“Homelessness is unfortunately a revolution at this point. If they want people to buy into society[,] we should have a society worth buying into.” —A random YouTube commenter, with a powerful message
Living the van life down by the river used to be a joke; now it’s a reality for many young people trying to survive in these troubling times.
The van life is no longer a ridiculed lifestyle illuminating the failures of an individual to assimilate to society. Today, the van life has transformed into a rally, a deliberate message from the young people addressed to the old ones at the top (mostly Boomers, and some, the offspring of said Boomers).
Here’s the message loud and clear: We’re tired of your antisocial system. We grow weary of your oppressive regime that works only for those who have ascended to the top and those who will ascend to the top not through meritocracy, but through the oligarchic channels of entitlements and nepotism. This ill-fated, anti-social hierarchy that reeks of materialism prioritized above all else—we’re over it. Now we only dream of escaping the tortured remains of this world you have despoiled, by taking to the free roads in a van or RV, counteracting your materialism with our minimalism.
The Boomer generation has dominated the political—and therefore everything else—ranks over the past forty years, and the current predicament (read crisis) of our world is all they can show for it.
Houses and rental prices are through the roof (might as well make puns out of the situation for some comedic relief). What they took for granted in their youth—needing only one working family member to support an entire household, for example—is now but a pipe dream for hopeful young homeowners in today’s landscape. And overpriced rental payments are but secondary repercussions of this failed system.
But perhaps that doesn’t matter, since the world is burning up—or flooding over, depending on where you go—anyway. Home settlements might not even be feasible in the world they’ve created for us, what with hydrofracking-induced earthquakes and climate change-enhanced hurricanes and flooding conveniently overlooked, so that they may carry on with their purely self-interested agendas of hedonistic improvidence. Their shortsighted indulgence of this planet will be our long-term responsibility to bear. And the weight of that burden feels very heavy on our shoulders.
This sociopathic oppression has been relentless with this subset of Boomers in power. They want to chain and bind us to this wretched world they created against us, so they can snatch from our fingers whatever morsels remain in our personal assets for themselves. We already bear the financial burden of supporting these Boomers into their socially-secured, medicated retirements (Socialist benefits aka Social Security and Medicare only for them, I suppose). Yet we must also tend to the blood-sucking parasite they’ve planted on us, in the form of student debt, which they deliberately inflated only after they bloviated ad nauseam the overstated perks of going to college to score a good-paying career (once again, all lies). This was all a sociopathic ploy to leech money from us until their—but at this rate, more likely until our— demise.
On top of the financial burdens we bear alone, we must also find a way to survive on this ever-warming planet with our stagnant wages since the 1980s. An affordable, AC-cooled home or apartment sounds like a luxury these days because it is. As the widespread meme goes, “They want 202[3] prices with 1990 kitchens and bathrooms.”
Quite frankly, we’re tired of this bullshit. What’s the point of living if you’re enslaved to a system that serves only one class (the Boomers), everyone else be damned? Working and saving, saving and working. That’s been the unending revolution of our lives for years—for some of us, even decades—yet we have nothing to show for it. Everything we were told to do, we did. Yet in the end, it was futile.
We’re chained and shackled to an outdated work system run by the decrepit, lead-poisoned minds of baby Boomers too brainless to even change the passwords on their computers in their high-paying, corporate positions, from “password” or “admin,” to something a bit more secure and unlikely to get hacked into. We must abide by their rules and show up to work on their time, no flexibility considered. On top of all this pettiness we must endure while we work, we get paid too little for it, and find it too improbable to even survive on the wages these CEO Boomers dictate are “good enough” to live on (yet they themselves couldn’t survive a day on, guaranteed).
Going back to the home issue—where the “heart” supposedly is—and we have found ourselves officially burnt out from disillusionment. Not even being able to afford a place to live, to call home and have a loving family to share it with, is the ultimate injustice to the youth of today. Younger Millennials are demoralized by what we thought we could achieve before realizing we’ve been duped from the onset by the sociopathic Boomers in power. And Zoomers, our younger siblings, have seen what the Boomers have done to us and are more wary as a result. This is why we have decided to take matters into our own hands.
Millennials—and now Zoomers— have been inventing ingenious solutions to this pandemic of Boomer sociopathy. No affordable houses for singles and couples? Team up with fellow burdened youth and live in a communal property with acres of shared land. If you’re savvy with home construction, you can buy an old, beaten up Victorian for cheap and flip it yourself. Or, for those of us who can’t do option one or two, take to the roads to escape this anti-society altogether, in a loaded RV, mobile tiny home, or the van life equipped for the dreams we once believed in.
Although it is far from perfect, the van life is a tempting opportunity to rebel against this anti-society doomed to fail. When all the markets explode and national panic strikes once again (as it inevitably will the way things are currently progressing), we’ll have already taken to the roads, embracing the simpler lifestyle of our nomadic ancestors.
In fact, there is such a trend in culture arising of late, seemingly from the spectral shadows of our nomadic, paleolithic ancestors. A minimalistic approach to life has taken root once more, among the concrete jungles of our modern-day urban sprawl.
McMansions and other excessively oversized boxes for shelter are quickly growing out of style among the younger generations, to be replaced with modest, single-family homes for settlers (when possible in this dreadfully inflated market), and flexible apartment leases (and other nomadic-friendly opportunities such as the van life) for the wanderers. Having the most toys over anyone else—a petulant ideology that plagues the superficial Boomer mindset—is now supplanted with a genuine yearning for strong familial values; a healthy work-life balance to ease the tortured minds of a corporatist world; and making the necessary sacrifices—owning less toys—to achieve those wholesome goals if need be.
Our modest values, in direct contrast with the Boomers’ selfish, greedy ones, are most assuredly the reasons Millennials (yes, primarily Millennials) are causing divorce rates to fall dramatically in America. It’s almost as if prioritizing cutting throats to secure the bag instead of caring for others wholeheartedly leads you down a lonely path where everyone resents you! We seem to possess substantially more knowledge and wisdom than our elders on what truly matters in life…
Perhaps our early paleolithic ancestors were right all along—a simpler lifestyle beside the warmth of a kindling bonfire, surrounded by loved ones living together in small huts, far outweighs the soulless distribution of luxury items and services among fellow faceless, “big names” who live in cold, sequestered, marbled mansions. Symbols of love touch our hearts in places where symbols of wealth can never reach. Suffering together yields more joy from life than residing in luxury by one’s lonesome. The wealthy, older members of this anti-society are richer than ever, and yet more miserable than most. We have learned these valuable lessons observing them over the years, and have channeled our priorities elsewhere as a result.
And so, if ‘society’ today continues on this treacherous path of Boomer sociopathy and deceit, it will cease to be a society at all. If and when that time comes, it will be the youth taking flight to leave it all behind. We have nothing left to lose, or at least not much, in this anti-society, after all.
“Society is no comfort, To one not sociable,” as the great William Shakespeare once wrote. Truly and terrifyingly, this quote shares eerily similar qualities to the sociopathic mindset that prevails over today’s anti-society. Sociopathy poisons not only our waters and lands through negligence and apathy, but also our very existence. It threatens not only our livelihoods, but also future generations for years to come. And if we cannot fight it, we must flee it.
Perhaps it’s time to liberate ourselves from the shackles of today’s anti-society, and spread our clipped wings wide. If we’re so lazy and unmotivated, as they love to project onto us, then maybe we should shift the burden of supporting the elderly into their extended retirements onto them. Or maybe it is for the best that we renounce our unwarranted debt obligations to our financial predators through debt strikes such as these. Perhaps only then will they concede to our merit in this ‘society,’ though even this is doubtful, considering the sociopathic source we’re dealing with.
The way it is now, subsidizing this anti-society is simply not worth the investment for us. We get nothing out of it and they get everything. After years of disillusionment and deceit, we’ve had enough. To the wild roads we roam, in search of the Promised Land we were once (deceptively) assured.
Living the van life may not be as romantic or poetic as it initially appears, but it opens the doors for young people seeking a more adventurous life worth living.