*New Beginnings | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | September 11, 2026*
This week, for the first time, I came across a phenomenon some of you may already know about, but which was entirely new to me: people who live on cruise ships. And I don’t mean people who work on these ships. Not security guards, waiters, cabin stewards, shift managers, or sailors. I mean people who have nothing to do with working on ships, except that they define themselves as nomads and live aboard cruise ships.
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How does it work? It turns out that different cruise lines offer all kinds of perks in exchange for gambling in their casinos. And there is an entire movement of people who have turned this into a way of life: they learn which companies offer generous perks to casino players, accumulate benefits and offers for future cruises, and combine them with loyalty programs in order to move from cruise to cruise at very low prices.
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An American woman named Libby Roam has been living this way with her husband for three years straight. Each time, they plan nearly a year’s worth of cruises in advance, and they spend more time at sea than on land. Alongside them, more and more people have moved onto cruise ships, and some document their cruise-nomad lives online. They do pay for their cruises, but once loyalty programs and casino perks are factored in, and once you subtract the cost of a car, bills, food, furniture, cleaning, and, of course, buying things to maintain a home they don’t have, they spend an average of about $2,000 a month for the two of them together, and that covers all their expenses.
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I’m always excited when I come across people who manage to think outside the box about how to live, and even more so this week of Rosh Hashanah, with the energy of new beginnings in the background. So I kept looking to see what other refreshing ways of life are out there. Or, in other words, how people live when they refuse to accept life as a sealed package that cannot be taken apart? Here are a few things I found.
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I found Heidemarie Schwermer, a German teacher and psychotherapist who, at the age of 54, gave up her apartment, let go of her possessions, and began what she intended to be a one-year experiment in living without money. That one year turned into about twenty years during which she house-sat for people, worked for others in exchange for food or whatever other service she needed, and when she began receiving a pension, she would give the money to others. She did, however, use her health insurance, because apparently there is a limit to how far one can take this experiment.
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This is, of course, an extreme example, as is moving onto a cruise ship. But I came across several ways of living that I could absolutely imagine for myself.
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For example, right here on the island in western Canada where I live now, there is a community of 36 families who have chosen to live multigenerationally. Each family has its own home, but among the homes there is also a common house, shared meals, gardens, a playroom, a workshop, and a multigenerational social fabric in which what they call surrogate grandparents, aunts, and uncles emerge naturally. The people in this community aspire to an intentional, ecological way of living together, and among other things, they break with the conventional model in which most of us raise children inside a two-parent unit, with two parents trying to manage everything and sometimes collapsing under the weight of it. When I read about them, I thought how beautiful this possibility is: that family is something a community does together.
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Besides them, I found Jillian Johnsrud, who asked why, really, should we wait until retirement to have free time at the end of our lives? In response, she, her husband, and their six children have taken more than twelve “mini-retirements” - sometimes for a month and sometimes for many months. During those periods they lived abroad, traveled to 27 countries, drove across the United States in a camper, and did things we usually save for “after we retire.” Except that, unlike conventional retirement, they started without a large amount of capital. Each time, they work for a few years, take a mini-retirement, go back to work, and then retire again. In other words, they spread retirement throughout their lives. And they are not the only ones. She herself wrote a book about it, and there is an entire movement of people living this way, through mini-retirements.
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And finally, if there is one thing we could actually start in the new year that begins tonight, it is the idea of an hour bank. What does that mean? It is a time bank in which the only currency is hours. An hour you spend fixing someone’s computer is worth an hour in which someone else drives you to the airport, cooks you a meal, or walks your dog. Every hour is worth one hour, regardless of the value the market would assign to your profession. I found many such banks in New Zealand, England, and the United States. In the town of Sebastopol, California, for example, the manager, David Gill, is himself paid in hours, and in exchange for his work he “buys” hours of home repairs, rides, and help moving furniture. In an interview, he said, “I think I feel richer now than I’ve ever felt.”
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Incidentally, several local authorities in Israel have also tried to run projects like these. Most of them faded away, apparently as people or welfare budgets changed. But perhaps because of this column, someone will start a time bank like this privately?
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So beyond my own desire for a bank of hours like this, this little bit of research reminded me that whether we are talking about hours and time, community and surrogate grandparents, or a completely different way of structuring our lives over time - even without money, we are rich in resources, far more than we usually remember. And above all, we are rich in possibilities. None of these ways of life has to suit us in order to remind us that our own way of life is not necessarily inevitable either. That there is more than one way to live, and that we have far more imagination and creativity than we think.
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So may we all have a good year. May we remember to shake our thinking loose and open it to new possibilities, and to keep in our minds the other people who one day got up and did it. Began. And may we begin too, each woman with her own goals. Each man with his.
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And Shabbat Shalom to us all,
*Maya Tevet Dayan*