I wish more people would try this. Everyone might learn a thing or two.

Obviously this was a failure but there is probably a bit of learning here for everyone.

I'm surprised he didn't do worse, clearly he still had skills that can't be erased which to me sounds reassuring in some way.

This guy got to "pull out" of being poor because of health reasons, people who are actually in this situation have to deal with that on top of being poor.

This was "poverty tourism", the guy just role played being poor for 10 months and still failed.

He was also secretly seeing a doctor for months before he quit, which I'm assuming he was paying for with his previous wealth.

I bet he didn't give up his health insurance, so yeah. That would have been stupid even for someone dumb enough to try poverty tourism.

This is already better than the life experience for most people. It's, at most, performance art. An act. A ruse.

"Roughing it" while setting the terms, don't make me laugh.

Anyone spending time leisurely on the Internet pontificating on this is truly clueless. You're closer to poor than you realize, and you're playing with yourself.

Be careful, otherwise you'll go blind and have to stop pretending.

Being someone who grew up poor and after much suffering, finally does well, my greatest fear is the real version of what they played out. For kicks. I'd slap this person if I could.

No matter how hard he tried, he got to do something unusual: choose to quit roleplaying, for the thing that comes for us all; health.

So. This is both a common experience and yet unique to this guy. Suggestions of repetition make zero sense.

Absolute waste of time that serves only to stroke the egos involved.

Stumbled on this topic elsewhere

Thought I'd share some comments that summarize this better than I did, with some humor:

1: Camping with extra steps

2: "Dear homelessness: unfortunately I am forced to tender my resignation as I have been offered a lucrative opportunity at being rich."

I mean it was bullshit, he had a free apartment from a friend, and some other "help" to get him ahead, so the fact he failed with a leg up is just insane. Oh and he quit for medical reasons, even though he kept his medical care from his normal life, so didn't even have to deal with you know... crippling fear of bankruptcy or being able to see a doctor during his "game" of life bullshit

To me this seems more than shortsighted. The decision to do this seems almost like the manic stage of bipolar disorder. The depression the YouTuber falls into almost instantly into the experiment adds to that suspicion. I think on the first(second?) day the YouTuber is breaking down from the idea of sleeping on the street - surely he anticipated that? The almost complete absence of any attempts to make some money bar a hare-brained buy-sell craiglist scam, which wasn't explored nearly enough on it's own to gauge its viability, seems slightly disordered also. I knew it would fail, but being unable to get off the streets is a remarkable failure. I think he simply didnt want to get a regular job to get stable housing and instead thought he was going to make 50k in the first month sitting in a public library.

Needs a “(2020)” in the title: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-J3AfTs3Xg

Lovely to see that he was able to "pause his poverty" to take care of his health. I'm sure he learned a lesson. /s