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Unlike previous games, the Fallout 4 ending cutscene does not change based on how the Sole Survivor has finished most quests or interacted with other people. Only the choice of completing Nuclear Family or The Nuclear Option has any effect on the ending. Also, unlike previous games, the ending is voiced by the Sole Survivor instead of Ron Perlman. Unlike the Fallout 4 intro, the voice is based. You break me, I systematically destroy your entire life. I apologize up front for the rather lengthy post, but it's all true and was my greatest revenge. It all starts about 10 years ago. I was happily engaged to a girl who I knew for about 9 years but had only been dating for about 1 year. Let's call her 'Nancy McFuckingCuntbag'. The account showed a balance of $150. Her new husband it seemed had used her money to pay off his heavy debts he had accumulated with his first wife, debts this wife knew nothing about! He had told her that he was debt-free when they were dating. 'We stayed married for another year but I was never comfortable with him again in regards to money.
As David Arthur Johnston takes a seat next to me on a bench in the courtyard of the Greater Victoria Public Library’s main branch, I can see that his greying beard is so long and bushy it hides his neck and that his eyes are a light shade of blue, but it’s his coffee that has caught my attention. It’s in a to-go cup. A to-go cup.
I ask him how he got the coffee. I realize it's an abrupt conversation starter, but it’s also a fair question for someone who claims not to ever use money. He answers without hesitation: “The 9-10 Club. It's a kitchen that's open on weekday mornings for the homeless. They have food and coffee there.”
Throughout our conversation, and in many later conversations as well, I repeatedly find myself asking where or how he’s acquired something. Not because I’m looking for a gotcha moment, but because Johnston has organized his life around something that seems impossible and I want to know how he pulls it off.
For those of us who struggle to make ends meet or who are disorganized or negligent with personal finances, or who can’t seem to ever create a cushion for unexpected expenses, the idea of doing away with money might seem spectacularly appealing. We all know financial problems can wreak havoc, leading to health-compromising stress, divorce, homelessness. Who but the wealthy hasn’t had to rack their brain to figure out how to bring in more money?
But what if instead of always trying to figure out how to get more money, you could figure out how not to need it? What if it were possible to sever your dependence on it? To banish it completely from your life?
For most of us, such questions would remain a thought experiment absent a major reorganization of civilization and the global economy. But, motivated by reasons more pure than stress relief, Johnston ditched money almost two decades ago, and he says there’s no going back.
His last purchases—beer, cigarettes, pot—occurred 18 years ago, he says, on his 31st birthday. He claims he hasn’t spent any money since. It’s true, his friends have told me. No money at all.
David Shebib, who befriended Johnston after testing his integrity—he offered Johnston $20—has provided a room for him to sleep in at times in the various houses he’s rented over the years. He says Johnston refuses to even touch money. “People can’t give him money to give to me,” he says. “He won’t take an envelope from me with money in it to give to somebody else.”
Cliff MacLean, who met Johnston in 2003 while protesting the second Iraq war, says Johnston does touch money—but only to destroy it or render it unusable. “I’ve seen him throw toonies or loonies in the ocean,” he says.
Johnston also throws found change into gutters and garbage bins and cuts out serial numbers on bills. Before 2011, when banknotes were still made of paper instead of polymer, they were easier to destroy—he could just burn them.
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He doesn’t seek out money for this purpose, he says. Rather, he handles it like an offensive picture littering the sidewalk or a swear word carved into a tree: “The idea is to not let kids see it.”
That’s because Johnston’s feelings about money are inextricably bound up in his certainty that refusing to spend it is the only moral way to live. Feeling fortunate to have broken out of “set conditionings,” he hopes his example—as well as his writings, conversations, YouTube channel, and activism—inspires others to do the same. For all Johnston’s proselytizing, he lacks a pushiness. Instead, he exudes—and has worked on cultivating—patience and calm.
Shebib considers him a “prophet.” MacLean compares him to the Stoics and says he has immense respect for Johnston’s ability to stand firmly for what he believes. “He's just a little out of phase with this century,” he says.
Strangers often take a harsher view. Johnston is aware of how he can strike people as “nice” but “crazy.” They’re right about the nice part, Johnston says. Shebib concurs: “He's actually quite nice all the time. It annoys me because he doesn't have flare-ups like I do.”
After Johnston and I talk for a bit outside the library, he suggests that we walk over to St. Ann’s Academy, a historic, provincially owned property on Humboldt Street that spans six acres and houses Victoria’s first Roman Catholic cathedral. It’s also the site of a monumental years-long showdown he had with the city, when his insistence on sleeping on the grounds of the national landmark led to his being arrested or detained so many times he lost count (he believes it’s somewhere between 40 and 60).
The showdown, which began in 2004, also paved the path for Johnston’s involvement in a constitutional battle that fundamentally changed the way Victoria responds to its unhoused population and that has implications for other Canadian cities as well. Two copies of his self-published journal from that period, The Right to Sleep: The Occupation of St. Ann’s Academy, are available through the Victoria Public Library: one is in circulation; the other sits in the heritage room.
As we walk through the city, Johnston offers a small disclaimer, putting out in the open what he calls his one “debatable” act of spending, post-31st birthday. If you count a gift card that someone gave him back in 2012, which he used on Big Macs and coffee, then, he says, he’s been money-free for only nine years.
***
You would think that if someone has disavowed money—has completely stopped using it—that life for that person would become a non-stop scramble to survive. But Johnston doesn’t scramble. If he’s meant to eat on any given day, he will cross paths with something edible. People offer him food, or they don’t. He finds it in dumpsters, or he doesn’t. Under no circumstances would he buy groceries for himself, he says. And though he will accept gifts, he doesn’t beg. Good karma has enabled him to survive, he says. But survival isn’t what’s most important to him. What’s most important is living in a way that’s right and true. And if living right and true doesn’t end up sustaining his life, well then so be it. He’s not built for this world.
Johnston started catching on to what he calls “the truth”—there is no “his” truth or “a” truth—24 years ago, after the first of two life-altering epiphanies obliterated his self-image.
Prior to 1997, he had thought of himself as an “Average Joe.” Growing up poor in central Alberta, he suspected that he and his family were perhaps a little smarter than others—his mother’s generation claimed valedictorians—but he felt, overall, that his life was unremarkable. He lived with his mother and sister in the country, about ten kilometres southwest of Lacombe, and visited his father, a mailman, in the nearby town of Red Deer every second weekend. His mother worked as a cashier at her brother’s general store.
Johnston was naturally social, but like so many others, he experienced anxiety and rejections. Still, he made friends easily and in high school became part of an eclectic group that included athletes, musicians, nerds, and drama geeks. (He says he evolved from basic nerd to drama geek.)
Johnston’s longtime friend Earl Oberst, who was part of the group, says Johnston had a big heart and could connect with anyone. He also had an open, curious mind. “He could take two books from the library and have them done before the end of the day,” Oberst recalls. But Johnston skipped a lot of school, and when, in his senior year, he learned he’d be expelled if he missed another day, he dropped out.
Johnston and his friends often congregated around a campfire in his backyard because his mother, who’s now deceased, allowed for such gatherings. She was a “surrogate mom” figure for Johnston’s friends, says Oberst, who remembers her fondly as a “God-fearing, homemade-wine-drinking, free-spirited woman” affectionately known to the group as “Mama Lea.”
Today, many in Johnston’s high school group remain friends. While most of them have followed a conventional trajectory—partnered up, settled into careers, had their own families—Johnston, though he has two children, stands out for being “on his quest,” Oberst says. “That’s what a lot of us call it.” He adds, “I honestly didn’t think it would last this long.”
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Shortly after leaving high school, Johnston made his way to Vancouver Island, moved in with an uncle in Gordon Head, and found work making bread at Rising Star Bakery. He briefly considered trying to enrol in university, despite not having a high school diploma, but he says he lacked the “gumption” and the idea fizzled.