Van Life
How do you go from 9-5 to living in a van?
I’m sitting in my improvised home office again. It’s month 9 of the apocalypse. I’m feeling very much like a prisoner this week. House arrest. Feeling like an appliance attached to the corporate world by a long, thin network connection.
Remember that scene from the first Matrix movie where the humans are plugged into the machines as an energy source? It feels a bit like that. I get up in the morning. I walk the dog. I make my coffee. I log in and have zoom calls. I fall further behind. I catch up. I have good days. I have bad days.
Like being a prisoner it can be very disempowering. Like being under house arrest it erodes your personal agency. Bottom line, layman’s terms, you don’t feel like you’re in control of your life. And to some extent humans never are, but the illusion of control allows us to get out of bed every morning.
I am a prisoner to the apocalypse. We all are. We get out of our cells once a day to walk the exercise yard. We strive. We adapt. It’s what humans do. But there is something missing. Especially for those of us with the wanderlust gene. We feel like the walls are closing in.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m happy to be employed. I am doing something that utilizes many of my strengths and is nominally compelling. But, sometimes it feels like the only excitement is punitive.
What do I mean by that? It means you work really hard to stay in control of the spaghetti ball of people and events but eventually you can’t keep all the balls in the air. You run out of time and/or focus. It feels like the game is rigged to keep that carrot of control just out of reach. Eventually a ball hits the floor and its on you to fix it, to apologize, to take a beating.
And so our confinement becomes a focus on scarcity. How do we keep enough of the balls in the air to not get the beating? That causes risk-avoidance thinking and cowering in the corner trying not to make a mistake.
I say this because, as that long, thin network connection with the corporate world becomes more punitive and less fulfilling your mind wanders. You get disengaged. You begin to think of greener pastures. Of escape. If the game won’t let you play, then maybe you take your ball and go find another game?
There’s a mental shift going on in this apocalypse. We are all looking at what we do as it is stripped bare of it’s creative and interesting bits and wondering why we do it?
We are creatures of free will. The apocalypse is causing us to look at the quiet desperation of our work lives in a new relief.
And many of us wonder if there isn’t another way?
And into these gaps in work-a-day consciousness other narratives can creep.
Is there a way to break the slave master’s bonds and live a life of freedom?
Of course there is. But, it’s not all or nothing. There is a spectrum of freedom that starts on one side with the 9-5 corporate wage worker and ends on the other side as an untethered vagabond living in a van.
In between there are shades of grey.
There is also the question of physical freedom versus psychological freedom. What is it that you are really looking for? What are some strategies to consider moving forward on either spectrum?
Are you running away from something or towards something else?
When we speak of physical freedom what do we long for? Is it the ability to do what we want, when we want, anywhere we want?
Instead of having to be stuck in your home office talking to a computer screen would you rather be in your flower garden contemplating next year’s narcissus crop? Or wandering the open road, vagabonding, with your dog?
That’s an example of physical freedom.
Psychological freedom is using your mind to achieve a sense of personal freedom, even if physically you are still tied to a specific situation.
Physical freedom is the harder of the two. Here we find a tradeoff. And maybe a balance. What do you do if you don’t want to spend 9-5 working for the man?
You can be creative about career choice so that maybe that activity overlaps with what you would be doing if you were free to do it anyhow. But, for many that ship has sailed. Or more accurately that ship has been anchored in place by a mortgage, a car loan and tuition payments. Not to mention family, realtionship and community anchors that are built into that current role.
In order to get physical freedom you would need to find a way to sever these anchor lines. How willing are you to walk away from those things? Is the pull of the greener pasture stronger than the fear of loss?
The idiot’s choice is to decide to work harder, and longer for some ill-defined period of time and in that way ‘earn’ your way into physical freedom. This sounds great but is seldom a reasonable choice. This strategy falls prey to the iron rule of spending up to your earning. The goal posts always move.
As the old saying goes “The best way to get out of a hole is to stop digging.”
Ironically one of the suggestions that ‘freedom life-stylers’ have always made is to ask your boss to let you work from home. Now that we are all doing that anyhow you get a taste of the good and bad of that particular partial physical freedom.
The truth is if you want physical freedom you’re going to need to reengineer you’re life to get it. The fewer things you own the easier this is. Just like any change you’re going to be forced to drop some balls. You can’t have everything. Some of the disconnections are going to be hard.
But, the good news is that you can always get psychological freedom. This comes from within. Most of the things in life are ultimately out of your control, but one key thing isn’t. How you choose to thing about it.
If Victor Frankel can choose psychological freedom in the concentration camps, we certainly can choose it in our 9-5. As the Buddha would say you can’t avoid pain, but you can choose whether or not to suffer.
If you choose to enjoy your work, it simply becomes enjoyable. If you choose to live each day in gratitude, it becomes so. If you choose to be free, in your mind, you are free. No one can take that.
The two then become related and empowering. If you choose to live psychologically free it will begin to manifest and influence your physical freedom.
Being psychologically free can lead you to those actions necessary to become physically free. If you choose to live an abundant life that abundance will manifest whether you work for a bank and live in a townhouse or live in a van traveling the country to run up mountains.
Coming to that peaceful clarity in your brain allows you to consider things in a new light. Maybe all those necessary and must have anchors in your physical life are not as necessary as you think? Maybe they are a mask for freedom?
If you are feeling untethered in the apocalypse start by looking inside. Start by considering what really gives you joy? What takes Joy away? What you may find is the simple things like a sunrise at dawn give you the most joy. And that some of the things you’ve been programmed with can be put aside as you shift towards the other end of the physical and psychological spectrum of freedom.