Quitting a Life of Quiet Desperation

Alana Semuels interviewed me a couple of days back for a nice article about my tax resisting voluntary simplicity lifestyle that came out in ’s on-line version of The Atlantic.

The article ends by comparing me to Henry David Thoreau, which is a pretty flattering thing to contemplate. The article originally had the title “Quitting a Life of Quiet Desperation” when it was first posted, which I like better than its eventual, more-clickbait-worthy “Can Quitting Your Job Help Stop War?”

I don’t recommend reading the comments — they’re largely the usual mess you find below the fold on the internet these days — but last I counted there were more than two hundred of them, which gives some indication of how many people engaged with the content of the article in some way or other. A few dozen people had also retweeted @TheAtlantic’s Twitter summary (“David Gross lives off $20,000 a year to avoid paying federal income taxes, which fund wars he is morally opposed to”), last I looked.

Imperfect metrics both, but it’s what we’ve got. Nice to get a positive article about conscientious tax resistance out on a site with some reach like this.

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