Recently, a reader of this blog tracked me down on Facebook and asked me a very interesting question. Just to be clear, I don’t recommend doing this (even if I am indulging this behavior by writing this post). I may be terrible at answering questions, but I’m somewhat responsive over email, so maybe try me there first.

Anyway, the question went something roughly like:

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And by roughly, I mean exactly, given that I took a screenshot of the question.

There’s a few reasons I find this question interesting:

The future scares me.

Not in a “the icecaps are melting” sense, more of a “what am I doing with my life” sense.

I spend a lot of my words on this blog talking about the future. Saving for it. Planning for it. Picking travel destinations.

So imagine my surprise when I sat down one day to think about it, and I found that I had no idea what I actually wanted to do with my life.

Happy Holidays!

I’m going to need a minute to blow the dust off my keyboard here, I haven’t posted in an inexcusably long time. Accordingly, I won’t bother with excuses, I’ll just get along with the post. To start, a relevant question I received:

Hi Brandon, just wondering if you’ll convert your blog into a travel blog if and when you give up the truck to travel?

This is probably in reference to the time I was figuring out when I’m going to sell the truck. Short answer: yes. Slightly longer (and also rhetorical) answer: why wait until I give up the truck to start talking about travel?

As of me typing these words, my little truck experiment has been going on for over a year and four months. That’s been more than enough time to see a thousand different questions fly through this site and my inbox, and every so often I’ll sit down and answer a few of them. But there’s one question that I haven’t answered, and can’t seem to escape. It’s usually one of the first questions to come up in conversation, and half a bazillion variations of it are sitting in my queue:

Staying true to my well-documented inability to write timely posts, here’s a post that I probably should have finished three months ago.

I wasn’t always the truck-faring degenerate that I am now. Reading some of my earlier posts, I can vividly remember a (roughly four percent) younger, more hesitant Brandon, sitting in an airport terminal, running through the plan over and over in his head, making sure he didn’t miss any important details. I’d picked out a class of vehicle, I’d picked out a place to get my private mailbox through, I’d scoped out parking locations. It was all there, I just had to go out and do it. I had some ideas about what truck-life would be like, but no experience to say whether or not my trepidation was justified.

It’s been a while since I last lambasted any of the ideals that keep the American Economic Engine™ chuggin’ along. I’m talkin’ about things like “Exceptionalism”, “Overconsumption”, “Materialism”, and any other ‑isms and ‑umptions you want to throw into the mix. Given my relative reticence on the topic, I thought it was high time I took some pot shots at Uncle Sam. Subsequently, I’ve spent a long time staring at this blank expanse of screen, musing over what edgy and Forced Witticisms™ I can put here. Strangely enough, nothing I put down feels particularly pleasing, probably because I don’t think I have anything useful to say on the matter.

Way back in July of last year, someone gave me the idea to track how much money I was saving by not having to pay rent in the area. I crunched the numbers (in reality, like two numbers) and wrote the code, and the savings clock was born. When I flipped the switch, it showed a fairly disheartening negative $6,000 because I was still half in the hole from purchasing my Ford-fabricated flat. But in the intervening seven or eight months, I’ve had the pleasure of watching that number dwindle its way to zero (where I hit my break-even point), and as of this writing, work its way up to five digits in our (just as arbitrary as my formula) base 10 number system.

_{Brief note: I wrote most of this on the plane, but it took me a few days to getting around to polishing it up.}

I’ve thought travel, I’ve talked travel, but aside from a few fleeting flirtations with decidedly domestic destinations, I hadn’t really done much of it.

Until now, that is.

I’m currently writing this at 35,000 ft, traveling at 556 mph on my way back from a business trip. By the time I touchdown in San Francisco, I’ll have covered 13,587 miles in the sky and 34 hours and 31 minutes in airplanes and airports, meaning that this trip handily accounts for more travel than any two of my previous trips. Spanning four countries and as many languages, I had the chance to explore what might as well have been new worlds to me and dust off my paltry high school French knowledge in the process, which was actually même pire que je pensais. My genuine apologies to anyone who was forced to struggle through a conversation with me and my rusty, awkwardly accented French.

I’ve discussed my homelessness on here before, but between my camping trip a few months back and my early retirement revelation, I now have a whole new lens to examine it under.

So let’s take it back more than 12,500 years: humans aren’t doing anything productive. We’re hunter-gatherers, we set up camp near wherever we think the food (berries, plants, and huntable animals) will be at. We build simple structures to protect ourselves from the elements, but we take them down and start over somewhere else when the food supply dwindles. Most of our time and energy is put towards the highly productive task of not-dying.

People have all sorts of suggestions for how you should spend your 20s, and they land pretty much everywhere on the spectrum. Some say you should work extra hard to provide yourself with a solid foundation for the future. After all, you’re young and void of life’s later obligations, put that time to good use. Others say you shouldn’t squander it toiling your best years away in monotony. As is probably evident from some of my other writings (read: ramblings), I fall somewhere in the middle. On one hand, I recognize that I’m setting up the foundation for the rest of my life right now (little to no expenses, investing early, yadda yadda yadda). But on the other hand, as I’m one to note, I only get to be this young once and I’ll be damned if I don’t make some memories to reminisce about when I’m old and gray. Plus, one of the main reasons I decided on the truck life was to minimize the time until I could start travelling.

Human beings didn’t become the dominant lifeforms on the planet by being rigid and inflexible in the face of change. We’re able to adapt, when we receive similar stimuli over and over again, we react to it more and more efficiently and effectively each time. Naturally, these stimuli come in an endless procession, in innumerable forms. On a physical, nearly tangible level, repeated stresses on our bodies build muscle mass so that we’re better equipped to handle these stresses in the future. Biologically, our bodies learn to handle repeated threats by developing antigens after the first encounter. Socially, we modify our habits to fit in with our habitats. When we uproot our lives and move to other locations we learn local customs over time, and our interactions with our environment become more fluid over time. My situation is no different, and I’m definitely noticing the ways I’ve adjusted, both consciously and unconsciously, to my environment.

As a forewarning, this post doesn’t ^really provide tips on how to be invisible, it’s more of an observation of human nature.

One of my biggest stressors when I was considering living in a van, as is undoubtedly evident from my earlier posts, was my unshakable fear that I was going to be caught, arrested, or otherwise reprimanded. I was worried that I wouldn’t be discreet enough, or I’d make some grave mistake one day, or anything but a perfectly executed ninja-esque routine would spell my end. One too many loud creaks at night, not closing the back gate quietly enough, climbing out at the exact wrong time, parking in the wrong place, etc, the ways I could screw things up seemed limitless. But a fortuitous combination of rote observation and apparent realization led me to the following declaration:

I’m a very judgmental person, I have been for as long as I can remember. It’s certainly not a trait that I’m proud of, it’s just always been easier for me to dismiss people based on superficial observations than to actually try to understand anything about them. If neither software engineering nor driving buses work out for me, I can readily imagine myself becoming a dunk tank clown, because I’m quick to recognize “flaws” with a cursory glance. I’m sure a proper psychiatric evaluation would conclude that it stems from some deep-seated insecurity that I’ve yet to acknowledge, but that’s entirely beside the point.

Every so often, I like to apply a simple Litmus test to my life to help me figure out a couple things. The test has a single question, and the way I answer this question tells me a lot about how reasonable of a person I’m being, and if I’m living in a sustainable way. The questions is this:

If everyone acted the way I’m acting, would it still work?

This is another post on philosophy, take that as you will.

I went out with a couple of co-workers last Friday, and naturally the conversation eventually ended up on my living situation. I’ve been continually surprised at how receptive people are to the whole concept of living in a car, normally once I explain all of my motivating factors. Mainly, I get a lot of “That’s really great! I personally could never do something like that, but power to you for going through with it!”, and that’s vaguely encouraging for me. Coupling these conversations with all of the time I have for reflection, I’ve come to realize a few things about happiness.

So I’ve already laid out my pros and cons of why I’m actually doing this, but there’s another aspect to it that I didn’t really explore in that post, and it basically revolves around the idea of minimalism.

We do things big in America. We love our malls, our big meals, our bigger televisions, and our huge trucks and SUVs. We live in a time of unprecedented opulence and convenience, but that doesn’t come without its own issues. The main one is that it is completely and utterly unsustainable. I remember learning in a high school environmental science class that it would take the resources of four or more planet Earths if everyone on the planet were to live the way Americans do. We’re supremely wasteful and consumptive, and it’s a lifestyle our grandchildren will certainly not be able to “enjoy”.