About Mark Boyle

Mark Boyle grew up in Ballyshannon, a small town on the Donegal coast. He studied business at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. In his final year he watched Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi, and he has often described that night as the moment his life changed course. One idea stayed with him: to be the change you want to see in the world.

In 2002 he moved to Bristol, where he spent six years managing two organic food companies. Bit by bit he came to feel that the problem wasn't what people bought, but the distance money put between them and the consequences of what they consumed.

Money creates a kind of disconnection between us and our actions. Mark Boyle

Freeconomy and the moneyless years

In 2007 he founded the Freeconomy Community, a network for sharing skills, tools and time on a pay-it-forward basis. It grew into an international network and in 2014 merged with Streetbank. In early 2008 he set out to walk from Bristol to Porbandar, Gandhi's birthplace in India, carrying no money. He turned back near Calais, stopped by the language barrier and the difficulty of finding work in exchange for food and shelter.

On Buy Nothing Day, 28 November 2008, he began to live without money altogether. He lived in a caravan on an organic farm, grew and foraged his food, cycled everywhere and relied on a solar panel and a wood-burning stove. What began as a one-year experiment lasted almost three. His first purchase at the end of it was a pair of second-hand shoes from a charity shop. He told the story in The Moneyless Man (2010) and set out the ideas behind it in The Moneyless Manifesto (2012).

Home to Ireland

In 2013 Mark moved back to Ireland, to a three-acre smallholding in County Galway that he works along permaculture lines. There, with friends, he turned a former pigsty into The Happy Pig, a free pub built from natural materials such as cob, cordwood and wattle and daub, where all the food and drink was free. In 2015 he published Drinking Molotov Cocktails with Gandhi, a challenge to the environmental movement about whether peaceful protest alone is still enough.

A life without technology

The same year he gave up newspapers, television and radio. In 2016 he built a home on the smallholding and moved in that December. On 19 December 2016 he announced in The Guardian that he was giving up complex technology: no phone, no computer, no internet and no electricity. His last day with technology was 20 December 2016.

His reasons are both personal and political. He believes complex technology harms people and places alike, and he finds life without it happier, slower and more connected. He described that life in The Way Home (2019), written by hand like all his work since.

Mark has continued to write for The Guardian, for years sending handwritten articles to his editors by post and receiving readers' comments printed and mailed back to him. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Mark is clear that he is “not trying to offer some prescriptive solution for all the world’s peoples and their problems.” His books are an honest account of one way of living.