Terrible as I only find joy in a few things and the van life makes almost all of them impossible. I guess that’s the difference between choosing the van life, and the van life choosing you.
What is life worth if you cannot do what is most important to you?
Absolutely nothing. Less then nothing. Negative Nothing (sweet band name)
I move around every 4 months in the US. I stay in long-term Airbnbs (min 1 month stay). I work remote; so, the issue I mostly deal with is my working setup. No standing desk, comfortable chair, multi-monitor setup (using portable external monitor), etc.
Otherwise, the surroundings of the place I stay at is always a gamble. You never know if its a loud or safe neighborhood just by looking at the posting or street view on google maps. Sometimes there could be construction going on next door.
Eating around and exploring the country is the best part.
This is the way
Hardest thing for me has been finding actual remote work. Look on any job board these days and everyone’s claiming “remote*” when they’re nothing of the sort.
Maybe you should claim things are true, knowing they are false, when you apply.
I’m not opposed to that, but if they expect me to be at a physical location at any point, I’m SOL.
I spent about 4 years traveling the world working remotely, as a digital nomad you might say. Before the name was popular
Put things I didn’t want to throw away into long-term storage. Had a laptop. Flew from place to place. The most important thing was securing a good internet connection in a place. If I couldn’t get a good connection move on to another place, or back to a known good place.
Libraries, coffee shops, hotels, co-working spaces, all viable options for internet requirements.
Mail digitized through a mailbox service, and emailed to me.
Google voice for an international phone number that just needed internet connection
The day to day living was pretty cool. You could stay in a place as long as you want, you could leave as quick as you want. Finding people was fun. Sometimes you weren’t sure about where you would be, could you book the hotel for more time? If you couldn’t you had to find the next place. So you always had a plan of where you are, and where you want to go next.
I move every 2 weeks in an RV. So I roughly wake up in 26 different places over the year.
Internet is rough. But has gotten better over the years since I started.
I could imagine that socially it might be difficult for some.
But largely my routine is similar to if I were in a house/apartment:
Weekdays: work, cook/eat, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep. Weekends: groceries, cook/eat, chores/maintenance, relocate if needed, walk/hike/explore, games, sleep.
Oh - I usually remind people they’re giving up a dishwasher and laundry machines unless they’re going pretty big on their RV purchase.
Recently I’ve been parking during the summer and flying to different countries. It’s more or less the same - solid internet is a challenge and you get to work on a potential language barrier.
If I ever go that route, you bet I’m getting a dishwasher put in at the very least. I know my limits, haha.
StarLink has been a game changer for me. Expensive as frick but so worth not having to find cell towers or monitor data caps anymore.
Verizon wouldn’t sell anything larger than a 15gb plan - glad those days of juggling SIM cards are past.
But yeah - Starlink has helped a lot. I still have 3 big cell prover SIM cards and modems/router for redundancy.
How do you make income if you don’t mind?
Software Engineer
This is Lemmy, they didn’t even really have to ask.
How do you deal with permanent addresses? I know like some jobs want you to have a permanent address and bank accounts want you to have a permanent address.
I’d consider getting a really cheap, small chunk of rural land and boondocking there sometimes (so nobody can claim it’s not actually a residence of yours).
My residence is registered at my parents house. I’m fortunate for that – not sure what I’ll do when they pass.
The companies I work for are typically smaller - my bosses and teams usually know I’m a bit of a vagrant. When I get acquired by larger companies I’m a little more tight lipped and vigilant with VPN use.
There are mailbox services, you get a permanent address, they can email you your mail.
Banks are more sticky, they don’t just want a permanent address, they want your place of residence. If you’re always on the move, you can have an intended place of residence… They may not accept the commercial mailbox service addresses, and in that case most people use a friend or a relative as their official banking location, but use the mailbox service for all of the mail. I live here, but I get mail there. That works for most people
out of interest, whats the deal with banks needing to know where you sleep at night?
is it a serfdom thing?
or is it only in the case of eg. that being the place you hold a mortgage with them on?
Okay, that’s good to know. Until we can ditch the entire banking system for crypto wallets on our phone, that bank account issue is going to be a bit of a noose around people’s necks.
As long as it’s one of the actually efficient cryptos.
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