Alright. Let’s say (hypothetically, of course) that one was feeling disgruntled, and wanted to fantasize about completely dropping out of society. The only thing you have access to is $10k, cash.
Take “completely dropping out” to mean self-sufficiency. No rent. No one hunting you down to collect the amount due on your foreclosed home. No regular job. A completely free existence, even if it means no health care, irregular food, etc.
How would you do it?
It would be cool to build a raft out of waste like that one dude on Ripley’s did. I believe he actually grew food on it as well. Is it possible to drop out of society? I imagine it is very easy. You could live in a forest and hunt, fish, and build your own shelter with a small number of supplies.
I have a book and a magazine subscription on how to do just that. The magazine is the Mother Earth News and they are dead serious and have been around since the 1970’s. The cover people regularly who have done close to just this although I don’t think any of them got along with no money at all although some barter a great deal. There are people in the U.S. and Canada that build their own sod houses/tepees/cabins and live in them full time while growing their own food. It can definitely be done because people used to do it routinely and the laws of survival haven’t changed at a basic level. There is also an awful lot of open, cheap, isolated land in the U.S. and Canada.
Sadly a lot of people worldwide manage without many possessions.
In the US, is a homeless person living off soup kitchens ‘completely free’?
I’m not sure you can be free if you must rely on charity to live.
Fair enough (it’s your OP!).
But is $10K enough to buy the land, water rights, tools and materials to build your own cabin?
First thing, where are you going to go/stay?
I read somewhere that Alaska is often the destination of choice in the mind of arm-chair “drop outs”, but the reality is quite different - virtually all the land their is owned by the federal government, and despite it being the largest state with miles of genuine wilderness, it’s just not doable for a number of reasons, and so surprisingly enough it shouldn’t be very far up the list of probable “get away from it all” destinations.
I would think Wyoming would have many suitable locations, and a lot of Southern states as well.
I don’t know if he’s still there, but there was until recently a Vietnam veteran living rough in the Royal National Park, right on the outskirts of Sydney. He cheated a bit because he used to accept handouts of food etc from picnickers and bushwalkers, but for the most part I think he was self sufficient - there’s a (non-native) deer population in the park, and he might have been eating that meat. It’s on the coast too, so fish wouldn’t be a problem, and the guy had excellent bushcraft.
10K is probably too tight to be all inclusive but if you already have the equipment needed, you might be able to pull off building a suitable house on less than that. You wouldn’t be able to afford new lumber but you might be able to find someone that needs a barn torn down who is willing to trade the wood. Some people also set up their own mini-sawmills (you can buy them and I have seen demos). Cheaper solutions are a sawmill attachment to a good chainsaw. After that, you have to let the wood dry for a year or so and then start building.
I wish I could link to some of my Mother Earth News articles about people that have already done most of this in the U.S. and Canada. I have an article about one older man in Wisconsin who already had a piece of practically worthless prairie land. He got a revelation while visiting it one day and built his own house with his own hands for about 10K. My favorite quote was him saying that he just couldn’t get any piece surrounded by “all that electricity” so he doesn’t have any. From there, he started growing food and dug a root cellar. He got some chickens and eats those. He even built a wood fired sauna as a luxury. The house looks eccentric but perfectly livable.
As long as you don’t set any firm rules about what can never be done, it is doable. I think that everyone would always need some money however even if it is minimal.
You really can’t do any serious gardening in Wyoming. The climate’s too harsh and the soil sucks. There’s virtually zero agriculture in the state beyond cattle ranching. I’d be looking at Idaho.
I don’t know about the whole state, but the area around Pocatello in eastern Idaho isn’t much good for anything that’s not a potato. Summers are cool and short, winters are icy and windy, and the ground is pretty sandy.
Every year a couple of people head to Alaska to drop out of society and usually end up dead.
And this is usually because they just don’t understand how much work it takes to keep yourself alive in a cabin alone in the middle of the wilderness. You have to keep your wood stove fed, you have to feed yourself. You’ve got to get your food stored for winter BEFORE winter sets in. Yeah, a moose will provide a lot of meat, but you’ve got to kill that moose and butcher it and get it frozen. And you need a gun, and ammunition. And a diet of just moose meat isn’t enough.
99% of Alaska is public land. So if you want to just want to live by yourself, you can certainly hitch a ride to Fairbanks, shoulder your backback, and start walking for a couple of weeks, and you might never see another person for the rest of your life. However long that is.
You’ll probably die of hypothermia long before you can starve.
I actually know someone who did this.
'Course I grew up in Alaska, which is a popular choice for drop out candidates. I grew up in the southeastern part of the state (where the weather is less harsh and therefore it’s more feasible to drop out and go build yourself a shack on public land somewhere and go about your business).
The guy I’m thinking of did precisely that some 25 - 30 years ago. Dropped out, moved to Alaska with a modest amount of hard cash (I think it was 5,000), and built himself a little place out on public land. Everyone calls him “Hippie Chris”. This is because nobody knows his actual legal name. For many years he came into town twice a year. Those trips he generally sold/traded some goods (furs, actually, and some handcrafted things, as well as surplus produce and fish/game) and used the proceeds to buy things he couldn’t really make himself. He also occasionally worked here and there as an odd-jobs guy for strictly cash-for-labor. He was never in town for more than a couple of weeks in any given year, and some years he didn’t show up at all.
He was a popular hire when he was in town, though, because the man is an absolute mechanical genuis. He can fix any damn thing at all.
For the last 5 years or so, he’s been making more frequent trips into town (and hiring himself out more often, still cash-for-labor though) and last winter he housesat for my parents (they spend the winter in Arizona these days) instead of spending the winter out at his place.
He’s essentially still dropped out though - just being more social about it these days. Still no job, no real ties, no rent, no responsibilities.
A few years ago, the federal government actually opened up homesteading (as in Old West homesteading - live X years on totally unimproved land and you own it at the end) on some of the federal land near my hometown, so my hometown has a higher-than-average percentage of drop-out mentality folks. A lot of them now proud land-owners, courtesy of the federal government. A few of those were so freaked out by the responsibility of land ownership that they promptly sold their places when they were granted title and went back to being dropped out.
Mostly the town views Hippie Chris and the other folks as slightly weird, but decent folks. It always struck me as a lonely and hard way to live, but I know people who find it fulfilling. YMMV.
An interesting book about someone who tried to do just this is Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer. The book’s subject died in Alaska, but not for the reasons you might think.
HA! I have to laugh at this (not at you Shagnasty).
I have a small bandsaw mill handed down from my grandfather. You had better start with more than $10K. I started to post in this thread
Of course, this mill is homemade by someone who owned a scrap yard and it looks like something straight out of Junkyard Wars. Since I’ve had it, I’ve spent about twice as many hours repairing it as I have sawing lumber.
If you want to start with something new, you’re looking at around $10K to get set up for a manual mill. You had better have lots of time on your hands and some additional equipment (e.g. tractor) to handle the logs. If you want something at little more automated to produce lumber faster, you looking at around $25K.
And, it’s a hobby that just keeps on sucking money. I just spent over $300.00 dollars for a box of new blades.
I’ve heard stories of people that have bought mills in the $25K and payed for the mill by sawing lumber to build their own home. It’s possible, but it’s also darned time consuming. You will need access to a good hardware store and a good parts supplier. You might be smart to buy a welder. I haven’t (yet) and I’ve had to borrow one a few times. But, once the mill is payed for, you have a way to generate a cash flow for the things you won’t be able to grow, kill, or barter for.
There are places in the South where you might be able to do it. You’d want to buy an acre or two adjacent to a national forest and near a river. Hunt in the forest, fish in the river, and plant a garden. Build a cabin, buy a wood stove, dig a well.
Problems:
Clothing. Are you going to be making homespun clothes? Wearing deerhides? What?
Who’s going to pay for hunting/fishing license? What if you get caught without one? Where do you get ammo?
Medical/dental expenses.
*This doesn’t quite cut the terms set by the OP
Some time back there was a Washington Post article about someone who had come close to doing this in another way…
He was the father (I Think) of a fairly well known judge (I Think) but he had bought an fairly older dilapidated small Sailboat for something approaching <$10K and he used it very much as his “shopping cart” what you see homeless people pushing. He was clearly more or less insane and had lived off-the-land on the Chesapeake bay, tying up in the few hard times at public docks and wandering around Baltimore and Annapolis panhandling and going to soup kitchens.
In Winter (novish-marchish) I think he had a deal to beach up at a friends (his sons?) place and he wandered the streets (doing good like Kung Fu).
I was always very intrigued and wondered if you uptempoed it a bit, (boat fishing supplied a UPS off the sail buy a little fuel time to time) if it wouldn’t work out not luxuriously – but a simple kind of neat life.
Another recent thread that ties to this one. In which Rysdad’s response made me wonder if something similar might not be possible following the inter-coastal -migrating like a bird.
*The reason it doesn’t fulfill the requirements is that the Article was all about THE MANTM hassling this guy over Boat registration and fishing licenses – so you would need to be part of the grid to the tune of ~100 bucks per year and fill out your paperwork or THE MANTM is coming for you.
I would say it is likely virtually impossible nowadays because all the places that can sustain a person relatively easily have already been staked out by civilization.
There is also the simple fact that many of the solutions proposed in this thread utilize methods, information, and tools developed by, er, civilization. Yeah, you can live next to a National Park, but the fact is the park exists because of the nation that’s protecting it, and any benefits gained from its existence cannot be counted towards the goal of “dropping out.” Sure you can buy $25k of gear… but going into the wilderness with a multi-layered waterproof tent made of Space Age Polymers isn’t completely dropping out, is it? 
Hmm. I forgot property taxes. You’d still have to pay property taxes on your cabin, or face eventual foreclosure.