Do you think quitting money would solve all our problems? Is it possible to quit money and survive in a system that worships it, where everything is flesh and money is the skeleton? A man, named Daniel Suelo back in 2000 decided to break up with the capitalist system, leaving all his life savings, thirty dollars to be precise, in a phone booth. Then he set off to a cave in Utah, and has been living there, surviving only on wild food and road kill. The former cook has no job and "subsists on excess, unwanted goods and that which is freely given.”

Suelo’s story is told by Author, Mark Sundeen, in the book ‘The man who quit money’. In it, he accounts how a man lived sanely and happily without receiving any earnings. It goes to an extent of saying that this isolationist manages to fulfill all the basic human needs- food, shelter, warmth. It even implies that he managed to fulfill, to some degree, a desire for companionship, purpose and spiritual engagement.

Well, does this mean that we can live happily or better without a money economy? In his blog, (yes he has a blog) Suelo say:

All creatures, all the universe, outside the walls of commercial civilization live moneyless.  That's why nature, outside civilization's constricts, is perfectly balanced.  Yet no nation on earth, even with its PhD economists, can even balance its budget!

While it is true that money brings with it too much clutter, doesn’t it simply represent value? As long as humans find it necessary to measure value, can something like money ever become obsolete? Our problem, I think, is not money. Money represents value. As long as the desire to measure value is within us, it doesn’t really matter what the measure is, because it will still cause us to behave the way we do, and make compromises. As a reader of the book asks, ‘doesn’t rejecting the need for this exchange translate into rejecting the idea that goods and services have value that is abstractable?”

Another thing I find worth noting is the hypocrisy in it. Suelo might have no bank account; he might have cut himself from the food of the 21^st Century, scavenging the wild for something for his tummy, but Suelo still blogs. Computers are not free. Neither is the Internet. So what are we saying? He keeps contact with the outside world, living vicariously through them. Some reviewers find this parasitic, saying that he owes something to the society he scavenges. He is in contact with money through this society. Not to forget, he uses a library paid for with other people’s taxes.

Can we survive without money or a measure of value?