Everything I owned fit in a Nissan Altima.
Not in a philosophical way. In a literal way. Clothes, a few bags, toiletries, some electronics, and whatever else I’d decided was worth the space. That was the inventory. If you’d stolen the car you’d have gotten all of it.
I wasn’t doing an experiment in minimalism. Van life wasn’t a genre yet, and I wasn’t trying to be an influencer. I had closed my business, gone through bankruptcy, and had nothing holding me to any particular address. No apartment. No employees. No plan.
So I put what was left into the car and drove west.
That was June 2022. I came back to Texas the following April.
How I ended up there
The plan, to the extent there was one, was to work seasonal jobs, keep moving, save a little, and figure out what came next.
I want to be straight about the decision, because there’s a version of this story where I make it sound like a bold lifestyle choice. It was partly a choice and partly the math. I could have rented something between jobs. I could have paid for hotels. But I’d just come out of a bankruptcy, and every dollar I didn’t spend on a place to sleep bought me more time to figure out what I was doing with my life.
The car was already there. It was reliable. It went wherever I pointed it. And it meant I never had to commit to anything.
No lease to break. No furniture to move. No apartment sitting empty three states away collecting rent while I wasn’t in it. My entire life moved when I moved, and that turned out to be worth more than a bedroom.
Yellowstone
I spent that summer working as a server at the Lake Yellowstone Hotel.
There were elk outside my window. That is not a figure of speech and it never stopped being ridiculous. I’d get up for a shift and there would be an animal the size of a horse standing forty feet away, chewing, deeply unbothered by my existence.
Lake Yellowstone was a five minute drive. Five minutes. I have spent longer than that sitting at a light on 1960.
The best parts weren’t the scenery, though. They were the nights. You finish a dinner shift at some hour that qualifies as late, you’re wired the way you always are after service, and instead of going to bed a group of you decides to hike up a mountain in the dark. Nobody planned it. Somebody suggested it and everybody said yes, because when you’re all seasonal workers a thousand miles from your actual life, the answer to most things is yes.
That was the best summer of my life. I’m aware of how that sounds coming from a guy who had just lost a business.
Alta
For winter I took a serving job at a ski lodge in Alta, Utah.
I picked, by pure accident, the single snowiest season in the recorded history of the place. Alta got 903 inches that year. It broke a record from 1981 by more than twelve feet. Snow piled up so fast and so relentlessly that they’d close the canyon road and we simply could not leave the lodge. You’d wake up, look outside, and the world would be gone.
I am a Texas country boy. I showed up not knowing how to put skis on. Somebody had to explain the boots to me.
By the end of the season I was skiing blacks.
I don’t say that to brag, or actually, fine, I say it partly to brag. I say it because it was quite literally a whole new world. I grew up somewhere flat and hot. Then I spent four months living inside a snow globe with 75 feet of powder and a mountain outside the door, and I got good at something I’d never once considered doing.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about going somewhere completely different. You don’t just see a new place. You find out you’re a slightly different person than you thought.
The parts that sucked
I don’t want to romanticize the logistics, because the logistics were the actual cost.
Hot nights where sleeping was miserable and I’d lie there doing math on how many hours until sunrise. Cold mornings where getting out of the car was the worst available option. Finding somewhere decent to park was never automatic. Privacy didn’t exist. Showers and bathrooms required real planning, every day, forever.
There was a permanent list of questions running in the back of my head. Where am I sleeping tonight. Where can I shower. Where can I park without someone knocking on the window. Where do I go for a few hours when I don’t want to sit in a car.
Those sound small. They are not small when you have no home base. They’re the entire logistical substrate of your day and you’re re-solving them constantly, which is exhausting in a way that’s hard to explain to someone who has a front door.
And then there were the other nights
Here’s the part that probably sounds strange.
Some of the nights I slept in that car were the best nights of my life.
I remember one specifically. BLM land, somewhere in Colorado, or maybe Arizona, I genuinely can’t tell you which anymore. No one around for miles in any direction. Not a house, not a road noise, not another set of headlights.
The stars were so bright it felt like a mistake, like I’d been given access to something I hadn’t paid for. And the quiet was total. Not city quiet, where the sound just drops below a certain threshold. Actual silence, the kind where you can hear yourself.
I had nowhere to be. Nobody knew where I was. Nothing in my life required me to be anywhere the next day, and everything I owned was within arm’s reach.
I don’t know how to describe that feeling except to say that it’s unparalleled, and I’ve been chasing it ever since.
Nice versus necessary
Before that year, I thought about possessions in terms of what they added. A better apartment beats a worse one. More clothes means more options. More stuff means more comfort. Obvious.
Living in a car inverts the question.
You stop asking what would be nice to have and start asking what you actually need, because every single thing you acquire has to earn physical space. Buy something and you have to decide what it displaces.
You can talk yourself into almost anything being necessary when you have somewhere to put it. Take away the somewhere and the argument collapses in about four seconds.
A lot of things are nice. Very few are necessary. That distinction stuck.
The strangest part was how normal it got
At first I was aware of it constantly. Where am I sleeping, will anyone notice, do I look like a guy who lives in his car.
Then it stopped being a thing. I’d wake up, get coffee, get ready, go to work. There was no persistent sense of living an alternative lifestyle. It was just Tuesday.
And once it was normal, I noticed what I wasn’t doing.
I wasn’t cataloguing what I didn’t have. I was thinking about where I was going next, what I wanted to see, which trail, which town, which job after this one. Owning almost nothing wasn’t subtracting from my life. It was leaving room.
What it cost me
My fixed expenses were close to nothing. No rent, no utilities. Some months housing came with the job. When it didn’t, it came with the car.
That meant I didn’t need to earn much, and when you don’t need much, you don’t have to work much just to keep existing. That’s not wealth. I was not wealthy. I just didn’t require money, and those are two entirely different conditions that get confused constantly.
I’ve written a whole piece about what that idea did to how I think about income, so I won’t run it again here. The short version: you can buy freedom by making more, or you can buy it by needing less, and only one of those is available to you starting today.
I learned it on BLM land, not from a book.
I didn’t want to do it forever
The experience did not convince me to spend my life sleeping in an Altima. If anything it did the opposite.
I wanted a real bed. My own bathroom. Somewhere comfortable to work. Privacy. The ability to leave my things somewhere and not think about them.
But the lesson wasn’t that comfort is the enemy and I should live out of a duffel bag permanently. I’m not interested in minimalism as a competition. The lesson was narrower and more useful.
Comfort and freedom are not the same thing, and sometimes they’re in direct conflict.
A bigger place costs more money. More possessions need more space. More space costs more money. More money usually means more work. More work means less time. Every upgrade quietly bills you in a currency that isn’t dollars.
Once you’ve lived at the other end of that, you can’t unsee it.
What I kept
I stopped living in my car in April 2023. I still like nice things. I still want a comfortable place to live. I still want to make money.
What I kept was a reference point.
I know what it feels like to own almost nothing. I know what it feels like to have no fixed expenses. I know what it feels like to wake up with no particular reason to be in the state I’m in. And I know I was fine. Not surviving. Fine.
That’s unusually valuable information to have about yourself, because afterward it’s very hard to be convinced you need everything you’re told you need. Someone can make the pitch, and part of your brain just says: I’ve run that test.
I’ll tell you the honest ending, though.
I miss that year every single day.
Not the parking lots and not the showers. I miss waking up in a place I chose that morning. I miss being twenty minutes from something I’d never seen. I miss the version of my life where the answer to almost everything was yes, because there was nothing in the way.
At the time I thought I was just getting through a bad stretch. Looking back, it was the freest I have ever been, and I spent the next three years slowly rebuilding all the obligations I’d been lucky enough to lose.
That’s the part I’m trying to fix.
On February 21 I’m leaving the United States to see whether I can get that year back on purpose. I’m publishing the numbers every month. Subscribe if you want to watch.