What Van Life Content Gets Wrong

You’re listening to Miles of Quiet. Episode Five. It’s a little after eleven at night and I’m parked at the far edge of a grocery store lot in a town I won’t be able to name tomorrow. The lights over the lot are the orange kind that make everything look like a photograph of a crime. I’ve got the back doors open a few inches for air, and I’m lying on my stomach on the bed with a headlamp on, reaching down into a cabinet, because the water pump is making a sound it shouldn’t make. There is no version of this on anybody’s feed. Nobody films this part.

And this part is most of it. That’s what I want to talk about today. So. I’m Henry Wilder. Last episode I told you the honest story of why I left a career to live in a van, the slow-motion version, the one that wasn’t a brave leap so much as a couple of things breaking at the right time. Today I want to come at the van from the other side.

Because I told you why I did it, and I stand by all of it. But if I stopped there, I’d be doing the same thing I complained about two episodes ago, which is showing you the good four minutes and cutting the rest. So here’s the rest. Here’s what van life content gets wrong. Here’s the thing about that. Van life content is basically real estate photography for a lifestyle.

Everything is shot in the good light. The bed is made with linen that nobody who actually lives in a van owns, because linen wrinkles if you look at it and there’s no room for an iron. There’s a mug of coffee steaming on a little wooden ledge, and the back doors are open on a view of the ocean, or the desert, or a mountain lake with no other vehicles in sight. And it’s beautiful. I want to be fair, because some of it is genuinely well made, and some of the people making it are good at what they do. But it’s a photograph of the best ninety seconds of a life, and it’s being sold as the life.

And I did the same thing when I started, so I’m not throwing stones from anywhere clean. Let me tell you what gets cropped out of that photo. Start with the view. That gorgeous empty spot where the van is parked with the doors open on the ocean. To get a spot like that, with nobody around, you are either up before light or you got there the night before and slept not knowing if someone was going to knock on the window at two in the morning and tell you to move. The good spots are good because they’re hard to get, and the ones that are easy to get are full, or they’re a parking lot.

I spend more nights than I’d like in places that photograph like nothing, because they’re flat, legal, and quiet enough to sleep. Rest stops. The back corners of lots. A patch of dirt off a forest service road that I got to in the dark and won’t see properly until morning. The dream shot exists. I get it a few times a month.

The other twenty-odd nights are logistics. Then there’s weather, which van life content treats like it’s always seventy-two degrees and golden. It isn’t. A van is a metal box, and metal does exactly what you’d expect. In summer it holds heat like an oven, and if you park wrong, you wake up at six already sweating with nowhere to go but out. In winter it gives up heat just as fast.

I’ve woken up to frost on the inside of the windows, on my side of the glass, from my own breath overnight. I’ve done the thing where you don’t want to leave the sleeping bag because the two feet of air between the bag and your clothes is genuinely cold, and your clothes are colder. There’s a whole science to staying warm in a van in November that nobody puts in the pretty videos, because there’s nothing pretty about it. It’s just you, managing a metal box, in the weather, every single day, with no thermostat and no landlord to call. There’s a specific kind of tired that comes from that. Not physical.

It’s the low tax of being the only person responsible for your own comfort and survival, every day, with no days off. Most people get to hand that to a building. Out here you are the building. I mentioned the water pump. Let me actually tell you about maintenance, because this is the part that separates the fantasy from the thing. A house has systems, and when they break, you call someone, and it’s annoying and expensive but it’s somebody else’s hands.

In a van, you are the someone. Everything in that box, I built or installed or have taken apart at least once on the side of a road. The water pump failed on me in the Nevada desert, and that turned into most of a week, because the part had to come from somewhere and I had to be somewhere with an address to receive it. The solar setup quit on me in the Pacific Northwest in November, which is the worst possible month for your power to stop, because November in the Northwest is about six usable hours of gray light a day and I was trying to run everything off almost nothing. And I’ll tell you the part that really gets you. It’s never the big dramatic failure.

It’s the small stuff, constant, forever. A cabinet latch that rattles loose every third day. A leak you chase for a month before you find where it’s actually coming in. A fridge that draws a little more power than it should, so you’re always doing quiet math about your battery. A house lets you ignore a hundred small things because they’re spread across systems somebody else maintains. A van makes every one of them yours, and they never fully stop, and that low background hum of maintenance is the actual texture of the life.

None of that was an adventure. It was a chore, in a bad location, with a deadline the weather set. And the thing is, I can do all of it now, and I even like some of it. But I like it the way you like being competent at something hard, not the way the videos pretend, where fixing the van is a charming montage set to acoustic guitar. There’s no guitar. There’s me, on my back, in a parking lot, at eleven at night, saying words I won’t repeat here to a pump that doesn’t care.

Now here’s the part I actually want to get at, because the weather and the maintenance are the easy complaints, and they’re not really the point. The thing van life content gets most wrong isn’t the hardship. It’s what it’s selling. It’s selling freedom, as a product. The whole genre runs on this idea that if you get rid of the house and the job and the stuff, you become free, and the van is the key that unlocks it. And I want to be careful here, because there’s a version of that which is true, and I’ve lived the true version.

But the product version is a lie, and it’s a specific lie, and I think it does real damage to people who buy it. Here’s the lie. The lie is that freedom is a location. That it’s a thing you arrive at by parking somewhere beautiful with no walls around you. And the reason that’s a lie is that you bring yourself to the beautiful spot. I said this last time and I’ll say it again because it’s the most important thing I know about this life.

Whatever’s going on in you gets in the van with you. If you’re anxious in an apartment, you’ll be anxious in a van, except now the anxiety has a flat tire to work with. If you’re running from something, the van is very good at moving, and it will move that thing all over the country for you without ever leaving it behind. The freedom in van life is real, but it’s smaller and quieter than what’s advertised. It’s not the freedom to feel amazing all the time in scenic places. It’s the freedom to arrange your days closer to how you actually want them.

It’s a Tuesday where I fish in the morning because the light’s right and read in the afternoon because it’s too hot to do anything else. It’s not owing five days to get two. But even that freedom has an edge to it, and I’d be lying if I skipped it. When your days are that open, nobody structures them but you, and some days you’re not up to the job. There’s no boss to resent and no commute to blame. If a day goes empty and flat, that one’s on you, and there’s nowhere to put it.

Freedom and responsibility turn out to be the same thing wearing two different coats, and the van teaches you that faster than anything I know. That’s the real version, and it’s genuinely good, and it looks like almost nothing on camera. A guy reading in a camp chair is not a thumbnail. So let me tell you the things I actually love about it, because I don’t want this to sound like I regret any of it. I don’t. I love that I wake up in a different piece of the world when I want to, and that the window over my bed frames something different every few days.

I love that my overhead is low enough that I don’t have to sell most of my waking hours to cover it. I love that the life is small, that everything I own fits in a space the size of a closet, and that I know where all of it is and why it’s there. I love the mornings most. Coffee over a fire that’s barely going, the light coming up, nobody needing anything from me for a couple of hours. But notice that none of what I love is the stuff the content sells. I don’t love it because it’s epic.

I love it because it’s quiet and it’s mine and the proportions are finally right. And that kind of love doesn’t photograph, so it doesn’t sell, so it doesn’t get made. What I wish someone had told me before I started is pretty simple. I wish someone had told me that the hard parts aren’t the adventure and the good parts aren’t the scenery. The hard parts are the logistics and the loneliness and the low grinding maintenance of keeping a small system running by yourself. And the good parts are ordinary.

A morning. A slow afternoon. A river you got to yourself because you did the boring work of getting up early and driving in the dark. I wish someone had told me that the loneliness is real, by the way, because that’s the one the content erases most completely. You can go days without a real conversation out here. I like solitude more than most people, and even I hit stretches where I’d trade a beautiful campsite for one dinner with someone who knows me.

That’s not in any video either. You can’t sell a lifestyle on I was lonely on Thursday. I’ll give you the specific version, because I’d rather be concrete than vague about it. There was a stretch one winter in the high desert where I went about nine days without a real conversation. I talked to a guy at a gas station about his dog. I said thank you to a woman at a diner.

But a conversation, the kind where someone actually knows you and you get to be a person instead of a customer, that was nine days out. And around day seven I caught myself talking to the van. Not in a cute way. Just narrating what I was doing out loud, because my own voice had started to feel unfamiliar. That’s not in anybody’s video. But it’s part of the honest ledger, and if you’re thinking about this life, you should know that column exists.

But it’s true, and it’s part of the deal, and pretending it isn’t just sets people up to feel like they’re failing at a life that’s actually going exactly the way it goes. So here’s where I’ve landed on it, after four years. The van isn’t freedom and it isn’t a trap. It’s a set of tradeoffs, like everything, and the content only shows you one side of the ledger. It shows you the ocean out the back doors and hides the parking lot. It shows you the made bed and hides the frost on the inside of the glass.

It shows you the montage and hides the pump. And I understand why, because the honest version is harder to sell. But I think you deserve the honest version, especially if you’re the kind of person actually considering this. It’s a good life. It’s just not the one in the photos. The real one is actually better in some ways and worse in others.

That’s true of most things. That’s it. That’s the whole episode. Next time I’m getting off the van and back onto the trail, because I want to make a case that’s going to annoy some people, which is the case against peak bagging. Summits are fine, and I’ve stood on plenty of them, but I think the obsession with collecting them misses almost the entire point of being out there, and I want to explain why. I’m Henry Wilder.

This has been Miles of Quiet. Go fix the thing you’ve been ignoring before it fixes your schedule for you.