So, we are not calling it stealth camping. We are not calling it hashtag van life. None of that "white people shit" that plagues "influencer culture." Even calling it "nomadic" sounds insulting to actual nomadic cultures worldwide, because white people love to just take words and apply them to themselves. For all intents and purposes, my long term plan is to just be a wandering hobo. A tramp. A vagabond. Easy, simple terms for what all this "lifestyle" nonsense is all about.
How did I come upon this kind of long term dream?
I am tired of capitalism. Full stop.
I was an "essential worker" during lockdown in 2020 and I learned how empty our society is, how meaningless our traditions are, and how absurd the expectation to work truly is. My job lost its holiday party at the end of the year. It stopped giving out end of the year bonuses. It stopped matching 401k contributions. It cut overtime out completely. It cut back every possible expense and benefit it could.
But company officers and management still took vacations and got new cars.
It was only the workers who suffered.
I always joked that if I lost my job I wouldn't look for a new one, I would simply turn to crime. I think acquiring and building out a van to live a transient life as off-grid as possible is a better solution, especially seeing how prisons are just regulated labor camps.
I have also put a lot of thought into this now that I have been let go from my job during a period of complete economic turmoil. Yes, I need money, but also, what good is working for money if there is no end goal for it? Am I working to support my own existence, or to support my landlord? Are my earned wages actively improving the quality of my life, or are they simply being bled out of me to pay for things that society forces upon me?
I'll save us all time and energy, none of the money was benefiting me. Cost of living keeps rising. Wages do not increase anymore. We keep giving up more of the things that bring us joy in order to keep existing, but existence is not a life.
So I decided my life will be lived for myself and cut as many ties to society as I can, with "no landlords" being the greatest of these ties. Landlords and the rental system are designed to create housing scarcity so that private citizens cannot own their own homes in a capitalist society. We are forced into a societal meat grinder where we are told successful living is attached to material accumulation, and the greatest of these is the purchase and ownership of a private home, but then every possible hurdle is placed in our path to achieving that goal. Ten years ago I could have afforded mortgage payments on a meager-yet-mine property, but my "credit rating" was not in any place to attempt doing so. Now, I can barely afford to keep up with the small annual increase to my rent without major changes to my income and expenses, and that is the point in which I no longer wish to participate in the system.
To be clear, this isn't just, again, entitled suburban white boy angst. This is the culmination of being exploited by capitalism in the labor market for 28 years at the time of this writing. This is having spent more of my life miserable and stressed to the limit trying to scrape by than ever being happy. My childhood wasn't even a happy one because the looming spectre of financial insecurity was there for my parents as well. I grew up in poverty, navigated adulthood in poverty, and now stand in poverty looking at what is just over the small fence at the boundaries.
To also be clear, this isn't some misguided line of reasoning either. Rent is out of control. Food costs are out of control. Medical costs are out of control. Property costs are out of control. There is not a single facet of our lives in the US that isn't engineered to maximize profits for those who own them while strangling the rest of us who are forced to pay for them. While I cannot escape the "work for wages" part at the moment, I can redirect where the money will be going hereafter.
At the forefront of this redirection is the acquisition of a permanent shelter from the elements. That shelter just happens to be cargo van shaped.
I would rather die untethered through happenstance than be choked to death by a government and economic system I never chose to exist in. It's that simple.
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