It takes a real shock to cut through the veneer of comfort and routine, and apprehend the ever evolving world around us.
This is a shock I've become more willing to embrace each day. To risk exclusion from the mainstream, consumer driven culture and society, in favor of a more intimate and immediate relationship with life as it is. For 3 decades, I've been told to dress, behave, spend, work, romance, and live in accordance with certain cultural 'norms', trying to live up to the expectations of my family, employers, friends, and society around me.
Until I broke...
3 years ago I had a depression/anxiety breakdown. I'd become totally disillusioned by society as a whole. In particular, the way we're coerced and then locked into wage slavery. We go through an education system which instead of teaching us valuable life skills, like how to learn according to our individual needs, how to think critically, and how to instill self-confidence, it merely teaches us how to be good employees, and good spenders, and discourages critical thinking, discourages us to question how the world works, and makes us feel insecure about our place within in. Then we're told to find a 'life partner', and secure a good job in order to buy a house, raise a family, 2.7 kids, a dog and a big TV in every room. We buy a car to sit in 2 hours of traffic just to get to and from the job we need to pay off the car and the house, and we can't quit because we're locked into 30+ years of interest accruing debt. That doesn't sound like living to me, and trying to make myself fit within that lifestyle was tearing me apart.
So, I sold all my shit, and what I didn't sell, I put into storage and hit the road. After travelling overseas for a year, I had to return to my previous job. But the vegabond in me was still growing stronger day by day. I loved living without the social and community expectations weighing on my shoulders. Being able to rest my head in new and unusual places, and waking up each day to a new and unique experience.
So when I returned to Sydney, and took up my old post at my old job, I had a few decisions to make. Do I want to deal with greedy and unhelpful landlords and estate agents again? Fuck no. Do I want to house share, and spend a large portion of my time living with someone else's poor housemate etiquette? Also fuck no.
Do I want to be able to hit the road whenever I got itchy feet, go on adventures, and explore the country I'd lived in for decades to find new opportunities, make new friends, reacquaint with friends of the past, and live on the coat tails of the coastal or mountain breeze? Now we're talking!
Within a month, I'd secured a VW minivan, and kitted it out with insulation, a cot, some storage boxes and a fridge. Never do I feel so liberated and free as when I'm on the road, to anywhere. Whether it be to the local bowling club car park near work where I get some sleep between shifts, or heading interstate with the sun setting behind me. Or it could be my usual spot in a quiet residential alleyway just a few hundred meters from the heart of the city's afterdark culture.
Vanlife, for me, has been the first step towards true liberation. Liberation from decades of consumerist ideology, cultural indoctrination, and a previously inescapable prison-like existence. Everywhere we go has another world within, beneath, under, or outside, and they're all happening in parallel, and intertwining with each other. They're all created by those inhabiting them, and with every new adventure, whether it be to the pub for a pint, or to the other side of the world, I'm discovering those new worlds and the people creating them.
Me and my little van... Rolling through worlds unseen by those with their nose glued to the paper, or their eyes fixed on their screens. That sounds like life to me!