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My Year of Living Without Money by Carolien Hoogland (Full Transcript)

Carolien Hoogland

This is the full transcript of action researcher Carolien Hoogland’s TEDx Talk: My Year of Living Without Money at TEDxErasmusUniversity conference.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: My year of living without money by Carolien Hoogland at TEDxErasmusUniversity

TRANSCRIPT: 

When I was about this small, I decided that I wanted to help save the planet. I was one of those kids that would tear off the label of the tea bag and then put it in the waste paper and then think where I put the staple. So I also really liked the idea of becoming a comedian. But I ignored that and I went to university to learn how to help save the environment. Save the planet. And about 10 years later in a master’s degree, many classes, books, a PhD degree, I became an environmental psychologist. Several research projects, I found myself sitting in a room at a computer. And I felt that I wasn’t really helping to save the planet.

And then something happened. In a farm north of Amsterdam I took part in a master class for transition management that was organized, by the way, by an ex-colleague from the DRIFT Institute which is right here at Erasmus University. And in the master class it was January 2009 over dinner we discussed the crisis and are shock when talented people around us and friends lost jobs. And one of us — one participant [Liang Fu], she said, “Imagine. Imagine all of us would lose their jobs and we’d simply live”. And something happened inside me, I felt these happy hormones and I thought, oh, oh, oh, oh, I want to do that. I want to do that. I like the idea of getting up in the morning and going out and doing what I’m good at, doing what I enjoy doing and then society takes care of me too.

So she appealed to a very personal longing inside of me and the next day I wrote out a promise to myself and I said I’m going to do this.