The Moneyless Man

Even though it's less than an hour's drive from Ireland's fabled west coast, the countryside around the town of Loughrea in east Co. Galway, with its mile after mile of nondescript farmland and the seemingly endless motorways leading to more interesting places, seems as far away from the craggy shores of Connemara as the dark side of the Moon.
Despite its lack of obvious charms, the land there still obviously holds enough magic that one of the world's most radical social entrepreneurs has chosen to make it his home. On a cloudy afternoon in the middle of March in 2016, Andreas and I pulled up outside the gate of a big yellow farmhouse on a well-hidden side road, halfway up a hill about ten miles outside of the town. Despite having barely seen a sign of civilization for acres as we approached, our host's home was smack in the middle of a row of three houses packed in tightly beside each other, one of which was home to an unseen but unfriendly sounding dog. Before we had time to get out of the car the shaven head of Mark Boyle emerged through the door of a small woodshed in the garden directly in front of us. He looked a little taken aback when he saw us. "How're ye lads?" he offered by way of an introduction as he walked towards us rubbing sawdust from his hands, "I'd forgotten ye were coming."
 

Introductions were made. As the three of us chatted I had to keep reminding myself that this oh-so laid back and seemingly very ordinary young man who had invited us to his home had spent the last decade living one of the most unusual lives of anyone on the planet. In 2008, around the start of the great recession, Mark, a 29-year-old food company manager from Donegal attracted media attention around the world when he embarked on a remarkable social experiment. Disgusted by the destruction of our environment, the rampant over-consumption in the developed world, and the resulting inequalities between rich and poor, Mark decided that he was going to live for one year without spending any money at all. Mark began his mission on Buy Nothing Day 2008, an international day of protest against consumerism. Despite the obvious symbolism, as Buy Nothing Day comes round every year at the end of November, Mark had really thrown himself in at the deep end; having to brave the freezing mid-winter of the English countryside, where he lived in a second-hand caravan, just outside of his adopted home of Bristol. After surviving a year of bathing in icy-cold streams, living off foraged fruit and nuts along with his own home-grown veg, and spending his free time volunteering on an organic farm, Mark declared that on a personal level he was happier and more fulfilled than he had ever been before, while, perhaps a little reluctantly, assuming the role of a global icon for the sustainability movement. Over the next couple of years, he became an in-demand public speaker, a columnist for the Guardian in the UK, and a published author, with his third book, the curiously titled Drinking Molotov Cocktails With Gandhi, having been released in 2015 (and with four published overall, as of 2021.) Mark was so content with his new way of life that he extended it for another four years, before, in 2013; the Moneyless Man came back to Ireland.

 

I had been fascinated by Mark for a long time before I had ever met him; hardly surprising in itself, in the world we live in, living without money seems as impossible as living without oxygen. But rather than his lifestyle, what I found most fascinating about Mark was how difficult he was to categorize. People for whom the routine life of paid employment is nothing more than something other people talk about are far from unique in Ireland, but of all the people I'd met on my travels, Mark was the only one who had never claimed any kind of state benefit in his life. His name won't appear on the statistics of an employment service anywhere in the country, while by the same token, at the time we met he hadn't had anything that resembles a job for the past eight years. He remains a master of his own time, which he fills with a variety of projects that he is free to pick and choose as he pleases, while also being dependent on the charity of no one when it comes to providing for himself. In a society which rigidly defines the difference between the roles of the productive employed and the "parasitic" unemployed, where do you put somebody like Mark?

 

Since moving back to Ireland most of Mark's time had been divided between writing and working on his farm. Mark bought the farm with the proceeds from his first book The Moneyless Man: A Year Of Moneyless Living (an irony not lost on the man himself). "We're really ramping up food production at the moment," he told me, in the kind of soft, north-west accent usually associated with non-threatening country & western singers. "My hope would be that in the future I'll have a permanent, sustainable home base where I can live without the need to ever spend any money again. But it's a very long-term project; it could take anything up to ten years to make a place like this completely self-sufficient." I took a look around the farmyard. It wasn't a particularly big site; maybe only about three acres. The big roughcast yellow house at the front of the grounds sat in front of a small garden containing vegetable rows housed in plastic tunnels and a chicken coop full of loudly clucking hens. The garden sloped downwards slightly towards a patch of freshly plowed dirt that clearly had the appearance that it was waiting to be built on, followed by another, bigger, field containing more vegetable rows. To our left was another smaller and more modern-looking building, which had clearly been erected more recently than the farmhouse itself. It was decorated with a honeycomb-style pattern of wooden circles on the external walls. I was intrigued about what was inside it but brought my mind back to the questions at hand. I wanted to know why Mark had set up his permanent home back in Ireland instead of staying in the UK. He thought carefully before choosing his words. "I found that I suppose, my Irish essence was finding it hard to find an outlet for expression in England. I think we have a tendency to think of all western countries as being the same but there are subtle differences between them. I think there's a greater warmth in Ireland. That's certainly what I've found" he concluded, unapologetically. "I have a very different view of sustainability now than I first did when I set out on this path. For us to be truly sustainable we need to adopt a completely holistic approach; to everything from where our food comes from to re-establishing our connection to the land and to each other. For me, coming home and getting back to my roots and the connections that I forged here when I was growing up were crucial. I think Ireland's sense of community broke down during the Celtic Tiger, but by the time I came back here in 2013 people were beginning to look back on that time and realize they'd lost the run of themselves. The financial economy may have crashed during the recession, but at that time the "gift economy," all the actions that people do on a voluntary basis, from the kindnesses that people bestow on their friends and family, to charity work to social entrepreneurship, began to boom. The country was beginning to find its soul again and I wanted to be part of that rediscovery."

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At that moment a young man with dark hair came into sight, making his way up the hill to the main garden. He sat down on the porch of the farmhouse and removed his wellingtons before beginning to scrape the bottoms of them clean with a stick. Mark introduced him to us as Daniel from France, the lone WWoofer (farm volunteers who stay for free in exchange for work) who was staying with him on the farm at that time. "It's quiet at the moment," Mark said. "Nobody really wants to come out to the countryside at this time of year, but in the summer we could have thirty or more people living here. This place is more than just a home for me," he continued as Daniel disappeared into the big house. "Lots of other people come and stay on the farm; to work, to volunteer their time, or just to hang out. I want this to be a place where other people can come and experience a different way of being, to live for while in a world without money." While Andreas went back to the car to get his gear out of the boot I asked Mark how his life had changed since his first days in the caravan. "Well, my life has certainly changed a lot, but don't worry I haven't gotten a job or anything" he laughed. "I use a little bit of money these days when I don't have an alternative. I don't like doing it but it's a compromise I have to make sometimes." It wasn't a question I was particularly comfortable asking him, but I felt that I had to clarify how much money Mark actually spent in a year. Even though he clearly wasn't in any kind of conventional employment, I feared, with the topic I was exploring being creative unemployment, that with this interview I might be barking up the wrong tree. Maybe my subject might actually be best described as some kind of unconventional small business owner. Mark was clearly a bit uncomfortable with the question as well. He seemed disappointed in himself. "Well, it varies", he said thoughtfully. "In 2013 when I moved in here I spent a lot of money, buying the house, obviously, and planting the forest garden and things like that, but since then..., I don't know, I haven't spent much. For this year let's say?." He paused to do the sums in his head."Well," he said slowly "the internet's one bill that I won't ever be able to do without, that'll be thirty-five quid a month, and a bit of money for some electricity, that's a bit harder to predict, maybe a couple of hundred?? and that's all I'd expect to be spending next year." That's it?!" I replied, startled. Even my most conservative estimations hadn't been nearly as low as that. "Yeah that's right," Mark answered. "I'm not saying that's what I will spend; I don't know what's going to come up during the year. For example, if I get invited to go to the UK and do a series of talks I'm going to need money for that, but, even then, a grand would be the absolute height of what I'd spend in the year, which is probably very shocking to a lot of people." "You can say that again" I mumbled.

 

I was satisfied that if Mark had a change of heart and decided to drop into his local recruitment agency it was unlikely that his resume would be placed in the "currently employed" folder, but how the man himself felt about it could be a different story."I know that you do a lot of things to fill your time, but you are still technically unemployed. Do you feel you have more in common with people who are unemployed or with people who are working?" I asked him. Mark answered without hesitation. "I think the crucial issue here is how people generally define employment. When someone is referred to as unemployed it usually means that they are not earning an income. I don't have any income but I would consider myself highly employed. In fact, at the moment I'd say I'm heavily overworked." he said, chuckling slightly. "I derive no income from it but I derive lots of other things: amazing connections with people, fulfillment, and a sense of purpose." "Well, how do you explain that to other people who don't know anything about you?" I pressed him. "How do you answer the question "what do you do?" "I relish that question" Mark replied with a look of genuine glee in his eyes. "I like to challenge people's expectations. They're expecting you to say "I'm a teacher" or a doctor or whatever, to apply a specific label of some kind. Sometimes I like to say things like, well, there's not really anything specific that I do; which is very true. I don't have a daily routine; it's always different. Even a day when I don't do anything except think can be of great value as it can inform what I'm going to do in the future. My answer is a way for me to challenge that question, to put value back onto things that people don't appreciate anymore because they don't have financial value attached. If you ask someone what they do with their life and they say "I think" you'll probably give them some pretty curious reactions." "And probably some pretty negative ones as well," I added. "Yes," Mark agreed, "and doesn't that say a lot about what's wrong? If I said "I work in HR" most people would be satisfied with that answer, even though in reality if I had a job like that I should really be answering "I fire people." That's what people actually do in a job like that and people don't have a problem with it, yet to say what you think is somehow taboo. When did not thinking become a good thing? It's a great thing to be able to take a day or a week and really ask yourself "What does the world need from me; where can I apply my gifts?" Knowing your purpose is an incredibly valuable thing because there's no point climbing a ladder up the wrong wall.  I get messages from people all over the world every day; from interview requests to people wanting to collaborate with me on God-knows-what, and you'd be surprised how many emails I've gotten in the last few years from suicidal people who cannot stand living the way we live." "Do you mean from unemployed people who want advice on how to live without any money?" Even as I asked the question I felt his meaning had gone over my head. "No," Mark replied "from people who can see nothing ahead of them but spending the rest of their lives doing a job that they don't want. It puts a lot of people into a state of depression. They've read my story somewhere and realized "there's a way out of this." It seems really weird to me that the stuff that people are passionate about always seems to be really hard to make money in, whereas the stuff that we hate doing there seems to be loads of cash in. What I think everybody wants to do is to contribute to the world around them in a way that they find meaningful, and our economic model doesn't give a lot of people an opportunity to do that. We work inside a very machine-like system where the highest goals are efficiency and profit for the sake of themselves, with little or no thought as to why we're doing it. What's the ultimate purpose of profit if we're all unhappy?"

 

Our dialogue was interrupted by Andreas returning with his Nikon slung around his neck, announcing that he was ready to start the photo shoot. Looking around for a suitable location he suggested that the outside of the mysterious honeycombed building would be a good backdrop for the headshots. As we returned to our conversation it became clear to me that Mark would always favor talking about his worldview rather than about himself. This wasn't because he was reluctant to talk about his personal life; there was never a question that he tried to dodge or refused to answer, it just seemed that he didn't consider himself to be that interesting. He had been born in Ballyshannon, a formerly busy small town in Donegal laid low by the 2008 recession. "I think it was one of the top ten worst-hit towns in Ireland" Mark confirmed. "It's dying on its feet. There are no young people there, they're all either in Canada or Australia. Just like around here." He waved his hand in the air vaguely indicating the general vicinity of the Loughrea area. We spent very little time discussing his childhood. It had been very happy and very ordinary; his parents were very normal people who were always very loving and supportive of him. I asked him what they had said when he told them was going to start living in a field and he delivered a response with the breathtaking nonchalance that only a Donegal man can manage: "To be honest, we didn't really talk about it much."

 

As has been reported many times before, with varying degrees of amusement, after leaving school Mark had done an economics degree in GMIT. "The reason I decided to study business was because I think I have good entrepreneurial instincts," he told me. "I was one of those kids that would set up a lemonade stall in his garden. Also, I'm not great with taking orders, so being self-employed seemed appealing." I sensed a distinct lack of enthusiasm in Mark's answer, something that surprised me from a man who had gone to such extremes to stick to his principles. I asked if business had really been what his heart had been set on when he was young. "Well I guess when I was very, very young I wanted to be a professional footballer, like every other Tom, Dick and Harry" he replied honestly. "But when I got a little bit older and that became highly unrealistic...to be honest, I didn't really have anything that I was drawn to. Choosing to pursue a business career just came down to me looking at my options and saying "nothing's really grabbing me, so this looks like the best I can come up with," because it's expected of you that you leave school, go to college and somehow magically find your purpose." He paused thoughtfully as Andreas reviewed the shots he had taken so far. "The problem with that" Mark continued "is that even though we are surrounded by choice, choice of careers, and choice of lifestyles, the choices are within fairly limited parameters. I suppose I just thought I'd do a job that I got some sense of fulfillment from and that would give me a nice pay packet at the end of the month. I can't remember precisely, but I'm sure at that stage it wasn't a lot more exact than that." I wanted to know what had been the turning point in his life and where he had found his new direction. "I started to read about the life of Gandhi - he changed my plans for world domination," he laughed, clearly aware of how cliched his answer sounded. "The idea of someone actually acting in accordance with what they believed had a big impact on me. I suppose I started thinking a lot about the state of the world. I moved to the UK and got a job managing an organic food company, which seemed like an ethical way of using my skills. Through doing that I came into contact with lots of other people who were starting to question our economic model and that really made me start thinking. I looked at all the problems that the world was facing and I found that the common denominator was humankind's separation from the rest of life. The world is in the middle of a complete ecological breakdown,; 200 species are disappearing every single day. As a result of humanity's actions, the actions needed to maintain our globalized economy. Each and every one of those species fills its own specific niche, even the most insignificant creature. It will come to a tipping point when so many species are gone that entire ecosystems will start breaking down and the ramifications of that are going to be dire. Human beings have become really invested in a myth called "independence." If you look at the natural world you realize that there's no such thing; everything is dependent on everything else and nothing can survive on its own. As a species, we've completely forgotten that. I asked myself what were the most potent tools creating that sense of separation and I found that money was probably the most potent one. It creates an illusion that if you have cash in the bank you're independent, but you're not; you're really dependent on strangers from all over the world, people that you have no relationship with, to produce what you need. For most of history, people were aware that they were dependent on each other because they could see where what they consumed came from. You were dependent on the people in your local community. If you didn't maintain healthy relationships with them you didn't meet your needs."

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He paused for breath. Like most Donegal men his manner for the majority of the time was almost terminally easy-going, but on this subject, he was openly animated by deeply held convictions. "The biggest problem with money" he went on "is the spread of its influence into every aspect of our lives. Because we base our happiness and well-being on GDP growth, for GDP to keep growing we have to keep coming up with more and more elements of our lives to monetize; we have to keep turning human relationships and natural processes into monitory transactions. We're getting to the point where our mums and dads are soon going to be charging us for dinner. When you study economics you are taught about the functions of money and why it's really useful, but there is no discussion of its downsides. You don't discuss the pros and cons, just the pros. Money is a given." I found a lot of Mark's arguments very persuasive. I'm sure almost everybody has known days when they've had very little money in their pocket, but none of us who have grown up in the first world, have ever walked into a supermarket to find nothing but empty shelves (well, before Brexit anyway.) Looking at the world through that prism, it makes sense that money would appear to be more precious than the real commodities that it's exchanged for. We are all conditioned by our experiences and to be able to see the world as it is is sometimes the hardest thing of all to do. I wanted to know how Mark had transitioned from perceiving a new world differently to actually living in one. "Well in 2006 I started a website called Freeconomy," Mark told me. "Two years ago I merged it with another, bigger site that was doing the same thing called Streetbank because I couldn't keep up with the rate that the technology was changing anymore, but at its height, people were using it in over one hundred and fifty countries. It was an online community based around the "Pay-It-Forward" principle that was common in pre-monitory "gift economies." If you had something that you didn't need anymore you could put up a notice on Freeconomy offering it to anyone who might want it. Then, when the time came that you needed something you could put up a request for it on the site. When I moved into this house I furnished it entirely through Freeconomy, and with great ease. Everybody's got stuff in their attics that they don't use anymore that they're willing to pass on. People really love to give when they're given the opportunity. If everyone is operating in that spirit then whenever they need something it'll come into their life and they won't have to pay for it. "

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As unobjectionable an idea as that sounded, despite Freeconomy's ultimate success, as with any new idea, it wasn't without its critics." I used to give talks to promote Freeconomy and sometimes people would react very negatively to them, standing up and calling me an idiot and things like that" Mark recalled. "I can kind of understand it to be honest. Someone spends thirty years working to pay for a house and give their kids a good life and then some upstart comes along and expects them to question everything they're used to, that's bound to inspire a negative reaction. I think at some level we are all aware that there's a lot of fucked up stuff happening around the world in order to facilitate our current way of life and we all carry a lot of guilt about that. I'd been giving those talks for about two years when I was having a conversation with Marcus, a very true and honest friend of mine. He put it to me that for all my chat about the consequences of money I wasn't living my beliefs any more than anyone else. And I knew he was right. I couldn't talk about it any longer if I didn't experience it. I had to see what it felt like to be a moneyless human being in a world that's driven by money. I spent the next four or five months preparing, setting myself up with the basics for the experiment. I made a list of all the things that I considered to be my needs and when I came to something that I absolutely couldn't have without money I struck it off the list. It sounds really hard but believe me if I can do this, anybody can." I reflected on my own life and all of the things in it that I took for granted as my little essentials: from the conveniences of technology and transportation, to even the slight feeling of comfort I always got from knowing I had enough change in my pocket to walk into a corner shop and pick up a bar of chocolate, all of which were dependent on me having enough money to pay for them. Mark's initial list of needs must have been a very long list indeed I thought. "Was there anything that you struck off the list that really surprised you when you realized you could do without it?" I asked him. Mark lolled his head on one side and pondered this for a moment. "At the time I'm sure there was but honestly, eight years later I just can't remember. We're all different people to the people we were eight years ago. These days I've boiled my needs down to being able to eat three meals a day and spending the rest of my time working on projects that I'm passionate about. That's enough for me now."

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We explored the rest of the farm. Mark lead Andreas and I down a gravel path to the freshly plowed dirt field, which he revealed was to be the site for a new cottage he was building as a new home for himself and his girlfriend Kirsty. I had read that Mark had been in a relationship at the start of his moneyless years in Bristol which had ended due to his girlfriend's discomfort with his new lifestyle choices. I was impressed by Mark's persistence in finding a more open-minded partner and I was curious about this new girl "Does Kirsty have a more conventional way of life than yourself?"I asked. "No," Mark answered, "If anything she pushes me to be more extreme" causing me to wonder if I should have been interviewing her instead. "She wants to leave the modern world behind entirely" he continued. "That's why we're moving out of the farmhouse into this cottage. This new house is about us trying to live in accordance with our principles. If we can manage it, the ultimate goal would be to build it into the ground. Grass should eventually grow up on top of it and it should have a green roof, like a Hobbit house. It's going to have no running water or electricity. Originally we wanted to power the whole farm with an off-grid power source but the more we looked into it the more we realized that just because something wasn't plugged in didn't mean it wasn't still part of the grid. If we used solar panels they'd have been made in a factory somewhere. It's all part of the same industrial society that's destroying the planet. The only way to be off-grid really is to have no power at all. But that's something that we can do in our own personal lives. If we want people to come and stay on the farm we can't expect them to come and stay in a place where's there's no electricity. You want to help them to think in a different way - but you've got to provide them with what most people would consider their basic needs. Let me show you where we keep the guests." He pointed towards the honey-combed building. We made our way up to the building's front door. "What was this when you moved in here?" Andreas asked. "Oh there was just an old pig shed here," Mark said breezily. "We stripped away what was left of the covering on the outside last summer and just left a skeleton. We more or less built the rest of it from scratch." Andreas let out an impressed whistle.  "Traditional timber frame; like my house back in Germany. " "Ah yeah," Mark sympathized, "it's a beautiful place to sit in during the summer."

 

He reached the door and swung it open. "This is the Happy Pig: the world's first moneyless pub," he said. The inside of the building resembled an up-market backpackers hostel: it was furnished with comfortable looking sofas and beanbag chairs, rows of well-stocked book-shelves decorated the walls and the centre of the room was occupied by a large game of table football. The bar itself was directly across from the door, being watched over by a stuffed weasel which still glared at us angrily even in death. Mark made his way across the room and maneuvered his way behind the bar leaning an elbow on the counter. "What'll ye have lads?" he said, unable to resist the corny joke. "I call this place An Teach Saoir; that means free house in Irish" he continued. "It's meant to be a hub for people to come together in. Here we hold storytelling, lectures on permaculture and sustainable living, music, and dance; all kinds of things like that." I tried to imagine how the ten-year-old Mark Boyle, manning his lemonade stand and maybe daydreaming of spending his profits on a new pair of football boots, would feel if he could see the strange and wonderful refuge from the workaday world that he would one day build for himself.

 

"Mark," I said returning to the present "what do you think you can achieve through this work in the long term?" The adult Mark was squinting uncomfortably under the full force of Andreas' quickly assembled lightbox while trying to maintain his camera face. "I don't have a personal goal for it," he said without looking away. "My philosophy is: do at any moment what you feel compelled to do. I don't worry about the results so much as what my impulses are telling me to do in any given moment. I try to ask "what is the world asking of me today; what can I best spend my time doing?" and then act on what feels like the right answer. I don't have a fixed goal that I want to have achieved by the end of my life. I want just to have always made the best use of my time. Human beings have this problem; we think that everything revolves around us and we think that we ought to be in charge of everything, whereas in reality, the universe has got a whole other gig going on. I think we need to bring humility into our lives so as not to feel like we can control the world." "So you feel that people should try not to demand a certain end result out of life?" I asked, trying to see if I fully understood his perspective. "Yes," said Mark. "In my experience, if you start focusing on the gifts that you can bring into the world everything else just looks after itself. That's the biggest lesson I've learned since I gave up money: I learned to fully trust in life. "What does that mean exactly?" I said, excited by the implied grandeur of his words. "In my first days of living without money" Mark continued, his eyes beginning to water at this stage "I had no guarantees about where my next meal was coming from. I had planned everything out well enough so that I knew what I was doing, but trusting that everything was going to be OK only came over time. In the first few months, there was a constant anxiety around everything that I did, I was worrying about whether my crops would fail a lot of the time. Within about six months all of my security issues had melted away and I got to a point where I didn't even think about it. I wasn't waking up in the morning with a knot of anxiety in my stomach anymore. I just inherently believed that I'd be OK. I would get up in the morning and do whatever I felt compelled to do with my life that day and trust the universe to bring the basics that I need into my world. And things always just worked out." "And you really got to a stage where you just trusted in that?" I asked.  I was secretly in awe at the joyous simplicity of this remarkable man's philosophy. It seemed so pure and uncomplicated as to be completely childish and stupid and yet Mark himself appeared to be living proof of its efficacy.  "Yeah," said Mark. "I just trusted in it. And I want to keep on trusting in it."

 

I looked out through the windows of the Happy Pig. The sun was starting to set. In the dimming light, I saw the garden with its polytunnels and the site of the future Hobbit house. Outside the main house, Daniel was sitting on the porch, reading a book and relaxing after his day's work. This hidden paradise had been built, seemingly out of thin air, by a very normal man who had relinquished his expectations, had allowed himself to let go of the reigns of his life and throw himself into the unknown. I marveled at life's capacity to lead people in directions beyond their imaginations. "Hey Andres, man," cried Mark, bringing me back down to earth with a bang, "Are you nearly finished? It's getting cold in here." He rubbed his arms vigorously as if to prove he wasn't exaggerating his discomfort. "Just finished now" Andreas called back. He took one more shot for the road before dimming his flashbulb for the last time. Our audience with the Moneyless Man was over. We walked back to the car where Andreas presented Mark with our extremely late housewarming present; a potted apple tree that had been growing forlornly in Andreas' kitchen for the past three months. Mark laughed. "How did you know? We're going to be making cider in the summer. Maybe the next time ye're around ye'd like to drop in for some." From little seeds do the tallest trees grow, I thought.