Ask Lemmy

I never used drugs, and arguable didn't have mental health issues. I just... ran out of money, and wasn't making more fast enough to keep having an apartment. I was homeless for about two months before I got back on my feet.

There's a lot of people like that, who just... didn't have the money to stay housed continuously.

I imagine most of those just go off grid. Being a homeless wanderer is very hard. Much easier to shun society from inside a cabin.

I don’t know. Probably. The world’s a big place with a lot of people.

There’s a guy who sits out in front of my cafe every day. You wouldn’t think he was homeless if you saw him, but I see him out there all day every day. He goes to the gym a few doors down for showers and to the laundromat around the corner to wash his clothes. He doesn’t look like he’s on drugs or anything. He’s in his 50’s, his hair is always combed, he’s always clean, appears lucid, etc. He looks like a regular guy you would see at an office job.

The weird thing about him is he does absolutely nothing. No book, no phone, nothing. He just sits there and stares into the parking lot for hours. I don’t know how he does it. We used to say good morning to him and, after he never responded, we kinda just stopped paying him any attention.

Most of the homeless people around here are drugged out zombies. They literally look like they just came off the set of The Walking Dead. This guy in front of my place is the one I notice all the time because of how normal he looks.

That's the vagabond lifestyle, and yes there's a modest number of them. It's apparently a hard life, but at least you're pretty much completely free.

They're basically hippies, they mostly bum rides. Dumpster diving is popular. People give them stuff too. You meet more in places where winter isn't really a thing, just cuz winter gets kinda cold, and they can go where they want, so they don't really stay there.

It is generally not recommended to diagnosis like you just did. Being weird is not in of itself mental illness. Also to be fair I think the plot was he was looking for his biological father.

But yeah I think there are mentally stable people who just decide that wandering the earth is what they want to do. I don't really get it but they probably don't get me so it works out.

Not quite homeless, Paul Erdős was a nomadic mathematician. He use to travel to universities, couch-surf with a mathematician, and solve a problem with them.

He would say, "another roof, another proof." As a result, he has a huge number of collaborators. The stat Erdős number is like the six degrees from Kevin Bacon game.

People seemed glad to have this oddball stranger as a house guest.

I was this person. Most people who do this are what people would usually call travelers. People who do it voluntarily, like I did, usually had enough money to get to another interesting place or buy a meal anytime they are hungry. Many people have odd jobs in remote places that preclude housing (I have had these jobs too). Some people are also begging as they travel. I never begged. I worked whenever I needed money. Generally speaking, living like this without facing extreme difficulties is exclusively a white male privilege from a country with a strong passport. Non-white people are routinely arrested. Women are routinely raped. Weak passports get deported.

Non-consecutively I spent a little over 4 years living in a tent or on the ground in some capacity. The longest period of time I lived exclusively in a tent was 14 months consecutively.

I hiked backcountry trails, city streets and traveled extensively through a number of countries. I rode a bicycle for some of those years as well. In total I walked somewhere around 1500-2000 miles and rode between 3000 and 4000 miles. The farthest I have ever walked in a single day is 30 miles. The farthest I have ever cycled in a single day is just over 120 miles. The longest period of time I spent in a single national forest was 5 months, but I worked in the back country there for 3 of them so I don't know how to count that. There are thousands of people who work in the back country for many many months on end doing things like trail maintenance throughout the US.

Yes, actually. Very rare, but yes. Diogenes is probably the best example I could think of for that kind of behavior.

The majority of homeless people are homeless because housing is to expensive, and the majority of homeless drug users started after becoming homeless not before

I've met two. Used to work with them on a ranch when I was a kid. Cool guys, wouldn't live in the same place for more than three months.

One of the dudes carried around a tiny TV with a built in VHS and a handful of movies. The other guy was just heading South, I think maybe going to Mexico.

When they decided to move on they just left, no goodbyes or heads up.. just gone one day.

There used to be (still is?) a guy who lived in Albany NY known as the Mayor of Lark St. I think he said he had a degree, but he was willingly homeless. Made money running errands for local businesses. Everyone in the Lark St neighborhood knew this guy.

He seemed plenty sane to me.

I don't know about that last part, but like I was hit by a driver riding a bicycle to work and unless something drastic changes, in the next 10 years I will be one of those homeless people.

There is no social safety net in the USA. I was hit by a foreign political refugee with the competency of a 3rd grader, and that is being generous. I'm still able to walk and mostly function so long as I spend most of the day laying down. I can't hold posture, am in constant pain about on par with a bee sting or worse, enough that it never escapes my conscious thought, and never sleep more than 4-6 hours, I'm a zombie of my former self. My problems are difficult to diagnose and our litigious society means neurosurgeons are not willing to look very deeply into complicated cases as risking decades of schooling is not on their priority list. If your radiologist's report from an MRI fails to show an easy diagnosis to treat, no reputable neurosurgeon will chase problems any deeper. It is easy to fall through the cracks. Like my damage is thoracic. That region is rarely damaged and is like 5% of all cases a neurosurgeon treats. I'm the kind of person you see homeless out there or a Fentanyl statistic eventually.

I'm above average smart by most people's admission, but simply turning my head left can send me on a 2-3 week spiral of extraordinary pain and little to no sleep.

Well, I know a guy almost like you describe, chooses it, says he's more free. He does love him some crack though.

I know there are. I've met a few. There's a whole scene for this kind of thing in San Francisco. It's a lot of old hippy-types. Cool people.

I literally did just that for a summer a few years back. An extremely exhilarating adventure, but I got bored of that crap after a while.

And no, I have never consumed any hard drugs nor would I ever given a fifth of a third of a quarter of the shit I saw on the road.

Dick Conant. There's speculation he had mental health problems, but not more than most of us. I believe he just wanted to live the life he did.

I did meet a guy once that I believe fit the bill. My dad and I were on our way to a 5-day back mountains backpacking trip, and picked up a hitch-hiker with backpacking gear. He was a kid, must have been early 20's. He'd done a turn in the Peace Corps in Bali, and when he came back he decided he didn't want to get into the rat race. So he got what he needed and had been spending the past few years basically living in the US national forests. He'd get some provisions, live for a couple of weeks, make his way to a town, pick up more food, and range back out. In the off season, he'd pick up odd jobs and save up for what he'd need for food the next year. From what I gathered, he lived mainly on beans and rice, and some spices; cheap, dried, dense goods. But a more homeless person, I've never met. I doubt he slept in the same place more than a couple of times. He was also the most chill, relaxed person I'd ever met. During the 3 hours we spent with him, I saw him get excited only once, when he realized I knew of a Balinese band I'd happened to pick up an interest in after hearing a bit of their stuff on NPR; it surprised him a white American would know about an obscure Balinese band.

I still think about that guy, although I've forgotten his name. Is he still roaming the national forests? I've thought about him enough to know I wouldn't want to live that life; despite it's attractions, freedoms, and aching beauty, you also give up so much: food, friends, music... heck, as I age, mundane tyings like beds and toilets become increasingly important to me.

Still, that guy was a free spirit, it ever there was one.

I spent the last 8 years living in homeless shelters. I'd say at least 95% of my fellow residents were fleeing domestic violence, drug addicts, people out of jail, elderly, pedophiles, sex offenders, wide variety of mental health issues, some physical disabilities.

Mental health was the majority, so much so that shelters work in concert with mental health programs. Some short term crisis stabilization places for homeless people leaving psych hospitals.

Remember one guy in above category refusing to stay in a shelter, said it was more crowded, less freedom. Some people so beaten by bad experiences, trauma, unable to hold jobs their entire life, who'd give up, living on the streets was only stability they could muster.

It is freeing, in a way. But not as romantic, idealized as some might think.

Yeah, I met a retired guy who just went around the country using his pensioner’s bus pass and slept where he could.

No. I think I myself could easily become a wandering hermit, but I use drugs and have mental illness.

I don’t think a person can be that far outside of the social matrix, to even be in a place where rejecting the world is an option, without mental illness driving them out there.

I've met quite a few people like this and anecdotally there seemed to be a trend. Nearly all of them lost someone or had something horrific happen to them and just weren't interested in any of it anymore. I've yet to meet anyone that all of the sudden found some sort of peaceful enlightenment.

I dated one for a while. He was one of those people that did a lot of trail hiking, just turned it into a lifelong thing instead of a yearly or once in a lifetime thing. It's an interesting lifestyle, but ultimately not one that I want, so we parted ways

Alternatively, I spent a lot of time homeless myself because my PTSD was too difficult to hold down a job or have roommates with. I did a lot of drugs then because I wasn't happy with my life and couldn't find a way out of the situation. My ex didn't do any because he was happy with his life. I eventually got the help I needed and the VA housing loan, so I'm finally in a good place

They probably exist just by statistical probability, but you're not likely to run into an old school mountain hermit or voluntary nomad by visiting your local homeless encampments.

Most unhoused folks are facing serious lef problems that require a level of social support that makes sense once you think about it but requires a lot of folks to be unburdened of their fears of what the unhoused are like to feel safe with the possibility of one of them moving into the unfilled unit just up the road, even with a guarantee that some sort of accountability agent will be visiting regularly to make sure their recovery is going steady, which itself would require a SIGNIFICANT uptick in the training of medical professionals qualified for home visits to potentially uncooperative patients.

Yes, I do believe there are some people that choose that life style.

The first time my best friend and I did mushrooms, he told me the next day that he decided his calling was to give up all his worldly possessions and just travel the earth spreading the word of the Lord.

I told him that was cool, but to wait six months before starting his quest—besides, he had his whole life to walk the earth, and the blunt I just rolled was 20 minutes away from burn down. It’s been over 15 years, and he still hasn’t left for that pilgrimage…never would have guessed, lol. 🙄

I once met a man who was just trekking across the country. Took a rest next to me at the bus stop in my city with his a big ol’ frame backpack; one of those ones you would take on a long multi-day backcountry hike with a sleeping bag. He said he had just come down out of the mountains. Until then, I had not met a single person who even tried to make that journey in either direction on foot, but this person apparently would walk huge portions of an entire state on a frequent basis. You could tell he wasn’t like other homeless people. He actually seemed happy.

There are multiple monastic traditions of shunning all material things, some of which include housing.

Do you know about hobos, tramps and bums?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobo
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tramp

Diogenes?

There was a man here in north Alabama like this. He even sometimes pretended to be mentally ill, but he wasn't - and he was actually very wealthy.

Diogenes comes to mind.

No. I don’t.

No doubt it depends what you mean by "mentally ill", and also how nomadic they need to be to qualify.