[chantelles]

I left home at 15 and some adults who worked together let me move in with them and be their maid. I paid $150 a month in rent and got $10 a month to live on. I worked out how to live off Milo (a Jamaican malt supplement), Chips Ahoy cookies (1/2 a cookie a day for a treat) and dumpster dived vegetables (mostly cabbages and carrots). I lived like this for years, when I got my first real jobs I made sure to save at least 80% of every paycheck. I retired at 35 and now I write about the apocalypse (one feature film, various shorts, one book, graduate degree in Equity Studies/lots of essays and conferences). I know live a very easy comfortable life, but most see me as bizarre because i have no furniture and do not buy any beauty products (I've never purchased shampoo or paid for a hair cut - I am female). There is an equal proportion of happy memories scattered throughout my life, some of my happiest were when I had literally nothing but one dress and 4 pairs of stolen Zellers underwear and was sleeping in a car. The form of our lives impoverishes experience of reality as much, if not more, as the content. It's a whole we do not see for the misplaced desire for displays of wealth over relationships with everything and everyone.

[RobertRoberts]

I lived with my wife in a van for months. We dumpster dived behind bakeries, pizza places and ate very simple food. Even now 24+ years later we live a very simple life with few things. (I left home at 17, and lived on the streets for a time as well, so a van was luxury to me)

My hope is that if nothing else, the current situation opens people's eyes to past indulgences with no thought toward the future. I wish I had saved as much as you had, I would be better off now. (I simply never learned good financial sense until later in life)

More than anything though, I am not afraid of going back to nothing. (I am sure you may have a similar "mental safety net?)

It's not the end of the world and we can recover from this current state. Not sure it's comforting to those that face this imminently, but many people have survived far worse.

[300bps]

My hunch is dumpster diving works well when food is plentiful and people are throwing perfectly edible items away willy-nilly.

Get a depression-style food shortage and suddenly what you find in the dumpster won’t be as appetizing as the donuts that Dunkin just didn’t sell that day.

[chantelles]

That's true. I mean, I mean the best dumpster diving is in rich neighbourhoods. Food banks also dry up in hard times. I lived in Nelson BC for a time when most people there were on welfare (it was at about 80%) and the food bank only had apples from the harvest and those decorative gourds so I got them and tried to cook them ( I was house sitting a Doukabor cabin for a Buddhist couple ) and even ate a few bowls of what was THE MOST BITTER thing I ever had even with a zillion sugar packets. But lets be real, what happens when the dumpsters dry out is folks steal. That's why it's safer to have a social net, for everyone.

[chantelles]

Yes vans are a luxury! My first 'home' was a tent with no zipper and then a VW rabbit for a year and so when I got a '64 Ford Econoline it was my mcmansion! I find that having a home is stressful, like stuff owning is a huge responsibility because I see each item as hours of my life sacrificed from thinking and working on relationships.

[emerongi]

My personal requirements are very low as well (maybe not as low as yours), but I think if I had a family with kids, my minimum requirements would increase substantially. All the material stuff starts to make more sense once you have a family to take care of.

[chantelles]

Totally. It's certainly why I never had kids, I can't stand all the responsibility of that.

[dirtnugget]

You must be the HN commenter with the wildest story around, respect.

[chantelles]

I've spent multiple years in therapy trying to integrate just that - that this is wild. My normal prevents me having healthy relationships. Events like a plague are more dangerous to my ptsd work than my health (though I have asthma) because this stress feels like home to me. There is a relief of, like the shoe has dropped, because I've lived this. I've been waiting to say SEE I TOLD YOU ALL THIS IS NORMAL! My book is an apocalypse memoir not to be facetious but - everything is true. Every event and thought is me in the late 80s, how I perceived every non-grandparent age adult as a horrible threatening monster who could without warning rip you to shreds and then never explain why. And I was lucky. I was born white and in Canada and I met some really kind people who (because I look non threatening ) saved me - not with money or food - but by just being nice, opening up to me. Saying nice things and laughing at my painful jokes and forgiving me for being really fucking bizarre. That's really why I wrote it - so folks can empathize with marginalities and the struggles between class/race/gender/sexuality and education and identity and then see you don't need to donate money or time to make a revolution. Just like be there, emotionally. Listen and expect nothing. And, that easy, you healed part of my identity.

[kinkora]

Interesting story!

Side note - i am Australian, have traveled the world and I find it funny in many countries (particularly Asia), everyone thinks Milo is from their own country. They are suprised when I tell them it's Australian and hilarity ensues when they looked it up online.

Oh and don't feel bad cause Aussies have loads of brands too that we thought were local but are actually from overseas. For the longest time, i thought Maggi noodles was from Asia but its actually Swiss!

[chantelles]

That's wild! I learned about it from a friend from Jamaica and I was able to source it so cheaply. How weird that a rural Canadian girl from a town with a Jamaican mayor (who was the only West Indian family in town ) ended up living off Australian meal supplement.

[joenot443]

Wow, what a story! If you don't mind me asking, what was your path like going from dumpster-diving vegetables to retirement at 35?

[chantelles]

Yes well many wanted me to write a tips to retirement book and not an apocalypse memoir. I can't write some of it, or am not ready to. But, no one should do it. It's just total privation and lack of self care, or would be to someone coming from a healthy home. I started in stripping for seed money to start buying houses, but it's such boring work and dangerous too (I ended up being an activist and helping nurses immunize strippers from Hep B ) You obviously cannot drink or use drugs - I never tasted alcohol until I was 35 (retired - still don't like it). When I went out I never took money. Ever. I lived on powdered milk and horse cereals while I was making very good money. I worked constantly (various business from pools to landscaping, tenants, house flipping, production company, and went to university part time and had no hobbies except running and I started that by just running in what I had. I only buy cars with all cash and they are always old. I mean, feel free to ask questions. TL;DR: Be a hustler, but not like one from the movies. One that is really boring, hated by everyone for seemingly being aloof and judgey, eccentric and annoying.

[hoka-one-one]

I just got laid off and I'n trying to live cheap until I find work.

[chantelles]

Do you have any money to apply for? I'm in Canada and my friends who've applied have all gotten it. This is the last time anyone should have to live cheap, it's the time when all the taxes you've paid do the job of taking care of you.

[SuoDuanDao]

I'm curious about your writing, could you link to where I can find some of it?

[McKayDavis]

http://apocalypsethememoir.com/

(from her profile https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=chantelles)

[XaspR8d]

The BookBaby links there were timing out for me, but I found it at https://store.bookbaby.com/book/apocalypse-the-memoir

[chantelles]

Thanks for the search - it's on amazon too. It's translated into Chinese and sells very well there, especially right now.

[tiawaven]

Paradise. When we were yung, we had it tugh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE

[noah-kun]

I hope I'm not reading this as a refutation capitalism as exploitation-based economics. I could carry on about that, but will pick up something:

> I've never purchased shampoo or paid for a hair cut - I am female [me: this choice of quote has nothing to say about gender, please read on]

In the Soviet Union, there was a growing demand for consumer goods. Government fought to reach a balance on whether it was time to undertake those goals, and how much of it should be handled by the secondary market.

After WWII, the United States switched to a highly commercial culture of consumer debt financing, a general consumerist focus. This put the communist nations, themselves developing rapidly, under even more strain to give citizens what they saw the West was enjoying. This may have been premature, and some might argue lead to an untimely end for the USSR.

What's interesting about your story is you we're living in a world of few consumer goods, like in the era before and during Khrushchev.

So where capitalism used the newly developing marketing gimmicks to both sell consumer goods at home, and undermine the priorities of People's government abroad--you, at least, are in a place where those superfluous goods are not a sign of victory over People's governments, but actually wasteful and unattainable. At least if one wants to move out of their car one day.

I'm sure none of this is lost on you as a writer of... what was it... Biden speeches? [Fake edit: the apocalypse!]

If we are rejecting the consumerism that served some role in bringing down the USSR, perhaps it's not a wishful thought that class consciousness growing. Maybe we're fatigued, ready to accept a world without the gimmicks parading themselves as innovation and surviving for years a household names off investor money and debt like a Potemkin village.

This is a good practice, living off less, but it's a blow to Western economic theories that have bought their way into textbooks. But what's to come down the pipeline isn't just the growth of China, but also Africa and partnering nations that we're used to exploiting (look at the grooming of India as a place of new manufacture). We'll soon see less opportunities to exploit, higher prices and, well, Socialism or barbarism.

[chantelles]

What's funny is I've been living in St Petersburg Russia for 4 months a year for the past 3 years. It's wild to live there now, where the stylish and beautiful youth are extremely enthusiastically embracing capitalism. I am not sure how capitalism is not gendered or any other economic system, but I agree, I'm very sure the failure of every economic theory is one of imagination and disciplinarity.

[fjk123]

good observations