Confessions of a Van Dweller, Act 1

Any poor soul who has been following along knows that I'm in my early 30's. They  also know that I abandoned a successful career at the age of 28 to attend graduate school. They may also know that I left a luxury townhome in a nice community along Colorado's highly-coveted Front Range to get my master's degree and to save money by living more minimally while still young and single. Why would anyone in their right mind do such a thing? One answer might be very surprising. 

When I abandoned my old life, I was looking to find knowledge and to reset my career with more education in my line of work. I was looking to better myself and to set a new career potential for myself with more education. My hypothesis was that I would start about where I left off once I finished school and would then have fewer impenetrable ceilings above me preventing my ascent into even better jobs. 

A dirty secret is that I don't really care for "jobs" -- a place you go to do tasks for someone else's vision for money so you can eat food, have a roof over your head, and drive a car. Jobs, in the rawest form don't interest me. But I don't have a choice, really. I wasn't born into money, so my post-child life has been largely dominated by... jobs.

In contemplating jobs, I realized that when you look at the system of the American life, we work jobs to pay off debts that we had no real choice in taking on, and the debt becomes the motivation to keep working. Hobson's Choice is where you are offered two options and one option isn't viable at all, meaning that you have been offered only one choice. For example, you can either choose to work and pay off the debt, or you can be homeless and/or die. Yikes. 

This line of thinking permeated my 20's. I realized that the house I lived in made it so I had no chance of escaping debt. Rent prices made me realize that rents are just unpayable debts. Then I realized that I couldn't bear to continue the organismic lifecycle of humanity by bringing another me into the world. I couldn't bring myself to consider bringing a new consciousness into a system where we are all enslaved by default of our existence. 

Like a captive panda, I couldn't bear the thought of having kids. Other panda's might handle the system better -- of course they are more successful. But then I realized that I could establish myself in this system even better, but it would require extreme action. I realized that if I could shift my financial system and potential, maybe I could live in a stable system where I did not feel enslaved by debt. 

The confession is that one of my reasons for abandoing my old life to live in an RV is so I could potentially have a family someday. Having a family is a relatively easy task, but since I can't seem to ignore debt and especially of the three-decade variety, I wanted to have a family on terms where I wasn't a slave to debt and neither were they.

It may be counterintuitive that one would live in an RV in order to eventually have a family. And it's not that I want a family or just any family; I want to have a family where I am not living day to day under complete financial oppression and having to work so much that I can't be there for my imaginary kids and imaginary wife. I set out to abandon everything and reset my system so I could provide something better, safer, and more complete. I was seeking liberation from captivity.