Mad Mike, the homeless blogger who became a millionaire overnight

When I visited him some months later, his place was a tip. He hadn't managed to adjust to coming off the streets. His electric had been disconnected as he'd failed to pay the bill (he received benefits to cover this), and he cooked on a camping stove on the floor of the living room. There was trash everywhere.

He just wasn't ready to come off the streets.

He had gone onto the streets after a nervous breakdown, brought on by divorce from his wife (I think... I have some difficulty remembering who experienced what). He'd lost it all, and was no longer mentally equipped to deal with life. He remained charming, intelligent and good company, but just a shade of whom he must've once been. Never saw him again, but his struggle to adjust hit me hard.

I remember my own challenge with the adjustment. For a while I too lived in just the living room... a thin mattress on a broken tile floor, a camping stove and a walkman for company. But I'd seen that this wasn't what you do, and that you had to form patterns, new routines, and spread out in the space, compartmentalize living functions to different spaces and form new routines around those functions.

I used to have a calendar on the wall to tell me what day it was (since I no longer saw the rhythm of the world around me), and it would remind me when to pay bills, or run chores. It was the little things that I now take for granted that were difficult for me. Why go out? Why speak to anyone? The things I had needed for so long (a dry warm space, the ability to bathe when I chose, a safe place to sleep, food when I needed it) I now had in abundance, so why do anything? Why even pick up the trash? Or make the bed?

I've believed since coming off the streets that it is less about physically providing the roof over a head, and is more to do with providing the support to help someone or targeting only those who are ready to leave the streets. Both sound horribly ambiguous and no doubt would leave space for a truck to drive through if enacted as policy, but the essence is that a person who has spent time on the street needs help to have an epiphany about caring for themselves and their surroundings, about functioning in a new space.

Love the idea of this. Ditch the furniture for creative tools.

> “Three out of five of our siblings have committed suicide. Mike’s mother is the third...”

Is this only an unfortunate chain of events? Is there some biological cause to the high number of suicides in his family?

Then again it's probably also possible to squander away the pension by getting loans against it.

Some kind of Ulysses contract should be possible?

And what are the legalities of signing contracts while drunk - do they count? Afaik people are not legally able to consent to sex while drunk, so perhaps contracts/agreements should be impossible while drunk?

I am firmly convinced that homelessness and living that life of rejecting convention has to do with deep-seated emotional scarring that should be much more akin to brain damage than a failure of "will power" (whatever that really means in a neuroscience way)

Cutting edge NS research[0] is proving again and again that we simply do not make decisions the way we all (most?) want to believe we do, in a rational and self-interested way.

This research has deep implications for all sorts of anti-social behaviours, and, especially for me at least, addiction.

I feel this hard emotional tug to escape into oblivion almost every-time I see others so easily create emotionally and sexually meaningful relationships, where I seem to fail at it miserably and have for my whole life.

Recently, I commented upon an Autism post where some of the symptoms of this disease (the inability to create and/or maintain social connections) shocked me to the point of tears, and have been pondering the connections between addiction and it ever since.

We can talk about habits and chances and everything, but if a person is just tired of hurting internally and has the choice between another night of lonely pain and escape, I'm hard pressed to blame them for escaping.

But hey, that's just me.

[0] http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/neuroscien...

Jezus christ that is simply terrible ...

One way of reducing the chance of this is to not split the inheritance. Even a vast fortune is reduced to below self-sustaining levels in just a couple of generations.

In my family I had a polish/Lithuanian aristocracy ancestor that owned some towns and large landholdings (he had some sort of wood monopoly). In three generations the families were still wealthy and in the aristocracy but were living off their title more than their wealth.

Another friend of mine's family from India who's grandfather was some sort of king has been splitting their lands up each generation. They recently sold off the las of their lands that had the ancestral home, a couple of forts and temples, etc and now are all just living pretty mundane suburban lives.