I'll have to swing down to the river and give him a Hubski sticker for the bumper of that van. I live right around the corner.
Errr. I think I live on roughly $103 a week, or at least somewhere in the neighborhood. There are many other ways to be frugal than the most obvious. And I mean, it's interesting as far as a life experience, but the writer comes off as definitely smart enough to get scholarships and live frugally the normal way. All that effort he's put into creating his van lifestyle could just as easily have been put into finding obscure scholarships/college jobs that pay room and board. It's easy as hell to do. EDIT: not knocking the article, it's an awesome approach. Just not in my opinion anywhere near the best one.
Yeah, but when the article features lines like: and not to mention, it seems like dude was dead set on not doing the conventional thing. The writer also makes it seem like he eschewed human contact too, which I don't think is particularly healthy, but whatever. He wrote a book, which someone published, which is good although it does kind of brand him as one of those gimmick guys.To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure.
Living on the cheap wasn’t merely a way to save money and stave off debt; I wanted to live adventurously. I wanted to test my limits. I wanted to find the line between my wants and my needs. I wanted, as Thoreau put it, “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”
I refused to join those ranks. I became a deserter, an eccentric, an outsider. At Duke, I felt like an ascetic in the midst of wealth, a heretic in the Church of the Consumer. I had to hide.