Car Life

For three years in a row I've packed myself into my car^car and taken off accross the US to attend various conferences / conventions^cons over several months. It's pretty easy to call this a road trip, but there's an important caveat to it; I am in fact living in my car for the entire duration.

I don't take time off work for this, I'm quite privileged to be able to work fully remote. I have Starlink^starlink for internet, shower at Planet Fitness^pf, sleep on an inflatable mattress with the seats folded flat (I have a camping kit^fruble which gives me more storage), I even have an induction stove that I plug into a power bank to cook with (which is in-turn plugged into the car's low voltage system to recharge itself).

Please do not mistake the use of multiple Musk technologies as an endorsement of the individual.

I initially did this trip to get some emotional (and I suppose physical) disatance from personal issues I was having at the time. But I loved it so much that I've done it every year since (and I plan to continue!). I've met so many people, and seeing the country like this is such a great experience. Not to mention sleeping in a parking garage is radically cheaper than getting a hotel for a conference, heh...

I've repeatedly heard from people that being alone for extended periods of time would drive them crazy; I don't have this problem, in fact as I've gotten older I increasingly have found that time to myself is incredibly important to me. This, combined with a lifelong dream of "a house on wheels"^quote, has made this lifestyle a really good fit for me. This is so much the case that I've started to consider living in my car full-time; well, in a vehicle, main contender right now is The Grounded^grounded.

The barrier to jumping into that lifestyle is two fold right now: financial, and... how do I put it... "stuff".

The first is pretty straightforward; I bought my car^car in 2022 for this trip, and after doing it three years in a row I'm at *checks odometer* 97k miles. Putting nearly 100k miles on a car in three years makes it pretty easy to out-pace your loan in terms of depreciation vs equity, combined with the fact that the new cost of my vehicle has actually dropped since my purchase, and the result is the current resale value of my car is ~half of what I have left on the loan; thus the idea of selling it to buy a different vehicle isn't particularly appealing.

The second is a bit more complicated; I have a lot of stuff.

Like, not that much stuff. But for someone who wants to / would live in a vehicle; I have a lot of stuff. The normal sort of "stuff" accumulation that happens in life. As in, more than I'd like, but not a ton of stuff if I were to live in a reasonably sized appartment.

I have ADD, and a normal part of that is jumping around between hobbies, committing hard, but only for very short periods of time before moving on to something new. This means I have a smattering of equipment / toys; microelectronics, LoRA chips, soldering equipment, smart home sensors, switches, spare computer parts, unused cable management tools, a disused 3d printer (gave that to my brother now!), electric screwdrivers (plural), and just like way too many miscellaneous cables and dongles / adapters... You get the idea.

Living in a vehicle means way less space. So I have to get rid of a ton of stuff. I actually enjoy this constraint, and living away from all my stuff for significant chunks of the year, several years in a row, has made recognizing what I actually use and need much easier (though not easy).

I hope to use this objective as a forcing function to dramatically slim down my life; regardless of if the grand plan actually moves forward or not.