Mark Boyle

Mark Boyle (born 8 May 1979), also known as The Moneyless Man, is an Irish writer best known for living without money from November 2008, and for living without modern technology since 2016. Boyle writes regularly for the British newspaper The Guardian, and has written about his experiences in several books. His first book, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, was published in 2010. His fourth book, The Way Home: Tales from a life without technology, was published in 2019. Boyle lives near Loughrea, in County Galway.

Early life Mark Boyle took a degree in Business at the Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, before moving to Britain in 2002.

During the final year of his degree, Boyle watched the 1982 film Gandhi, about the life of Mohandas K. Gandhi. He has frequently cited this as the moment that changed his life.

Early career During his first six years in Britain, Boyle lived in Bristol and managed two organic food companies. In 2007, after a conversation with a friend during which they decided "money... creates a kind of disconnection between us and our actions", Boyle set up the Freeconomy Community.

Moneyless lifestyle A few months after creating the Freeconomy Community, Boyle set out on a two-and-a-half-year trek from Bristol to Porbandar in India, the birthplace of Gandhi. Inspired by the nonviolent Salt March led in India by Gandhi in 1930, and by the woman in America known as Peace Pilgrim, he set off in January 2008, carrying no money and only a small number of possessions. However, he was forced to turn back only a month into the trip, as language barriers and difficulties in persuading people he would work for food and a place to stay halted his journey shortly after he arrived in Calais. One of his travelling companions had travellers cheques for emergencies, which allowed them to travel back to the UK.

Boyle has received considerable positive and negative publicity for his moneyless lifestyle, appearing on television, radio and other media in the United Kingdom, Republic of Ireland, Australia, South Africa, United States and Russia. Much of the attention has focused on his day-to-day routine, including food, hygiene, and traditionally expensive aspects of life, such as Christmas. The activist Robin Greenfield has cited Boyle's book The Moneyless Man as an inspiration for his activism.

Mark Boyle is one of a small number of individuals who have lived without money in recent times. These include , and Daniel Suelo. One woman, Jo Nemeth also lives without money and has specifically cited reading Boyle's book The Moneyless Man as the inspiration for her own choice. Nemeth was reported in 2025 as living a moneyless lifestyle since 2015, a total of ten years.

Boyle gave up his moneyless lifestyle in 2011 and the first item he bought with money in three years was a pair of shoes from a charity shop. He was so used to not using money at that time that he felt that "it felt as strange as giving it [money] up in the first place had". This vasectomy was voluntary and he had it done "against all sorts of advice".

In 2013, he moved back to Ireland. In 2015, Mark Boyle opened a moneyless pub on a three-acre permaculture smallholding in County Galway, Ireland. The moneyless pub is called the "Happy Pig" as the building it's in was formerly a pigsty before Boyle bought the farm that he converted into a smallholding. Boyle notes that the exclusion of newspapers includes even The Guardian for which he was a columnist, though this didn't stop him from getting columns of his published in the paper. Boyle decided that more radical means were needed for the environmental movement and that merely peaceful protest wasn't working to stop eco-catastrophe. On 19 December 2016, Boyle made an announcement in his Guardian column that starting on Wednesday 21 December 2016, he will stop using all "complex technology" which he names as computers, the internet, phones, washing machines, water from taps, gas, fridges, televisions and anything requiring electricity to run. Mark Boyle's last day of technology was on Tuesday, 20 December 2016. In it, he wrote about what he noticed in the month since then along with further explaining his reasons for renouncing technology as well as briefly answering a question from a Guardian commenter during one of the explanations. Boyle wrote that he was recently interviewed for a television show about digital privacy and the future of technology (he does not mention the name of the show). Boyle claims that those environmentalists instead of protecting nature, actually debate "how to best domesticate these wild places" which he says includes "deserts, oceans, mountains" with the aim of using those places to power the green energy "needed to fuel things that, up until recently, we couldn’t even imagine, let alone claim to need".

Freeskilling Alongside the online component of the Freeconomy Community, several areas including Bristol and London hold Freeskilling sessions, where freeconomists take turns to pass on their skills in free one-off evening classes. Past topics have included subjects ranging from charity fundraising and anger management to bicycle maintenance, bread-making and campaigning skills.

Works The Moneyless Man – Boyle's first book, The Moneyless Man: A Year of Freeconomic Living, was published in June 2010 by Oneworld Publications. Ben Fogle: New Lives in the Wild Series 13, 2021