When is a vanlife blog not a vanlife blog?
Hi and welcome! First up this is not really a travel blog - I don’t have the discipline or the desire to write consistently every few days about where I’ve been and what I’ve done. Aside from anything else a lot of the time it’s really not that interesting. Living in a van with a cat is often just normal life really. You work, sleep, eat, the same as everyone else. Just in a smaller space. I’ve read enough vanlife blogs and seen enough vanlife youTube channels to know there’s more than enough of that sort of content out there already anyway. The world doesn’t need another description of emptying a compost toilet or dealing with minor mechanical issues like they’re the end of the world, and it definitely doesn’t need any more clickbaity thumbnails with ‘Is this the end of vanlife’ scrawled over a distraught face.
Anyway that's enough about what it's not. What it hopefully is, is a mostly connected, mostly thoughtful collection of posts about ‘vanlife moments’ and things that are currently fascinating me, mostly around politics and economics. The moments are the bits of the journey that are still in my mind weeks or even months later, floating around and linking up with other thoughts to eventually form either a coherent, interesting, possibly insightful post, or a rambling mess of word soup. The politics & economics will predominantly focus on degrowth economics, modern monetary theory and discussion of whether capitalism is remotely suited to preventing environmental catastrophe (spoiler: no).
I am not an expert in any of those fields (other than vanlife, which I've been doing for around 6 years so I guess I can claim a moderate level of expertise in sleeping in random car parks). I am simply an interested observer, with a little bit of time and in some ways a little bit of distance from the rat race and daily grind most people face which I hope gives me a slightly different perspective. It's much easier to see the shape of a thing when you're not trapped in the middle of it after all.
