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Comment by cko | Hacker News Reader

I lived in my Toyota 4Runner for about 6 months. It was definitely not glamorous - my coworkers thought I was crazy. I parked outside of work. At night I would pee in a bottle. Sometimes the bottle would spill. I had to drive everywhere - to the library for WiFi, to the gym for showers, to the basketball court for exercise.

I think it takes a certain personality to be able to do this (without the benefit of being beautiful and Instagram sensations). Me, I've always wanted to try. I was saving an additional 400 a month - for a total of 10k per month in savings. So the reason was definitely not financial. After a while it got old, especially heat waves where I woke up in a sweat and had to turn on the AC for ten minutes to air out the car.

The faint smell of piss and 90 percent humidity. Bet there's no hash tag for that.

Oh yeah, I hate driving and think travel is overrated.

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Did you work remotely while living in a van? Or did you still work in an office? It sounds like you did the latter, which sounds miserable. I think you would've had a different experience if you had used your van to travel.

I've been living in my pickup truck for about a year while rock climbing, skiing, hiking, and not working. A pickup is not a van, and definitely makes things like cooking or just hanging out less enjoyable. Regardless of the space constraints, the biggest thing is the loneliness of the vagabond lifestyle. I actually kind of miss my coworkers. Most connections are ephemeral, like climbing with someone for a day before they take off to LA or Oregon. There's also some stress with finding places to park at night. You're almost always staying somewhere where you shouldn't quite be. I've spent some entire days just surfing around on the internet, not motivated to really go out and adventure. I'd agree with this blogpost https://theinspiredclimber.com/2014/05/14/romancing-the-dirt..., "don’t expect going on the road alone to fill the void in your life."

Like the parent commenter, I too have spilled my pee bottle in my living compartment.

It would have been way different for sure. If only I enjoyed travel.

So you weren't doing it for money and you don't like travel, so what was the point? Why do something that doesn't make you happy?

We all think we know what makes us happy. So we try things and we find out that it doesn't work... The sad truth of it all is that not only do we not know what makes us happy, biologically speaking, there is no evolutionary advantage for a creature who reaches the nirvana of eternal satisfaction.

We are biologically built to forever embark on a fruitless quest for happiness, and while we can be happy at certain times, we'll never be able to reach that state of complete satisfaction that we spend our entire lives searching for...

As crimsonalucard stated, it was on one hand something I've always wanted to try out. Just living on the barest essentials and seeing how far I could take it. Also I don't have any people I consider close family in my life, so in case I lose my job and the economy tanks, I can feel secure that at least I can survive.

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