignoring other people, if you refuse to make long-term commitments to yourself or a certain goal, commitments that will require you to do lots of things you don't feel like doing, suspending your freedom, you will never build anything meaningful, anything that makes life worth living.

That's what being civilized is all about, collectively maximising our long-term freedom, instead of pursuing individual freedom at the expense of others freedom, instead of pursuing freedom in the present at the expense of greater freedom in the future. It's made us so much better.

Everyone still has the option to unplug from the matrix and go do whatever they feel like, good for you. But do not expect help if you don't help others, and do not expect much goodwill if you refuse to engage in our collective pursuit of making things better for all of us.

Do you mean in the US? There are many countries around Europe with large populations of traveling folks - they even have cars and setup camps only to move further when they feel like it. As far as I know there are many countries where no one asks anything if you set a tent and spend the night, especially in the mountains, but more generally on land that is not privately owned.

There are still plenty of homeless travelers who live in caves. We have plenty here in CA.

As long as you don’t litter and cause forest fires nobody cares if you live in the bush/caves. Hell, if you have a birth certificate you can get free health care here while living in the bush!

I think there's at least a 40% chance this was Radagast. His fate after the War of the Ring is unknown after all.

No, named after the founder, Tim Leatherman.