You're asking me how one might fix the sorts of problems I describe which motivate individuals to quit attempting to lead normal lives, resulting in some cities experiencing an invasion of freegan transients and related hobo shanty towns?

I think there's quite a bit of time and distance between the platonic incident where one person quits, and the later outcome where thousands of similar quitters congregate in a place conducive to their accumulation.

You're probably interested in preventing the quitter's mentality though, more than the semi-hostile freeloader invasion. (count the pennies and the dollars take care of themselves, so to speak)

There's probably no single answer to that, and the drop outs all look the same on the other side, because basic human needs have cut people down to size, reducing everyone to caveman essentials.

But still, even if there are differences, maybe there's a common thread, in that many stumble and land in a similar place... How to go about preventing a sort of modern civilian's burnout on being a productive busy bee with responsibilities?

Partly, that idea gets painted into a corner, because if you're owed nothing for maintaining a well-groomed exterior, and looking presentable is to be considered its own reward, then the choice to behave as such or to defect to the hobo shanty town is a neutral outcome in the grand scheme of things.

But there are competing interests at play, in that one side is fed up with all the superfluous artifice and extra effort, and the other finds the noise and the smell and the mess unsavory. Yet neither really matters more than the other. In fact, the responsible tax payer is as much the loitering warm body as transient, all the while, sucking up more resources.

The reason this perspective holds up all relates back to the idea that there is no accounting for what the tax payer enables, by holding down their day job.

Most regular people 9-to-5 occupations are cookie cutter careers that loop back and forth, each contributing to the net positive of modern living in the name of convenience, but upon this trampoline of social fabric rests other layers that never touch the ground. There's no way for one person with a day job to know whether their efforts streamline the ease of daily routine for someone admirable or dispicable. A paying customer is treated the same as any other. No one gets to pick and exclude one customer over another, within the bounds of law.

And when locked into a job for years on end, an accumulated sensation of fairness builds up. A question arises in the mind: Did I get what everyone else gets, for all the steps I took to get to where I am? Did others get more with less effort? Would everyone get the same as me, if they made similar choices? Are some of us just lucky? Is there something beyond luck affecting outcomes? Are outcomes rational and grounded by predictable principles?

Basically, social contract theory, in short. Except outcomes are NOT rational. Not lately. With drastic changes unfolding, in addition to simply not caring about social artifice, there are huge differences in how to conduct a livlihood and get by, when compared to a few decades ago. While there are new option available, other keystone choices have disappeared or seem laughable. This adds to the number lost at sea.

There's a sweet spot of balancing one's position between new challenges and attainable outcomes, and not everyone focuses on staying in that zone, while choosing new interests that should prove practical. In some respects, there's no good way to predict the future, and intuit what is likely to prove practical anyway. To complicate matters, technological implementation of new practices has demanded some truly complex new skills. Printed circuit boards, soldering and 3D printing isn't going to be everyone's cup of tea. It's like asking ordinary hikers to free solo what appears to be Mt. St. Helens. There a disparity between what the future looks like, and the internalized imaginations of less technical folk, and how they see themselves. What's the alternative for them? Side hustle being a demeaning little task rabbit?

But that's not even what freegan transients are on about. That's the HN oeuvre for what technocratic VC startups might cut out for them. Pitch in for the big win, why not? There's a fiverr in it for ya, kid!

When you've grazed among the cavemen, you begin to see that being dirty, smelly and obnoxious during someone else's morning commute isn't the sin you perceived it to be, when you were the one hiding in your earbuds. Life without the flatscreen TV and the text messages isn't so bad, if you can keep warm and tend to basic nutrition. If the climate is reasonable, you just need to sidestep the sore throats and the pink eye, if you skip a few haircuts and grow slovenly and out of shape, well, so what. Pushing forty, the exciting prt of your dating career was long gone. Owning a home? That ship has sailed.

So what's to motivate anyone to to climb back on the bandwagon after jumping off? What's to convince passengers to stay on the bandwagon in the first place?

From a technical perspective, part of it is thread execution isolation. People feel like it's too easy for others to fuck up their otherwise reasonable momentum for unfair reasons. And they're right.

By contrast, the goldilocks factor is that isolated people who don't depend on one another have no rational basis for ensuring anyone's success. I don't care about the career options laid out for a Starbucks barrista. And the barrista doesn't care if I can come up with five bucks for my coffee tomorrow morning, because all customers are a faceless blur at a shit job. But I want my coffee, free of spit and loogies, and barrista needs maybe a couple of hundred bucks a week. We mutually hate each other on some level. The coffee's too expensive and the job is pathetic. We're both on the brink of abandoning this economic ruse at any moment.

Do we build society so that each participant in this client/server scenario is more grateful at the presence of the other? It doesn't seem particularly realistic. The truth is that the forces that created this brittle interplay of apathy originated decades ago, and it has refines and perfected the brink of apathy on razor thin margins ever since. Everything is middle-manned into shelf stable products insulated by preservatives, and we get our peer groups and family units destroyed the summer after high school graduation.

To undo this apparatus is no simple task. And like centuries-old glass warped by amorphous change, and flakes of lead paint accumulating on the window sill, it's all taking itself apart, and we'll need to remodel soon. Hope the house doesn't burn down because the electrician goofed on some new wiring...