Nomadlife

 I just finished reading Nomadland by Jessica Bruder. I tried watching the movie, but the pace was fucking glacial and I got bored. So, while I was out the other day, I bought a copy of the book.

And you know what?  The book is better.

Shocker! Right?

Heh.

Anyway, the book is very interesting. In case you don't know, Jessica Bruder is a journalist who reports on the various subcultures in American society. In Nomadlife she focuses on the vanlifers, people who have chosen to live in vans and cars, to escape the crushing debt of 21st century life. Most of the people that Bruder interviewed and focused on were senior citizens, who seem to have lost everything through bad luck and the accumulation of debt. She focuses predominantly on the story of a woman named Linda May, who is in her sixties, when she becomes a vandweller.

I'll admit that this wasn't my first exposure to the whole vanlife experience. I know who Bill Wells is and I've seen younger vanlifers posting trendy videos on YouTube. Also, vanlife videos tend to get lumped in with the 'tiny house dwellers' in YouTube algorithm. Start looking at tiny houses and you'll eventually come across a video of someone living in their van.

Bruder's book, however, is a lot more honest than most of the videos. You get a strong sense that the people she's interviewed don't see themselves as victims. They see themselves as hacking the system, getting out of a rigged game that they just don't want to play any more. The vanlifers on YT are younge people who seem less genuine, in comparison, and more slick with their sponsored ads and curated content. More affected. Less real.

Overall, I'd recommend Nomadlife. It was a good read and I learned things that I did not know before I picked it up. It's scraped away a lot of the romanticism of living life in a vehicle, while portraying its interviewees, not as victims, but matter-of-fact pragmatists.