Full transcription:
Chris: So, Aaron, we've been really interested in talking to you, as a lot of people know, at this stage, the podcast is about using design skills to have people hack and think about and experiment, essentially with their own lives. We're really curious to talk to people that are actually doing something versus just saying they're going to do something or dreaming they're going to do something. What are you doing that is might be perceived as a little unusual?
Aaron: Yeah, absolutely. So what I'm doing is I moved into a van about two months ago. It seems pretty extreme, you know, I guess maybe if it's the first time you hear of somebody doing that, but there's actually a small community of people that have been doing this for a while, and I've been blogging about it. And it's and it's through choice, you know, it's through a purposeful designed choice around what's important to me what my values are, and where I want to go and be in life.
Chris: So you say that very kind of off the cuff nonchalantly, and I think a lot of people think what the hell? Move into a van? You've chosen to do this, you're not in a position where you're forced to do this. I'm curious, you can just share with us what prompted this and maybe the process that you went through.
Aaron: So it's interesting, there was activation energy that prompted me to actually go through with it and do something about, you know, the living situation and moving into a van. But there were a lot of values that so it kind of built up overtime over the years that led me to thinking that this was the right choice. So the activation energy, that's maybe the simplest thing. I lived in a very beautiful apartment in San Francisco with a view of the ocean, beautiful, expansive view of the Pacific Ocean. In the evening, you know, I'd opened up my bedroom window and could just listen to the waves very calming, you know, beautiful place to live, I was there for about 10 years. And then you know, through those years, like a few roommates have come and gone and they were kind of recent set of roommates that have moved in had a very different philosophy about life, and what's important, and we didn't see eye to eye and the place became less of a home to me, after that. Became this place, I was going to just kind of sleep and I just go straight to my room and close the door. And that led to the activation or did make a change. And after having been there for so long, I was kind of ready to, you know, move out and explore. But there were a lot of values that I had that led me to choosing the direction and the direction was something where I could be independent, and could control the environment that I'm in and could design and actively, like work on that environment. I had always like building things and like, have kind of an artistic side. So I had started getting into discovering this thing about like tiny houses like it was this new idea to me and the idea that you could build something that's so small and design it how you want it. And then you know, it's pretty inexpensive to do that. And so then a few years, you could design something completely different and have a whole new living environment. So that was very attractive to me.
Tracy: So you mentioned that you had this moment with your roommates and you're considering new options. Could you talk us through a little bit of your thought process and how you got to the point where choosing to live in a van became the most vibrant option for you?
Aaron: Oh, yeah, that's great. A few years back, I had been exposed to a colleague that had had a houseboat and I thought that was really fascinating that you could live in an environment that wasn't a house. That kind of opened up the I think realm of possibility for me that there are other living situations out there. From that I did all this research on what like living on a boat would be like.
Tracy: What kind of research were you actually doing?
Aaron: First of all cost, and then just what daily life would be like, I found all these blogs of people that lived on sailboats and they wrote about it. And they talked about the things that they had to deal with day to day. And that quickly made me realize it wasn't for me. And the reason for that was that I've never been comfortable over deepwater, I've tried to, you know, handle that by like taking swimming classes and things like that. But that made me realize that like living on a boat itself may not be the right environment. But that opened up the thought that like there are these other places where you can live.
Tracy: One of the things that we talked about at the beginning of how you design your life or start designing your life is to immerse yourself in the types of things that you think you might be interested in. And it's interesting that for you, you know, you're attracted to your friend’s lifestyle, but that you were able to see pretty quickly what didn't work for you and what it did was gave you a whole new set of options to choose from that you wouldn't have had if you hadn't have had that sailboat research experience.
Aaron: And it helped plant the seed. This was years before I was at the point where I felt like I had to make a change and I kind of eventually put it on the back burner it was it looked like it was a little too expensive to get into like buying a boat is pretty expensive. And then maintaining is very expensive. So I wanted to set that aside maybe through that path later. What ended up happening is so I've had this job at this company for several years and I had this experience where after about five years, they give you this paid leave and you can take a month off. And on that sabbatical, I sat down and started thinking about what is important to me and kind of starting to evaluate These things that I'd always wanted to do, but had always had been on the back burner for a long time. One of the things I wanted to learn about was retirement, I knew that there was 401K's and things like that out there. But I didn't know what that was all about, I didn't know how to engage with that. Another thing that I wanted to do was redo my apartment. I had been a photographer many years. But if you walked into my apartment, you wouldn't know that, like all the walls are, were bare. So during the sabbatical, I discovered that there's this whole community of people that aren't retiring when they're 65, or when they're 55, or even 45. They're retiring very early, like in their 30s. And so even in their 20s, and it was this whole thing around financial independence, and basically structuring your finances in a way that doesn't require a lot of expenditure every month, that was completely eye-opening. And mind-blowing, that was an option, the path that I thought that everybody was on was that you know, your work until you're 65 or 67, or 72.
Tracy: When you talk about somebody retiring when they're 20, did they win the lottery? Are they working at startups and selling off their first child? Like, how do you? How do you like that in your 20s?
Aaron: There is very simple math behind this if you can save 75% of your income. And I know that sounds like a lot. But if you can do that, you can basically retire and be financially independent in seven years, I think it was seven, seven or 10 years, I forget which one off the top of my head. So the way that this somebody would do this in their 20s is, you know if they get married kind of early, and they have dual income, and they don't spend a lot of their finances by the kind of late 20s. If you didn't enter into your, you know, early 20s, with that being financial independence, a real possibility.
Tracy: That's amazing.
Aaron: Yeah, I know, right. And it was one of those things where I realized that if someone had told me about that, in my teenage years, I would have chosen a very different life path.
Chris: Aaron, is that a big part of what prompted the van?
Aaron: So part of that sabbatical, it was all about, you know, kind of realizing that the path that I'm on was the default path. It was the option that someone else had clicked for me. And it wasn't one that I had, like, taken time to really consider. And so there's this realization that you know, hey, I don't necessarily have to work until I'm 65. What other areas of my life or there that I might change, the living environment was one of them. And so I've started on that process of what other living environments are there out there, there's living on a boat as an option. But there are a lot of trade-offs that I wasn't sure I wanted to make. I had read a few blogs about people living in their RVs, around San Francisco, I thought that was really interesting. I discovered tiny houses and kind of did a lot of research on that and started looking into how difficult that would be to make really happen. And then eventually came down to looking at what was really important to me. And that was things like being frugal and retiring early, and kind of having control over my living environment, and maybe some freedom to travel, having possibilities, being able to completely redo the interior or that kind of thing. So when you take any of those values, like on their own, they don't really necessarily add up to anything. But once I started adding them all together, like a van or a tiny house would make a lot of sense. What led me to choose the van specifically, probably was two things: One would be this Study on Happiness. It was published a few years ago, and they found that people are happy regardless of kind of changing life circumstances like if you come into a whole bunch of wealth, your happiness level might change in the short term, but it very quickly modulates back to where it was before and same if you lose a lot of your belongings or health, even your happiness level takes a big diet. But over time, it gets back to the sort of status quo, I guess you could say. And that idea combined with this other one, which was that things don't make you happy, like buying things, owning stuff. And when I recognize those two things and realize my happiness is independent of my stuff, and probably independent of many other things. And that even though maybe moving into a van would be a big challenge at first that you know, it would probably quickly level out in terms of happiness, but that I think really led me down that path choosing a very small and concise environmental event that's inexpensive and very mobile.
Chris: Now you get into I'm doing it mode. So I'm curious as you started to tell people in your life that you're going to live in a van in San Francisco what were the reactions from your friends and family?
Aaron: A lot of head nodding and then one or two like, hey then, okay cool. It comes out in funny ways how you know if it makes somebody uncomfortable, who's hanging out with a friend one evening and was about to leave and you know, before I could leave their home they ran over to the refrigerator and started pulling out stuff and saying like, hey, do you want to bottle water? You want to take something with you? And for 10 years you've never done this like what
Tracy: Is it kind of equated with being homeless or what do you think that was about?
Aaron: It is equated with homelessness and all the connotations that come with it, which was surprising because since I had done all this thinking about it, you know, I wasn't equating it with homelessness at all, but I guess that's just the society's kind of default view of it.
Chris: What fears did you have early on everything that you're describing the theory and why you would do it makes a ton of sense.
Aaron: One was belonging. So what am I going to do with all my stuff? I went through this thing called the Kon Mari method where you pick up each thing that you own, you ask yourself, does this bring me joy and if it doesn't, you discard it that helped me break my relationship with my stuff and realize that like I could own very few belongings and still be happy. The other kind of fears that I had, I think at first were around privacy and around bodily function, managing those things. So those were kind of the first two things that I took care of with the van was I purchased one without windows so that I wouldn't have neighbors looking in and so that it wherever I parked, you know, I could kind of be there without bothering anybody else either. You know, I wanted to be very stealthy, so that it just wasn't an issue. I also hung up a very thick like blackout curtain in between the cabin of the van and the in the back and in the bathroom thing did a lot of research on that and found that there's portable toilets, that you can use.
Tracy: Does that take a ton of space?
Aaron: So I purchased a larger van, so I actually have room to stand and stretch.
Chris: He did not just purchase any van, he purchased what might be considered the ultimate van experience because of quite a movement and a cult around the particular van that you chose.
Aaron: I chose, it's called a Sprinter van. It's made by there's a couple of companies that you know, it's branded under but made by Mercedes Freightliner for a while, Dodge also, what that looks like, if you're not aware of that is it's like sometimes ambulances are made based on the sprinter platform. So it has a high roof, it's pretty long, even the shorter version that you can get is pretty long. It's the total van is about 20 feet from end to end, the interior space is about 10 feet as far as the living space goes from the front to the back. And then almost it's like five and a half feet side design. The wide is sort of the luxury van and the movement. Having all that spaces is pretty nice. And a lot of people will purchase these and an outfit and create kind of beautiful RVs that are pretty economical and space
Tracy: How do you find parking for it in San Francisco though?
Aaron: That was a big one. At first, I still was on the lease from my old apartment and we had a parking permit for our neighborhood. The neighborhood is far enough to the west of San Francisco that you can typically find parking Okay, so I did that for a while. And then once I discovered that I really am location independent, I started finding other neighborhoods and places explored living in all kinds of places like in the North Bay by the Ferry Building and Larkspur. Currently, I'm out in Berkeley. It's a little warmer out there a little more accepted to so I'm not really worried about the neighbors.
Tracy: Yeah. Have you ever had any interactions with somebody? They were like, Hey, get your van house out of my neighborhood.
Aaron: No, only No, not in person did have one reaction virtually. I really enjoyed Larkspur and I was looking for a place where I could park the van and leave it throughout the week because it was getting every day I was trying to move it so it didn't look like someone was living in the van. So I found posting on Craigslist and I called this fellow and asked if I could park my van and he was posting a parking space that he had available. And so I was asking him, I've got a bigger vehicle. It's a Sprinter van and I'll be coming and going throughout the week and he's totally on board with it. I thought well maybe he's not getting the message that I'm living in it. So I'm going to be really specific and I told him, Okay, so I'm living in the van. Is that okay? And then No, it wasn't okay. Give me a very detailed explanation of why that wasn't okay in this neighborhood.
Chris: I'm curious to go back to your first night in the van. So there you are, committed, you're in the van talk us through what was the first night like.
Aaron: I did all this research to find a pretty good deal and I purchased the van out of state in Texas. I thought that would also be kind of a fun road trip coming back across the US. You know I get to drive through some pretty areas and it's typically warmer over there at this time of year and so I bought the van and I went straight over to REI and bought like a cot some real basic camping equipment and then went over to Walmart and bought some blankets and you know basic bedding. And then the next day I hit the road. And so the first night was in a little town in New Mexico is at a truck stop was a little bit of a surprise to me. But the weather said is going to get down to about 40 degrees that night. And I wasn't quite prepared for 40 degrees. I but I have you know camped out and weather that cold. I thought it would be okay. It was so cold. It was so miserable. I was absolutely freezing all night. I had a camping experience once where I was I was out motorcycle camping. And we were in weather that was about 20 degrees and I had a sleeping bag that was not rated for that low and it was a very miserable night. This even though it wasn't that cold. This felt just the same. And I'm not sure what it is about the interior of the van but it feels like it amplifies the cold a little bit.
Chris: The nice feature.
Tracy: The luxury experience.
Chris: That's the Mercedes part.
Aaron: You know what was interesting is I woke up I think it was maybe 3:30 in the morning and I just decided I gotta go crawl back up. I sit down in the driver's seat, and I look to the left and there's a Sprinter van parked right beside me. And then I looked over to the right and there is another one
Tracy: That's a total community.
Aaron: It is. Yeah, there's a lot of people.
Chris: So what's going through your head that night you're sitting you're lying there and in a truck stop in New Mexico in a van you just purchased to live in and you're freezing.
Aaron: You know the main thing was, I had to get across the country to make it for my brother's baby shower. And I'm just thinking, I've got to be able to sleep and you know, stay awake for this trip. Not I wasn't too worried about the future of the living environment, because I know that people have, it's a solved problem, a little insulation, a little extra blankets like it'll work out. Yeah, that said, the cold has been something that I needed to climatized to. And that was probably the biggest challenge and biggest surprise of moving into the van.
Chris: That was one of the questions I was going to ask you and Tracy and I talk about this a lot with our guests is often we have a vision for something. So we want to change something and we can imagine how our world would be if we made that change. If you act on that change, often, it's very different than what that original vision was. So I'm curious about your experience, you know, you had this vision of 75% savings, and I'm going to live in the van and this is gonna be my new world, what's been different. And the same about what you envisioned, it would be
Aaron: The things that were different were the cold, for sure, I wasn't expecting the cold at all. Thankfully, that was pretty easy to deal with, I basically loaded myself up with some really, really heavy-duty sleeping bag. Other things that were different that was unexpected was the food bill, you know, living in the van, I didn't have refrigeration or cooking facilities.
Tracy: Freezing in the van.
Aaron: Yeah, that's true, actually. And I have truly used that to keep food cold overnight. In general, you know, going from, you know, a refrigerator at the apartment to not having anything, the food bill shot right up. And so I wasn't saving money, even though I had kind of planned to be, and that took some iterations to kind of figure out how I would manage food. So those were kind of the two big surprises. And then I think the third surprise, for me, was the moment that the van felt like home, for the first two months, it was just a place I was going to sleep at night. So I would go to work. And then after work, I would go to the library or go to the cafe and I would structure my day so that I was kind of out and about all day long. And then would go back to the van and then sleep and then head back to work the next day to kind of minimize the amount of time that I spent there. Over time, I've slowly iterated on the interior, you know, just find something that was important to fix, like the cold, insulate things, and then improve the lighting and kind of made all these small improvements. And then once all of the basic needs were met, it changed. There was just a moment where I just realized, Oh, this feels like home. Now I can come back and just relax here after a long day. And that was a big surprise. I wasn't expecting that to happen.
Tracy: That's really nice. I mean, because when you're talking about like after work, you would go to the library or cafe, I was just thinking that that seems like it would be really taxing because you're not in a space that feels like home. And how do you unwind or let yourself just be?
Aaron: Absolutely, it is a little bit taxing. And I wouldn't want to have started this experiment without a support network. Throughout this, I've been able to drive out on the weekends and spend the weekend at my mom's place or spend it with friends. And that's been a huge part of just a climatized into the environment and staying kind of sane throughout the experiment. It would be a lot tougher if that support network wasn't there?
Tracy: Do you have any interaction with the community of other people who are also living in their vans?
Aaron: Yes, I started a blog and started writing about the experience, partly from Chris's influence of just it would be good to document this and look back on it later. And there's also an online community on Reddit of Van Dwellers. So I made some, you know, kind of posted a bit there and have kind of responded to other people's questions about logistics and things and what's been working well for me. And through that several people have reached out and wanted to meet up, I've met at least one person from the community on and just kind of, you know, showed them the van and answered questions because they were I guess they were van curious, you know, they were thinking about it. Interestingly enough, you know, we earlier in the show, we were talking about people's reactions, and I never know what someone's reaction is when I'm going to say, you know, oh, yeah, I live in a van. I've experienced probably the more positive side of the gamut, including mentioning this to a co-worker a few weeks ago. And their eyes lit up. And they just said I've always wanted to do that. And they started asking me questions, and now they're planning to do the same and the, you know, the summers.
Tracy: So what about the types of people that you have come across that seems like a good lifestyle?
Aaron: I think anybody that has a bit of wanderlust that looks at the nomadic lifestyle and says, oh, also anybody that has a little bit of an introspective nature or introverted nature where the idea of going out and into nature, you know, camping in the desert, or in the forest or kind of getting away from the noisiness of life and just having a place to be calm and pursue their own interests, like art and writing. And I also think that artists and entrepreneurs, anybody that has this sort of their that they're open to challenging and living a different way when you started my sense was you wanted to keep it really private. You didn't Want coworkers to know, what shifted for you? In the beginning, I had a little bit of fear of what other people would think, or a lot of fear about what other people would think early on acceptance, you know, kind of just reaching out to my family and close friends and mentioning it to them and then being okay with it, that went a really long way to just being okay with it internally. And at first at work, though, I had this desire to keep it separate from my workplace, because I didn't want the living in a van to become, I guess, part of my identity. I didn't want that to affect, you know, my career or anything like that. And I had read of a few people that had mentioned that they live in a van at their workplaces, and it hadn't gone so well. But, but that said, like they I think they did work in areas that maybe weren't quite as accepting of differences being right in the middle of San Francisco that helps. Can you picture it long term? Yes, I can. Although I picture eventually being in a tiny house, I see it as a five to seven-year adventure and then moving on to something else.
Tracy: Wow, that's a pretty long adventure.
Aaron: Yeah, my initial goal on this was to live in it for at least 10 months. And that was kind of my point at which I'm pulling ahead in terms of finances. Being a few months into it, I can easily see that that could extend as long as I feel like it should, like living in the van isn't affecting my happiness in a poor way.
Chris: Have you had any visitors to the van?
Tracy: I don't know. I've just like my big question is how do you date when you live in a van?
Aaron: When does it come up? When do you drop the van card? All dating as long-distance? Honestly, I haven't crossed that bridge, yet. It's a pretty new experiment, I can say that people have sometimes a kind of a visceral reaction of either being totally okay with it, or being very against it, or somewhere in the middle of just like, I'm gonna have to process that for a while and then get back to you. It's helpful because the next time I'm dating somebody, like the more accepting they are of others is kind of a plus. And in my book, I'm okay with having a feather in my cap that looks a little different.
Chris: You heard Aaron, Tracy, would you try living in a van?
Tracy: Absolutely not, I think. I think when he talked about living on a sailboat and feeling as though he just doesn't like to be above deep water. Like recognizing that in himself, I think I can recognize in myself that I would be really unhappy living in a van. And I know, you probably would have no trouble living in a van or even like a tent.
Chris: I don't know, I think I'd have to set it up where it's like, every fifth or seventh day, you get a nice hotel, or you know, where you oscillate from the rugged to the all the comforts come back, then you go back out again.
Tracy: You know, that's actually how I like to travel, I'm willing, yeah, I'm willing to stay in like a pretty crappy place for a couple of nights to save some money, and then just splurge on, you know, a nice place for a night or two.
Chris: It certainly makes you appreciate those things. And I'm sure Aaron, who will now occasionally stay at a friend's house or go on vacation or whatever, we'll definitely appreciate that concrete base foundation and shelter and a nice shower.
Tracy: I also liked it when he was talking about the Kon Mari method for getting rid of and stuff. He was saying you pick up an item that belongs to you, and you ask yourself, does this make me happy? Or does it you know, enhance my life in some way? And it's just such a simple question, I started to mentally think about things in my own home, there's probably about a quarter of the things that I could very easily get rid of. And not saying I'm going to do it. But there's so much research, I feel like lately that just talks about how experiences bring you so much more happiness, then things do.
Chris: There's a pattern emerging here between those that we've interviewed, you know, we've talked a lot with Elle about should and must and should just being the default, David Kelley was telling us he was playfully saying, it's really hard for an old man to break habits. And I think he's referring to the same thing, which is the idea of sort of questioning and challenging and experimenting, as you have played the same record quite a few times over the years.
Tracy: I also think I mean, that goes back to brain science. You make those habits so that your brain doesn't have to work that hard on things that you do you often that's already decided, oh, that's not a threat to me. And you can go on and be more vigilant about the rest of the world. And as you get older, certainly those paths have entrenched themselves in your mind. I think that's one of the ways at least scientifically why it's so hard to break patterns.
Chris: Yeah, and I think Aaron does a fair amount of experimenting. I think meeting people like Aaron inspires us that results may vary because he's perfectly fine not falling into the normal stream of things and willing to hack at things that might to the Normal societal, I look pretty unusual. And Aaron doesn't care. I've always liked that about him. And the van is just another example of it. He's done that in some other parts of his life and nutrition and other things. But the van that by far is the boldest step he's taken in terms of just doing what he thought was right for himself.
Tracy: I love the line that he said about I'm okay with having a feather in my cap that looks a little different. And thinking, you know, asking him about dating, which was on my mind the entire time, it was like, how do you invite the lady back to the van. But I felt like the whole time, it's like he would attract somebody that would be on board with that and have a similar sensibility. And so it's not a compromise. It's just finding the person or people that are more aligned with your values. The defaults in society sort of come from that have the, I want to feel connected to other people. So I'm willing to go along with things that they all agree upon, even if they're not the things that I would most be drawn to. But just because I want acceptance.
Chris: I guess we could call Aaron's interview something like it's not about the van. Exactly. In that, the van is just a proxy for all of us to think about. It's kind of like what's your van and my van? Like you were saying I wouldn't do it. And I'm just playfully saying that would be interesting on the weekends. But yeah, ultimately, we have our own inner vans that need to be unpacked. This has been really fun. I think it's been a lot of fun to do with you, Tracy. And it's just getting more and more interesting as we go. So looking forward to the next episodes.
Tracy: Yeah, me too. I just love seeing the patterns across all the different people that we've talked about and how you were saying they're doing so many different things, but there are so many underlying principles that are common to everybody. And we'll continue to explore that as we move along.