Vanlife is freedom! Freedom from responsibilities, freedom from work, freedom from the drudgery of modern life - emails, meetings, offices, concrete jungles. Freedom from decisions and mental exhaustion. Well... maybe not. 

I was talking to a fellow climber the other day who has taken some time off from her stressful normal life to escape to Spain and just climb for a few months. We spoke about how even an apparently dramatic life change doesn't automatically fix everything. There are always issues to deal with in life, escaping to another country doesn't magically remove them, at best it replaces the old stresses with new ones. It's the same with vanlife.

Those “living the dream” Instagram moments parked next to mountain lakes on a picture perfect day do occasionally happen. But vanlife is still real life. I still work, deal with emails, have online meetings. Granted I don’t go into an office or have a house to maintain but vanlife does bring its own unique challenges which you may not even consider if you haven’t tried it yourself.

First is the constant question of ‘where do I sleep tonight?’ and all the implications that decision might have. I personally don’t like staying in the same spot for more than one night at a time, temporary stopovers tend to be tolerated a lot more than permanent encampments, which means I have to move on every day, sometimes back to an old spot and sometimes on to find somewhere new. Always with multiple considerations - do I need to have good internet tomorrow, is there a toilet nearby, is it flat enough, will it be busy overnight, am I going to find myself in the middle of a school run in the morning. 

Dealing with electrical issues

Oh look, something broke!

Food - you don’t have as much storage as a house so shopping is much more regular than once a week. If you want to be genuinely off grid for a week or longer then that can take serious planning
LPG - I have no indicator for my LPG bottles so guessing when they are nearly empty is a challenge, getting it wrong and running out in the middle of making dinner is very inconvenient! It doesn’t help that UK garages appear to have a phobia of refillable LPG bottles so finding one you can refill at might involve a long drive!
Water - My aging motorhome has an essentially useless water level indicator, so I just fill up weekly, again the UK is not brilliant in this regard so this may involve finding a campsite or driving an hour or more to a tap
Laundry - Not really a hardship at home is it? Chuck stuff in the machine, then hang it up or chuck it in another machine. Easy. But with vanlife its another thing that needs planning - finding a decent functional laundrette with parking nearby isn’t always simple. On more than one occasion I’ve found and used a washing machine only to discover that the drier doesn’t work and had to drive around town looking for a working one.
Waste, bins etc - Another thing you don’t really have to think about in a normal house, all this is just taken care of for you. At most you have to chuck the recycling and rubbish outside in the correct containers. Whereas in a van you’re constantly aware of how full your various types of waste containers are and worrying about where you can empty them, finding recycling points in the UK is becoming more and more impossible.
Solar/electric - I run everything on 12v and have 2 leisure batteries with a couple of solar panels on the roof. During summer that's just about ok, in winter in the UK it is a real struggle which means it's yet another thing to consider when I'm planning my next few days - do I need to get on hookup or drive for hours to get some power into those batteries?
Van problems - Constant minor issues that come with driving your house around the country - screws shaking loose, hinges giving up, electrical gremlins, mysterious leaks. And then the bigger stuff: services, MOTs, mechanical repairs that need a proper garage. Which would be fine except my vehicle is also my home. How would you feel if you were locked out of your home every time your car went into the garage?

Taken one at a time these are not difficult things to manage, but being constantly aware of all these factors, prioritising and dealing with them as and when you can and just keeping everything in balance can be surprisingly mentally tiring. Then of course you still have to fit in work, and travel - which is kinda the main point of vanlife! Sometimes the only option is to just find a nice campsite for a few days where you can get everything topped up, emptied out, cleaned, washed and ready to go again.

So vanlife is not a stress free life, probably very few lifestyles truly are. But it is a different form of stress, there is significantly less of the existential dread of wasting your life chasing money/promotion/status and a lot more that feels real - where do I sleep, where can I get water, how do I repair the latest van problem. Vanlife stress is attached to actual tangible things that can be dealt with, normal life stresses for me were either great big things - having a mortgage you have to spend 30 years paying off, running a business and needing to constantly keep the revenue flowing to pay staff, or more abstract existential angst which just sits permanently in the background, nagging away at your brain, asking if this is really what life is for.

For me the vanlife stresses are much easier to deal with, for others who may actually enjoy climbing that corporate ladder, aiming for a bigger house, newer car, vanlife probably sounds awful. It’s certainly not for everyone. Personally I enjoy feeling more connected to the real world, which incidentally is not the “real world” that business people always talk about which seems to just be about money, businesses and other made up crap. I wake up when I'm woken by whatever's going on around me, or by the sunlight, not by an alarm. I go outside when the weather's nice and stay in and work when it's shit. I’m more aware of the seasons - the short winter days with the sun barely peeking above the buildings and the long summer days with unlimited solar power!

Along with the practical benefits, doing vanlife for the past 5 years and  seeing how those stresses have shifted has proved to me that change is possible. That you don't have to just “stick it out” if life doesn't feel right, you can change it. That doesn't mean finding a stress free life where every day plays out idyllically like one long Instagram feed. It just means recognising which stresses you can handle and finding a life that suits you. For me, right now that's vanlife. But it may not be in future and that's ok.