Van life is the best life. I’ve written a good bit about Foster Huntington, a modern Jack Kerouac who quit his stupid corporate advertising job in Manhattan to travel around in a van and build insane treehouses in the Pacific Northwest. Foster is the man who started the nomadic #VanLife trend on Instagram, where hundreds — if not thousands — of people have documented a life of wanderlust and adventure roaming around America in VW Vanagons.
Foster may be the “face” of #vanlife in America, but there are plenty of people like him out ther.e It’s fascinating to me that it’s become such a “trend” thanks to Instagram. As BroBible’s token hippie scum, I’ve known plenty of granola-types living in the woods like this since 2003. You can run into people like this at pretty much any state or national forest parking lot or trailhead in Colorado or California or Oregon or upper New York or Vermont. They’re everywhere. And not all of them do it because of a romantic notion for wanderlust — some just want to do their own thing in the woods. Some just don’t give a fuck about having a life trapped in that web of beepers and Zenith televisions and Walkmens and discmens and floppy discs and zip drives, laser discs, answering machines and Nintendo Power Glove. Whatever makes you complete.
The Atlantic did a documentary about a few people actively involved in the Van Life. If you’ve ever wanted to just get away from it all and have an adventure, it will make you want to quit your job and get out there on the open road. OR it will make you want to continue in your lucrative but soul-sucking career and curl into a ball on your $3000 couch from West Elm with a bag of cheese curls while watching Friday Night Lights re-runs for the 10th time on Netflix.
Your call.