The Marketer Who Went Off Consumption

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In an earlier post, I have written about a life that fits into a backpack –

There is a trade-off between comfort and fulfillment and the less money you need to live a comfortable life, the more time you’ll have to pursue and fulfill your dreams. Taken to the extreme, this may mean wanting to have a life that fits into a backpack, so that you are free to indulge your wanderlust, to travel the world in search of meaning, maybe even walk into the wild.

Sometimes, I too fantasize about a life that fits into a backpack. Sometimes, I want to give away the life I have built over the last eights years and live the rest of my life (or at least the next ten years) out of a backpack.

In my fantasy, the backpack contains a customized 17″ MacBook Pro, a Seagate FreeAgent 1 TB external hard drive loaded with movies, songs and audiobooks, an iPhone to stay connected, a dozen books, a pair of Nike+ running shoes with an iPod Nano to go along, a couple of Nike tracksuits, a dozen boxer shorts from Jockey, six pairs of slim fit blue jeans from Levi’s, a dozen Tantra t-shirts, a dozen shirts from Provogue in a mix of cotton and linen, and, perhaps, the perfect off-white linen jacket from Provogue.

Living a life that fits into a backpack is a seductive idea. Different people use different terms for it — being a digital nomad, living a digital life or living in the ATM mode (via Steve Rubel and Web Worker Daily) —

After Katrina I spent a lot of time living a nomadic existence. I spent a lot of time thinking about what was important and what wasn’t. Family, friends and my personal outlook are the most important things. Everything else is secondary. Unfortunately, the secondary stuff does take some time to manage.

My goal is to keep as much of the secondary stuff in a form that lets me operate out of what I call “ATM mode”. ATM mode is what we all do now with our money. Society has moved past the barter stage so I don’t have to carry cows or goats to engage in financial transactions. And technology has made it possible for me to carry a small card that lets me access as much money as I need so I don’t have to keep it all buried in my backyard or under a mattress.

I want this ‘ATM mode’ for more than just financial transactions. I want to be able to walk around with minimal stuff and yet be able to access key information from anywhere that has access to the Internet.

Now that I’m giving away everything I own, some of my most prized possessions are, in fact, digital. The next step, then, is to transfer all of it from my hard drive into the cloud.

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