I did this for almost two years. I got really lonely and ended up glued to social media because I was too shy to talk to people in the random mountain towns I was staying. I also found living around cars all the time somewhat maddening. Imagine your background noise everyday being shopping carts and car door lock chirps. Usually the intent of #vanlife is spending more time in nature, oddly living in a car embeds you far more in car culture, streets, gas stations. There was always some latent anxiety about being somewhere you're not quite supposed to be, since living in your car is basically illegal. Novelty wore off after a few months, today I'm glad to live in an apartment. I get to hike/ski/climb almost every weekend, and come home to a warm, well-lit place with a couch and shower.
Honestly, if you want to solo-travel and socialize, go hitchhike.
It's a crash-course in making contact with strangers, dealing with rejection, knowing how to let go and enjoy the moment and maintaining a positive attitude (especially when you wait for a ride for hours in shitty weather), how to ask for help without being obnoxious, and having faith in the goodness of humanity as a whole.
It's not for everyone, but it definitely was both therapeutic and educational for me, and I still love it as a guy in his thirties.
I never thought of this before, but it kind of makes sense that the van thing isolates whereas the hitchhiking makes friends. One is fundamentally based on independence and solving things on your own. The other is fundamentally based on people acknowledging each other and helping each other out.
Agreed. I think it's worth emphasizing here that it builds up confidence in a very healthy way.
Growing up I was very insecure and (was) thought that building up confidence only had to do with getting a higher self-esteem. And sure, having a low self-esteem is bad for you health. But most ways of trying to improve it backfire. For example, if you think of things you're great at it makes you dependent on feeling that you're great at those things and then that can become a source of insecurity.
Meanwhile, learning to talk to strangers while hitchhiking is all about getting over yourself. A lot of the anxiety comes from the anticipation of being rejected making you feel horrible as if you were and imagining the worst possible ways it could make you feel. Basically, a normally healthy feedback loop to weigh options has become totally unbalanced and makes you suffer for something that neither happened nor has to happen.
More importantly, it suggests you're hyper-focused on yourself and on how others see you. And the irony here is: most people don't, and that's perfectly fine. Or as Melissa Dahl summarized in a title of an Aeon essay[0] about this: "you're simply not that big of a deal, now isn't that a relief?"
I'm sure most of us know this rationally, but feeling it emotionally is a different thing altogether. Well, hitchhiking is a great way to train that world-view. It was for me, at least.
It is not just US, also in Europe it seems like the hitchhiking is dead. 15 years ago when I was criss crossing Europe many times hitchhiking, sleeping in hostels but usually just in the ditch next to the road or field nearby. I used to meet tons of hitchhikers almost anywhere you go.
Today I am not hitchhiking anymore, but I am happy to give a ride to anybody flagging finger. For past three years that happens only once and even those two people were doing it just because of some hitchhiking competition.
Well, "only" is an exaggeration but yeah, racist stereotypes do work against you.
I'm half-Asian, which I guess is "white enough" to fly under most of the (conscious and subconscious) racist radars out there. OTOH I can get quite a tan and I used to grow a beard years before it was trendy to do so. Pretty much right after 9/11 actually. The Islamophobic associations were definitely real.
I figured out a cheat mode though: wear thick rimmed glasses[0]. I used cheap plastic +.25 reading glasses so they didn't look fake but didn't give me a headache either. It's totally stupid but it made a huge difference. And this was years before the famouse Curb Your Enthusiasm bit[1], which clearly is an example of "it's funny (and sad) because it's true".
I agree that hitchhiking makes socializing automatic. It also taught me a lot in terms of dealing with chaos and constant uncertainty. But I had the same realization about the constant noise of living in the automobile civilization all the time. You're always exposed to the risks of traffic and the infrastructure is simply not friendly.
Well stated. My journey only last 6 months because of the constant anxiety that comes from not having a stable parking situation. You think it's going to give you freedom but it ends up being your prison
To me half a year is a long time, and for an experiment it certainly is. You should cross the word "only" from your mind, it's no competition. Freedom can also mean to have stable home, relationship, work.
