Dropping out in the 21st century

What does dropping out mean in the 21st century? Can we really exit society forever these days? Could we ever really? Or is it a question of seeking alternative lifestyles? We explore the past and present of an idea that never quite went out of fashion…

A History Of An Idea:

It was at a New York press conference on September 19, 1966 that Dr. Timothy Leary uttered the immortal words: “Tune In, Turn On, Drop Out.” The phrase allegedly came to him in the shower, following a suggestion from his pal/academic cohort Marshall McLuhan that Leary invent a punchy phrase to promote the benefits of LSD.

Punchy it certainly proved: a million hippies, hipsters and students swiftly took the idiom to heart, giving up college, taking spontaneous road trips, setting up ashrams and generally getting high on acid and weed – all of which lead to Leary belatedly clarifying the phrase in his 1983 autobiography, Flashbacks.

“Drop out suggested an elective, selective, graceful process of detachment from involuntary or unconscious commitments,” he wrote. “Drop Out meant self-reliance, a discovery of one’s singularity, a commitment to mobility, choice, and change. Unhappily, my explanations of this sequence of personal development were often misinterpreted to mean ‘Get stoned and abandon all constructive activity’.”

In fact, Leary’s phrase was really just a psychedelic take on a much older idea advocated by thinkers ever since – well, ever since there have been commitments (involuntary or unconscious) and systems to drop out of. In the 1930s, George Orwell famously quit society to live as a tramp, documenting his experiences in his book Down And Out In Paris & London. Almost a century before that, in 1854, Henry David Thoreau opted to dwell as frugally as possible in a small, self-built wooden house in Massachusetts.

Thoreau – influenced by Ralph Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who in turn were influenced by Kant and the German Idealists (with a splash of Rousseau and the Romantics for good measure) – also wrote a book: the highly influential Walden. “If a man does not keep pace with his companions perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer,” wrote Thoreau in the final chapter. “Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

March to the beat of your own drum: this is the kind of advice we could easily imagine giving (or receiving) in our very own era of ‘individual freedom’. Indeed, Walden’s key theme – to get as close as possible to nature and self-sufficiency – has echoed loudly down through the centuries, through the psychedelic sixties and the Situationist movements, to recent movies like Sean Penn’s Into The Wild (2007), based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, who donated all his savings ($24,000) to Oxfam and travelled to Alaska to live a Thoreau-esque existence off the land. After a two-year romp through the wilderness he eventually died by eating a poisonous plant.

Desert Island Delusions:

Yet even if we wanted to escape totally and completely – could we? Mobile phones, satellite networks and ubiquitous computer terminals have created such a hyper-connected world that a Robinson Crusoe-esque voyage to some sequestered island where we can light fires with flints and spear trout with crudely whittled sticks seems laughably romantic. Yet despite – or rather, because of this – the lure of films like The Beach and TV’s castaway culture (Lost, Survivor) has never been stronger.

Desert islands might be hard to come by in 2009, but folk like Daniel Suelo are managing to live moneyless existences right in their own back yard. Suelo, whose experiences and philosophical reflections are regularly recorded on his blog, www.zerocurrency.blogspot.com, has lived without cash in his native America for eight years. He eats wild edibles, food from farms and orchards, even roadkill. He doesn’t ask for food, but sometimes accepts leftovers from restaurants and bakeries. He carries a tarp for shelter, sometimes stays in abandoned buildings or farm sheds, and now and again housesits for friends. In Moab, Utah, a favoured hangout, his principal address is a cave.

“I do not believe money or the use of money is evil, but that it is something that must go obsolete if we are to survive,” he says via email. “If you use money, use it ethically. And if you can find a way to free yourself from it, do it, by all means.” Suelo’s window to freedom ‘cracked open’ when two friends invited him to visit Alaska in an old Dodge Van. “I slung fish on the docks but got disgusted with the whole thing and walked out with visions of living off the land,” he says. “I walked into the wild with only enough food for a couple days. Unlike McCandless, I was blessed to run into a Basque dude named Ander, who had similar visions as my own. We speared fish and ate berries and mushrooms for weeks. Then we started hitch-hiking together and were astonished at the magical coincidences, how human generosity came just as we needed it.”

Suelo traveled to Thailand and India, heard the Dalai Lama talk, considered becoming a Hindu Sadhu – then realized a much better ‘test’ would be to “return to one of the most materialistic, money-worshipping nations on earth, America, to the authentically profound principles of spirituality hidden beneath our own religion of hypocrisy. The idea exhilarated me. ‘I can be a Sadhu in America’, I thought. To be a vagabond, a bum, and make an art of it – this idea enchanted me. The idea of it was just plain fun.”

21st Century Solutions:

One man’s meat is another man’s poison as they say, and becoming an itinerant, moneyless vagabond might not be everyone’s idea of a good time. But the notion of dropping out still carries plenty of compelling charm. From quixotic stoner slackery and culture-jamming iconoclasts to emotive eco-warriors and ardent anti-consumerists, the tang of rebellion can still be sniffed in the polluted air of our modern-day societies.

But in an ironic culture where even anti-commercial ideas are regularly co-opted by advertisers and sold back to us as lifestyle options, is it really possible to rebel or ‘drop out’ in any meaningful way?

“These days everything is so broken up and ‘modular’, it is hard to distinguish the drop-outs from the reliable regulars,” says Martin Cohen from the Philosophical Society of England. “I’d say that to drop out you need to have been pretty sure of being ‘in’ something, and more and more people are excluded from such security anyway. When you look at some of today’s so-called drop-outs, say the anti-globalisation protestors who travel to G7 summits abroad, they are actually still people with some advantages over those who really are excluded. What that might show is that dropping out is much more a lifestyle decision than an economic event.”

Commerce, advertising and branding reign over our daily existence with a hitherto unknown intensity. The topic was tackled to some extent by Naomi Klein in her 1999 book No Logo (itself published by a multinational) amongst others, but ‘counter-culture’ figures like Banksy or Damien Hirst, reeling in large amounts of dosh while simultaneously denouncing capitalist culture with ‘subversive’ stencil art and diamond-encrusted skulls, remain a potent paradox.

Recessions and recent economic crashes notwithstanding, our world seems inescapably commercial. Major cities like London, New York and Tokyo have slowly become wealthier, more organised, more homogenous. Pockets of resistance show up here and there, but few Western cultures have any real ‘people power’ – which is why the recent political protests in Iceland, which eventually ousted the reigning government, came as such a surprise.

Berlin, with its cheap rents, relatively low levels of commerce and liberal attitude to partying, has more drop out options than most. The city has become something of a magnet for the West’s ‘dropnoscenti’ – squatters, creatives and refuseniks of all ages – as well as ‘techno tourists’: weekend visitors that travel from other cities simply to get wasted on Berlin’s dancefloors in a way that’s increasingly impossible back home.

“I think techno offers a good opportunity to escape the normal nine-to-five,” comments Marcel Dettmann, resident at Berlin’s legendary Berghain, a vast, industrial space whose refusal to buy into ‘lifestyle’ clubbing has made it one of the best and most purist techno clubs in the world. Dettmann’s sets are equally renowned, intense and sinuous 12-hour journeys that often only begin at eight or nine a.m. “I am personally very glad I have the chance to do what I like most – music. I don’t know whether I feel more human than someone in a ‘normal’ job but when I play, there are some very special emotions in the audience, and for me, too.”

But dancefloor devastation is a short-term fix, and while Dettmann agrees that Berlin is “a good city for someone that wants to do his own thing”, he also admits you need money to survive. And even sectors of Berlin are becoming hopelessly gentrified, areas like Prenzlauer Berg and former dens of discontent like Tacheles being cases in point. Tacheles, a 19th century shopping arcade occupied by the Nazis during the war, was taken over by artists and squatters in 1989 when the Berlin wall fell. Once a bastion of anti-capitalist idealism, it has, ironically, become something of a tourist attraction, although new ‘underground art’ centres such as the sprawling Berliner Kindl brewery in Neukölln are cropping up in its place and keeping the ‘old spirit’ alive.

“Due to the unique historical situation in east Berlin after the fall of the wall, Tacheles in the early years was one of the places where everything seemed to be possible,” comments Linda Cerna, a spokesperson for the venue. “But getting more professional, co-operating with other national and international institutions, realizing big projects…Tacheles had to change and we think that it is positive that a place like this is still changing.”

An Immaterial World:

“Figures such as Thoreau, who chose to live a self-sufficient-ish life in the local woods, or even the Buddha could be described as ‘drop-outs’ if we misunderstand them,” reckons Sophie Howarth, from Alain de Botton’s London-based centre for alternative living, the School Of Life. ”But if we take a step back from the contemporary focus on the [materialistic phenomenon known as] ‘affluenza’, and consider their lives as examples of pursuing what it might mean to live authentically and wisely, we may find ourselves radically reconsidering easy judgement.”

“Affluenza” - a combination of the words affluence and influenza - is an anti-consumerist term defined by clinical psychologist Oliver James as “placing a high value on money, possessions, appearances (physical and social) and fame.” James believes, amongst other things, that high rates of mental disorders are the consequence of excessive wealth-seeking in consumerist nations and that the costs of prizing material wealth generally and vastly outweigh the benefits.

Global capitalism is having a weird old time of it right now, and the subsequent economic slump is biting into many people’s personal lives, making us rethink our material and spiritual priorities. Guardian columnist and misanthropic anti-hero Charlie Brooker summed it up in his usual succinct way: “All of it was a dream. All that crap we bought, all the bottled water and Blu-Ray players and designer shoes and iPod Shuffles and patio heaters; all the jobs we had; all the catchphrases we memorised and the stupid things we thought. Everything we did for the past 10 years - none of it really felt real, did it? Time to snap out of it. Time to grow our own vegetables and learn hand-to-hand combat with staves. And time, perhaps, to really start living.”

Despite the humorous slant, Brooker made a serious point, one that has been gaining in popularity since way before the recession. Compared to the imminent death of our host planet, material wealth seems even more shallow than it did before. The onset of global warming showed many that, rather than escaping from our world, we need to engage with it and find creative solutions to real social and environmental problems.

“It’s funny,” says Ran Prieur, whose influential essay ‘How To Drop Out’ still gets 2500 hits a month on his site, www.ranprieur.com. “The 21st century used to mean flying cars and now it’s looking more and more like the fall of Rome. I think future historians will see this as the century when industrial civilization broke down, so it’s a great time to learn different ways of living. Specifically, the money economy will never again be as dominant as it was in the late 20th century. In the future, as in the past, success will be measured more often by direct useful actions than by the ability to go out and earn tokens. Many of the tasks that are now being done for money will disappear and the people who did them will have to learn stuff like how to grow food and repair bicycles. So ‘dropouts’ who already have practice living at the edge of the money economy are going to be leaders.”

Dropping In?

Freeganism, a movement that “practices strategies for everyday living based on sharing resources, minimizing the detrimental impact of our consumption and reducing and recovering waste and independence from the profit-driven economy,” shares that spirit. Freegans believe in creating a better world simply by sharing, and have garnered much press for practices such as ‘dumpster-diving’, where usable resources are foraged from bins and skips and distributed amongst the Freegan community.

“Running away to a desert island can sound like an attractive alternative, but may not necessarily be a viable solution,” says Alf, a practicing Freegan based in the UK. “Freeganism is not about disengaging from the world around us, but about engaging with people and with the environment in a more considerate way. It’s about freeing ourselves from the adverse effects and constraints of a consumer-driven society. We do this by being content to live off less: by offering our time as volunteers and finding that our basic material needs are met when we change our motivation and priorities.”

“Dropping out completely has never been possible anyway,” states Prieur. “It’s a myth. Even 400 years ago, when you could run off and join the Indians, you were just moving from being part of one society to being part of another. I think we have to do that again, except the society that we’re moving to doesn’t quite exist yet. We have to build it. To get there, we have to move beyond the myth of the self-sufficient individual, and we also have to move beyond thinking of the dominant society as poison, and think of it as a resource. [Author] William Kotke wrote something like: ‘not only is it acceptable to use the tools of the present system to build the better system that will replace it – ideally, all of its tools would be used that way’.”

Shades of hippy/communist idealism notwithstanding, pro-active engagement is highly popular today as a way of combating myopic government policies, re-balancing certain inequalities and re-thinking our own lifestyles. Utilizing the system to make positive changes from the inside certainly seems a more logically effective method than running away from it. In that sense, ‘ dropping in’ could well be the new ‘dropping out’.