"strange, throatless prosperity"

Mitchell Johnson on how his mom adopted the van life, and the larger cultural picture around Nomadland:

"This year, people like my mom are in the national spotlight as the community at the center of Nomadland, the film that won the Golden Lion at last year’s Venice Film Festival, won the Golden Globe for best drama, and heads into the Oscars as a favorite for Best Picture. Nomadland takes place a decade ago, on the heels of the recession in 2011. When my mom started living in her RV, the decline had not ended in any meaningful sense, but the doom of the early years had given way to a strange, throatless prosperity. In this atmosphere, rootlessness could be viewed not as a predicament but an opportunity. It was the era of Eat Pray Love, Wild, and Tiny House Hunters. On social media, the young and online catalogued the adventures of houselessness-by-choice under the hashtag #vanlife. The RV (or teardrop trailer, or sprinter van) became a symbol of inspiration, and a source of ad revenue. Women in wide-brimmed hats and linen shirts sold detox water or bluetooth speakers from the back of their Volkswagen buses, but the real product, of course, was the lifestyle. Living in a van represented a new, glamorous ideal, unburdened from homeownership and a steady job — unmoored, even, from the physical world itself. If owning a home was no longer possible, there was endless space on Instagram. 

In lesser-known corners of the internet, a different set of people were discussing van life, too. Traffic to websites like CheapRVLiving.com boomed as mostly older Americans were planning their exits. A popular Yahoo message board titled 'Live In Your Van 2' doubled its membership in the years after the recession, growing to over eight thousand people. Reddit’s r/vandwellers forum started in 2010 and quickly gained tens of thousands of followers. (Today, it has 1.2 million.) After the recession, sales of vans, RVs, and trailers skyrocketed as more people moved into them full-time. These were the nomads."

I haven't seen the movie, but I've been meaning to read the book.

There's just so much to talk about here -- the fact that so many people of many ages can never afford to buy a house, the American dream of constant mobility and freedom, and our love affairs with cars.

I'll admit that I do watch some #vanlife on YouTube (some of it is decent, seriously).  I also enjoy minimalist survival videos, even though my desire to actually go out camping is less than zero.

Lots to stew on.  Having a house is nice but Americans really tend to overestimate how much house (or lawn, or yard) they actually need.

I'll leave it at that for now.