There is a space on my resume where no bullet points grow.  It represents three years during which I dropped blissfully off of the career path, only to return for a rather pathetic reason.  I began in 2004 when, having saved up half a year’s salary, I quit my job, gave up my apartment and most of my belongings, and traveled through Europe for five months.

I thought the time off would help me choose a new direction for my life.  I was stuck in an unsatisfying career that was supposed to afford me time to write fiction.  In reality, I spent most my free time eating calamari in soulless Manhattan happy-hour bars and shopping for pants suits.

After returning from Europe, not ready to pick up where I had left off, I stumbled on the website of The Idler, a bi-annual magazine published in the United Kingdom that extols the benefits of doing nothing.  The Idler’s editor, Tom Hodgkinson is the author of How to Be Idle and How to Be Free, which likewise encourage readers to enjoy life more by working less.

The Idler philosophy is not simply meant to make couch potatoes feel better about slacking off.  Instead, Hodgkinson advocates self-sufficiency, reduced waste, and disengagement from consumer culture, tuning out the voices that tell us we cannot live without an iPhone and accepting the truth in the cliché:  the best things in life are, in fact, free.

Inspired into inaction, I moved to Seattle, where rental real estate is cheaper.  I found a contract job as a receptionist, which allowed me spend several hours every day writing fiction on the company’s dime.  I bought my clothes and house wares at thrift stores, and used the public library instead of Netflix and Amazon.

My minimalist lifestyle went swimmingly, until I came down with a bladder infection.  My job, like most temporary positions, did not come with health benefits.  So when I woke up one morning with blood in my urine, I decided that bankruptcy was more frightening than death, and tried to ignore it.

I drank liters of water, which lessened the bleeding, but hours later it returned, a more lurid red than before.  By evening, I was feverish and taking odds on whether I’d wake up in the morning.  It was after nine on Sunday night when I finally walked into the emergency room.

Now, a bladder infection is not cancer.  It is not months in traction after a near-fatal car accident.  Still, for a urinalysis and some antibiotics, I was billed over $700, nearly two-week’s salary.  I began to see the flaw in my plan.  Choosing to subsist on a low income may be a radical notion in many parts of the world, but in this country, it’s downright dangerous.

From time to time in the US edition of How to Be Free, Hodgkinson parenthetically acknowledges what a stumbling block healthcare can be to creating one’s own private utopia.  But he doesn’t offer up a solution, and why should he?  In the United Kingdom, healthcare is guaranteed regardless of income or employment status.

On the other hand, here in the United States, where we claim to value personal freedom and democratic principles, 45 million people go without health coverage of any kind.  Many of these are part-time and freelance workers, who choose non-traditional employment despite the enormous financial risk posed by cold and flu season.

I realize that my line of argument contains some serious bourgeois conceit.  Voluntary poverty is a luxury for me, because I have had the advantage of an education and can compete for jobs with health benefits.  What my ill-fated slumming experiment shows is the absurdity of keeping healthcare dependant on employment

How does it help society, or even the economy, to have our career choices determined by actuarial tables?  Just think of all the amazing things Americans could do if we were liberated from the fear of financial ruin due to medical costs.

We could volunteer in our communities; we could start our own businesses; we could devote ourselves to creative pursuits.  We could even raise our own children instead of paying someone else to do it (someone who probably doesn’t have health insurance).

Universal healthcare has begun to feature prominently in political rhetoric and I have hopes that the United States will get there, inch by inch.  In the meantime, we make our choices.  I went back to the career in New York, but I still use the public library and buy second-hand goods when I can.  And I only own one pants suit.

From September 2008