The next time it’s 4:30 pm and you’re eyeing the clock at your 9-5 job, wondering how you’re going to fill the tank, buy the groceries, pay the VISA bill, and still have some fun money left over, ponder this: Maybe you don’t have to work at all. No, I’m not about to pitch some multi-level marketing scheme. On the contrary, if you have some anti-capitalist sentiments, it would make becoming a Freegan that much more palatable. Imagine if all your food, your transportation, maybe even your housing, were free. Imagine if, when your friends and family asked why you were unemployed, you could say: “I’m not unemployed, I’m voluntarily jobless. Has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Kind of like when the military calls human beings “soft targets”.
For the procurement of food, all you need to do is get over that little issue you have with digging through garbage bins for dinner. Once you’ve gotten over your waste-disposal snobbery, there is, contrary to popular wisdom, indeed a free lunch. As well as dinner, breakfast, and maybe even high tea, too. All the while, you’re making a powerful statement by not supporting a society in which “…retailers plan high-volume product disposal as part of their economic model”, as so eloquently stated at Freegan.info, your one-stop (no) shopping destination and guide to Freegan living.
Transportation? No problem. Freegans utilize trainhopping, hitchhiking, walking, skating, and biking as their basic modes of transport. That means you’ll be late for that meeting across town because you skateboarded, but it won’t matter. Remember? You don’t have a job!
Housing’s a cinch too. Just squat! Occupying abandoned property isn’t very different from what you did all day in your cubicle job, except instead of an annoying boss poking their head into your space at inconvenient moments, you’ll just have COPS poking their head into your space at inconvenient moments. If you get arrested, you’re still set, since the prison system provides free housing and food as well. There’s a little less freedom of movement and more non-consensual sex, but you’d still be sticking your basic Freegan values, right?

But Seriously

Yes, seriously. If you take the time to read about the Freegan philosophy, you’ll realize the issue in question is quite legitimate, in fact quite profound. And the solution offered is very hands-on and practical, even if the probable number of practicing Freegans is small enough that their real impact is likely negligible. Here’s an excerpt from the home page of Freegan.info:

“We live in an economic system where sellers only value land and commodities relative to their capacity to generate profit. Consumers are constantly being bombarded with advertising telling them to discard and replace the goods they already have because this increases sales. This practice of affluent societies produces an amount of waste so enormous that many people can be fed and supported simply on its trash.”

That’s a pretty objective summary of contemporary western life, in my opinion. I’m personally not ready to commit to going that far off the grid at this point, and I don’t imagine many people are. However, the simple fact that the life of a Freegan is so potentially press-worthy (c’mon, who would change the channel if the local news were running a story that showed reasonably intelligent people eating out of dumpsters? How Soylent Green-esque!) suggests to me that Freeganism is at least some amusing PR for the larger green/clean movement.