The Man Who Quit Money tells the story of Daniel Suelo, who learned to live happily without earning, receiving, or spending a single cent.

by Tyghe Trimble

Daniel “Suelo” Shellabarger, the main character of Mark Sundeen’s The Man Who Quit Money, is an eccentric. The 51-year-old lives in caves in the canyons outside of Moab, Utah. Raised an evangelical Christian, Suelo has remained deeply religious. He’s also gay. And he refuses to so much as exchange goods for services.  But Suelo isn’t a conflicted zealot, or even a principled aesthete. He’s a contented man who chooses to wander the Earth and do good — by running homeless shelters and always working for free — in every way he can. He’s also someone you’d want to have a beer with and hear about his life, as full of fortune and enlightenment as it is disappointment and darkness.

In 1991, Suelo’s low point, he attempted to kill himself by driving his car off a cliff. He walked away from the wreck, but with renewed purpose. In 1999, he traveled to Thailand to learn to meditate, only to find enlightenment from the Dalai Lama – to go back home to “learn your own wisdom, your own traditions.” He tries to live, truly, in the example of Jesus Christ, but the response clergymen give to his lifestyle is “we’re living in different times now.”

Parts of Suelo’s journey are downright foolish, such as the time he thought to hydrate by eating cactus — “he didn’t see why a little barrel cactus would be any different [than eating a prickly pear]” — and nearly died alone in a cave, 20 miles from the nearest hospital. And then there’s his main food source — grocery store dumpsters — an ethically dubious place for a man who refuses to beg, barter, or accept a paycheck.

Rather than ignoring these missteps, Suelo holds them up as virtues. He paints his near-death foraging experiences (there are more than one) as moments where he is tested, and comes away enlightened. In dumpster diving, “unlike begging, which is largely seen a degrading and pathetic,” Suelo sees it as a “means of surviving by your wits.”

Mark Sundeen’s account of Suelo’s life unfolds, like his life, with purposeful aimlessness. The structure of the book is far from rigid, and Sundeen’s outside analysis — about the politics of the 1990s, the influence of libertarians like Ron Paul, and the history of evangelical Christianity — provides only the essential background. But at its core, The Man Who Quit Money is the story of a man who decided to live outside of society, and is happier for it.