Emory’s Homeless Undergrad
Decatur Metro | March 16, 2010I’m unsure of whether I should be impressed or mumbling “Oh, please!” to myself after reading Creative Loafing‘s “First Person” account of “Sid”, a homeless-by-choice Emory student. However, there’s no debating it’s a compelling read. Nice work CL!
Here’s the build up…
Editor’s note: First Person is a series of commentaries that gives voice to those not commonly heard in Atlanta media. In this instance, the subject’s real name is being withheld to protect him from a crackdown on his unorthodox living arrangement.
Sid is not the typical Emory student. He spends most of his time studying and hanging out with friends, but unlike his peers he goes home at the end of the day to a van he parks at the YMCA. Considering Emory’s tuition costs about $50,000 a year, a “kudzu leaguer” living out of his van and scavenging meals from dining hall leftovers might seem surprising, but Sid lives a Spartan lifestyle by choice. Sustainable homelessness is something to which he aspires, and he hopes to always live as simply as he does now.
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The book and movie are called Into the Wild. Feel good hit of the year.
Someone may want to tell Sid to not eat the weeds with the lateral-stripe pattern.
My thought exactly.
Same here. Sure sounds like a Chris McCandless redux.
McCandless went to Emory too….
To each his own, but I prefer to live life by not eating out of garbage cans or sleeping on other peoples property. I feel I’m being….what’s the phrase?….a responsible citizen.
On Twitter CVarkey wonders “I don’t know but this seems to be a trend (or maybe a copycat?)” and points out this similar Salon article about a Duke student doing the same thing, entitled “I live in a van down by the river“.
The difference is that the Duke student did it originally to get out and stay out of debt. Sid admits his family is wealthy and lives his “Spartan lifestyle by choice.”
Ah, the liberties afforded by independent wealth.
Out here in Northern Ca we call them “trustafarians.”
I wonder what made him choose as expensive a school as Emory if he wants to be a “freegan.”
Good luck to this kid biking across the country and eating nothing but worms and bugs along the way. There is virtually no chance to bike that many miles a day and replace the calories he’d burn by hunting and gathering little animals and dandelion greens. Something tells me this kid needs help.
Not to mention replacing flat tires on the bicycle. Cheap food tends to have lots of calories, though. A loaf of bread might get him 60 miles. And I’m sure other people will feed him, give him stuff. And if he’s scavenging in the garbage, he’s eating more than worms and dandelions.
Do y’all think this is TRUE? I wondered whether it was all a creative writing exercise.
Why would the Decatur-DeKalb YMCA let this guy live in his car in their parking lot? It’s a safe bet that he doesn’t pay for on-campus parking.
This guy gets to go camping every night.! That is awesome–oh to be young again; I hope he has a great time (imagine what his van would look like if he attended community college). (It would be totally wicked.)(and I’d bet he wouldn’t be lonely in it.)
Count me with the “Oh, please!” crowd. If this kid really wants to “make a difference” by living a sustainable lifestyle, he should volunteer to work with the people who’re homeless & eating out of trashcans not because they’re righteously turning their back on their parents’ filthy lucre, but because they have no other choice.
And Gibbets, funny you should put it like that– my term for camping is “pretending I don’t have a house”…I don’t like to pretend I don’t have a house!
Glad you mentioned the Salon story about the kid from Duke. One thing that struck me about both stories (probably taking it personally as a lowly scholarship-having, state-school grad) is that they think a roof over their head is some kind of bourgeois consumerist luxury, but a private university education is a basic necessity!
The Sid story is kind of sad. I hope he figures out there’s a whole lot of leeway between voluntary homelessness and living in a huge house you don’t need and spending a king’s ransom on interior design. There are ways to live simply that don’t require Dumpster diving.
This is interesting. The difference between the two students that strikes me is the one at Duke figured out how to get the education he wants without going into debt, while the one at Emory seems to be experimenting with an extreme viewpoint while knowing he has a safety net. He would impress me more if he was giving the funds he is not using to someone else who needs them, i.e., funding an Emory education for a student who otherwise couldn’t dream of getting it. At the same time, he’s young and maybe that will occur to him.
They’re both young, and I’m surprised at how judgmental some of the comments here have been. What harm is either one of them doing? Scant likelihood either one will both be “camping” 10 years from now, and meanwhile they are at least thinking about the world beyond the ends of their noses. With respect to Sid, especially, I’m reminded of a quote: “The man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at forty he has no head.” Intellectual experimentation is healthy, IMO, and people need to engage in it plenty before they “grow up” and begin to be ossified like some of us!
Full disclosure: I worked my way through college and spent 10 years paying off the debt, back when it cost a small fraction of what it does today. Not sure I’d have the fortitude to live homeless year-round in the North Carolina climate, but I like to think it might have occurred to me if I’d been living (much) farther south and facing the obscene costs that today’s students are up against.
Reasonable people will differ on what’s judgmental and what’s observation, I suppose. Being on the other side of forty probably colors my view, as well as having not only worked closely with the (not by choice) homeless but, at one point when I was a child, being very close to homeless myself. “Intellectual experimentation” is certainly the kindest euphemism I’d apply to what “Sid” is doing (not so much the other kid). One person’s “intellectual experimentation” can seem like a mockery of someone else’s plight to another, you know?
I get that, Cubalibre–how easily we can seem to be mocking others in real trouble, by keeping our own focus narrow and self-involved–which is, to my mind, one of the definitions of adolescence. At the same time, viewing everything from the other side of 50 myself, I’m just so relieved whenever I see or hear of teens/twenty-somethings thinking for themselves–however narrowly–and acting on their convictions–however clumsily. Trying out different value sets and identities is how we find out not just who we want to be and how we want to live, but WHY.
I dunno. If my kid lived in a car and ate garbage, I’d probably worry about him an awful lot. So my guess is that his family is hurt by this. Chris McCandless certainly put his family through hell and ended up dead in a wrecked bus in Alaska, though I realize the circumstances are not completely the same. But they are outrageously different, either.
Also, where does this guy shower? Or does he sit down in class smelling like . . . well, a homeless person who digs up and consumes worms? If so, he’s not physically hurting anyone, but he’s certainly imposing one of the major downsides of his “lifestyle” choice on others, isn’t he? If I lived outside for a few months by choice and rummaged through your trash, would you welcome me into your living room, or insist that I engage in basic grooming and personal hygene?
After reading this, I wonder….Do you think he is a liberal or a conservative?
…And is he a tree hugger? He seems to be eating them!
It’s his choice to live like he is living. Don’t be so judgmental — he’s not hurting anyone. And if he can afford to go to Emory, more power to him. Would you care at all if he were in a cheap college and doing the same thing? I can remember being VERY poor when I was in college, but I always had a roof over my head. I paid $17/month for 1/2 room in a rooming house, no meals. I shared the one bathroom with 9 other girls. I didn’t have a car, and there were no buses in that college town. I worked 1/2 time to pay my bills, and got some scholarship $ to pay for tuition and books. I graduated in 3 years by taking as many as 20 credit hours/semester. I would do it all again in a minute, it was the best time of my life!
Hello! I’m the author of the Creative Loafing profile, and I just wanted to drop by and clarify a few things people have raised questions over in the comments.
I assure you the story is all true. “Sid,” of course, is a pseudonym, but all other details in the piece are factual.
Sid has heard the Chris McCandless comparison often, especially since the two grew up very near each other (although a decade or two apart). He told me that these comparisons caused him to avoid reading or watching Into the Wild, although I’m not really sure I follow his reasoning. He does promise to stay out of Alaska, though.
Also, perhaps this wasn’t clear in the first post (alas– the hazards of a word limit) but Sid and his traveling buddies do not intend to subsist entirely on scavenged food on their road trip. They’ll be bringing some food staples with them and supplementing it with what they can pick up on the road. Sid also intends to work a little before the summer to save up money for food and bike repairs.
Sid himself actually isn’t really wealthy, even though his parents are rich and paying for his tuition– there’s not really any great excess of cash or a trust fund left over from his minimalism that he could donate (even to OxFam, Chris McCandless style). He doesn’t accept money from his parents and gets by on his own, aside from tuition and a couple of car repairs over his undergraduate career. He also has refrained from telling them about his current situation, because he doesn’t want them to worry. They think he’s living with a friend, which is one of the reasons he wished to remain anonymous, although the main reason he cited was the repercussions of the university finding out he’s homeless.
As for his day-to-day life, the posed picture in daylight accompanying the piece is not very representative of how he lives, as he actually spends as little time as possible in his van, and generally is only in there when sleeping. The rest of the time, he is studying in campus spaces, in class, or hanging out at friends’ places. He showers in the gym regularly. And his freeganism consists more of swiping abandoned leftovers from tables and skimming the top of trash cans in passing if he sees that someone’s thrown away part of their meal untouched. The image that may come to mind at the word freegan– a man leaping from a dumpster with banana peels dangling from his hair and smelling of rotten eggs and feet– is not really accurate here.
Also, just to clarify, by author I mean something more akin to scribe. The words of the piece are all Sid’s own from our interview transcript; I just edited the piece.
Yep, to me this is not experiencing the real world or making a difference or anything like that. Experiencing the real world is paying for college yourself, working two jobs to get by, barely making the rent payment–but MAKING it. Sustaining yourself, if you’ll excuse the use of the word. Making a difference is impossible to do when your parents are footing the bill for your $50K/year education. It just doesn’t compute.
It’s interesting how your own definition of “living simply” changes over time. Used to be that I thought living simply was driving my primer-colored 1981 Chevy Cavalier that I bought for $700 and only eating every other day. Now, living simply for me is buying a used 2008 instead of a new 2010 and not allowing any electronic gaming in the home. And making my kids wait until they’re 14 before they get a cell phone.
“Sustaining yourself, if you’ll excuse the use of the word. ”
You are excused.
DM, can I officially be nominated and confirmed as the “sustain” excuser? Actually, maybe a new rule stating you have to ask for some type of penance/forgiveness for using the word in a post.
Absolutely! Whenever it’s on the tip of my fingers I pause and think…Left Wing! Just know that only diehard DMers will know to do so.
I also believe that recitation of the “…has no heart…has no head” quote also needs excusing, since it comes up almost as much!
CSDM- you said it and very well!
My cynical mind thinks this is just something for a little story that will ultimately distinguish him from other ivy league grad school applications. And maybe ’cause he thinks chicks dig it, too.
15 years from now, bet me, it’ll be investment banking, corp law or the semi idle life of a grown-up trustafarian down at the club.
Most of the comments here makes me think most of you are old, uppity and judgmental. I thought the City of Decatur was suppose to be more hetty. I guess not.
So you are surprised to hear that most of us are not romantically living homeless?
The kid is not making any kind of statement by having his parents pay for his lofty tuition.
For StellaBleu – I think people are generally terrified to even THINK about living at a minimalist level, that’s why you see the churlish remarks hurled at this young man’s lifestyle choice. I am appalled at the snide judgments being tossed at this guy.
Well, I could respond to this remark by saying that it makes you seem immature, naive, and yes, judgmental. But that wouldn’t be polite, nor would it be productive.
To us “oldsters”, this kid’s little social experiment is hardly an exercise in “minimalist living”, not the least because he’s not footing his own $50K tuition (I went to Emory as a graduate student, so I know what one has to pay to attend). Plus, I wholeheartedly doubt he’ll still be a disciple of minimalism 4 or 5 years down the road. Minimalists also don’t tend to need their lifestyles affirmed by publicity. Any benefit of his “intellectual experimentation” (to borrow a term from another poster here), if it has any at all, will accrue to no one but him– and can he really think that now he “knows what it’s like” to be in the shoes of the homeless or the hungry? Of course not, because he can get out of it any time he chooses. I realize that he’s “not hurting anyone”, but that doesn’t render him immune from commentary or observation. As someone whose family was, at one point in my childhood, one step away from actually being homeless (and we went to bed hungry more than a few times), it’s hard not to see this as some kind of self-venerating publicity stunt– if it’s the experience he’s really after, why reach out to Creative Loafing, unless what he really wants is an audience? It follows that if one is seeking an audience, one’s altruism is suspect. It’s just a story about an experiment– not a true example of minimalism or altruism. One person’s hero is another’s court jester– that’s life. It’s just silly to get so upset when other people point this out.
I think it’s just silly for you to assume I am upset because of my comment. It was just an observation which I still believe to be true. Also I am pretty certain you don’t even understand what my overall comment means. I think you just got offended because I called you old.
LOL! Really?? No, you didn’t offend me– I just think your comments were silly overall (albeit richly ironic), but was trying to be nice about it.
I think it’s one thing to decide to live “homeless”. To each his own, as long as he isn’t infringing on the rights of others. That whole “My right to swing my fist ends at your nose” thing.
But I’d argue that it’s another thing to write a first person account of living homeless in a metro newspaper. That opens you up to replies, affirmations and criticisms.
It’s not like anyone is organizing a manhunt to find this guy and evict him, they’re just replying to something he initially wrote. Publication is no longer a one-way medium.
Well said, DM. If you’re going to put yourself forward as a cause celébre, you better be prepared for people to pick you apart. This is a point apparently lost on the posters who’re whinging that the people who don’t necessarily buy into every hare-brained social experiment are being “judgmental” or “narrow-minded”.
It’ll hardly take a manhunt. It’s more likely to be a “Y” employee tapping on his window saying,”Hey bud. Time to move your van.”
Unless his withholding his identity has given him “invisibility” super powers.
do any of you actually KNOW the cost of an Emory education? even to say his parents are “only paying tuition” is to say they are paying for the cost of a least 2.5 DCS paraprofessionals, to follow an earlier DM thread …. I would yank his sorry butt home and let him work for a homeless shelter to see how attractive that lifestyle really is ….but i am old, and cranky.
I can attest that the cost of three years of graduate school there cost me in excess of $60K, and that was back in ’96 – ’99. I can’t imagine undergrad was much less expensive, or that the cost of tuition hasn’t risen exponentially since then.
All I’ll say is that my undergrad school went up $20k in less than 10 years, which is essentially the same track as Emory.
I love colleges, but tuition cost inflation is absolutely insane. That’s why I’m totally with the Duke kid. More power to him if he can stay out of debt until he graduates.
Tuition growth is suspiciously like the housing bubble. What happens when all these kids with $100k loans don’t get jobs right outta school and can’t start to pay them off?
DM, that’s already happening. Many, many recent college and grad school grads are coming out of school so hopelessly underwater, that they may never catch up.
I completely agree that higher ed is a bubble. And the most salient comparison to housing: easy and cheap credit. People borrow like crazy to pay these lofty tuitions because the government is, to a very large degree, subsidizing the loans. So the college kids are not paying the true cost of their tuitions. The jobless rate should put a brake on this borrowing, which will force down tuitions. Also looming is the federal government’s fiscal calamity — we’re simply out of money for most everything, including college subsidies — which will cause that market to collapse.
Interesting times, for sure.
All you have to do is ask for a deferral if you can’t pay your loans right away. They give students/graduates a lot of leeway. At least, that’s how it was when my wife and I finished college.
Yes, you can defer for a brief period. Not forever. You still have to pay the loans back eventually. And you can’t discharge them in bankruptcy, either. So a deferral gets you some short-term relief. That’s it.
For us, short term = several years.
Your mileage may vary.
I’m pretty sure Sid is one of my friends. At least I can’t imagine there’d be more than one Emory student that would fit this description. And he’s not really doing this whole homelessness thing for attention or to get laid. In fact he doesn’t even tell people he’s homeless until he gets to know them really well. And he tends to be generous with what he does have. I’ve known him to go hang out with the [not-by-choice] Atlanta homeless and buy them dinner when he has money, and he campaigns pretty aggressively against social injustices as he sees them.
I think one of the main reasons he’s chosen to be homeless is overwhelming guilt at his privilege now and in his childhood. And maybe his way of remedying that is clumsy, but he is a genuinely well-meaning person.
Well, I can’t be mad at anyone chiming in to defend a friend, so I’ll just say this: I’m happy to take your word for it that Sid isn’t doing this for attention, female or otherwise (although the fact that he gave this very public interview tends to cast doubt on your assertions to the contrary). However, dealing with his “overwhelming” privilege guilt by choosing to be voluntarily homeless really isn’t remedying anything, except perhaps as a temporary sop for his conscience (and frankly, IMO, he shouldn’t feel guilt that he was born into privilege, because he had no more say in that matter than children born into poverty have over their situations). I hope you’re a good enough friend to Sid to talk him out of it if he ever indicates he wants to leave the world behind for the wilderness– instead, urge him to put that wealth & privilege to work to battle the social injustices about which you say he feels so strongly.
Isn’t giving money to other homeless people at odds with Sid’s own goal of “sustainable homelessness?” Shouldn’t he be teaching them to forage for the worms, dandelion greens, and choice leftovers that Sid uses to survive? In other words, Sid says this is a legit way to live long-term. So why give others hand outs as opposed to teaching them the skills needed to make the choice sustainable?
Not really, because the goal of sustainable homelessness is Sid’s alone, as I understand it. He doesn’t demand the same from everyone else, and he knows as well as anyone that not-by-choice homelessness is a legitimate problem. He really hates capitalism, and he just personally doesn’t want to be a part of the system. I don’t think he really considers himself the Categorical Imperative for everyone else, you know?
However, he does want to tell people about it.
And Sid does take advantage of the system he hates every time he hangs out at his friend’s apartments and uses their toilet and enjoys their heating and air conditioning, which his friends paid for by participating in our capitalist system.
I guess capitalism is ok, as long as someone else gets the bill.
I also appreciate the insight Emory ’11. The more I learn and think about this, the more I’m inclined to this that this has less to do about making a statement about poverty and more to do about Sid’s relationship with his parents.
I’m with cuba in hoping that Sid can one day ultimately get past the guilt he’s been struggling with and effect real change with the resources available to him.
Let me see, I’m trying to remember, now who was that pretty well known guy who was put in jail because he wouldn’t pay his taxes, but was willing to be released when his buddy paid them for him? Oh, right, that would have been Thoreau. No, I’m not saying this kid is a Thoreau in the making, but then who knows. Not me. But apparently some of you are pretty sure about some things.
Also, while the grammar and spelling is superior here, some of the opinions expressed are not much more generous than what I can get at ajc.com. I don’t know Sid’s life, but he’s still obviously a young person, and he isn’t causing me any problems so I give him credit for trying something that is, at least to him, completely different. Why do you care so much what he does? What is it about Sid that touched this nerve? Should he be required to live in a campus apartment and party from Thur. through Sun? I went to a state school with a freegan in the ’70s, though he was unusual at the time and not called a freegan. Grew up to be a regular tax paying guy. We all grow up our own way, why can’t he? Just because he shared his story in print? I don’t get it.
Perhaps I overlooked it, but I don’t believe anyone said he shouldn’t be allowed to live his chosen lifestyle.