I have lived in a cramped camper van with my wife and our cat for 8 years. Here's how we make it work.
You never had children, that's how.
The article was from Business Insider, which is on my news feed for some reason, even though I'm not really a fan of it. The headline comes from a blog entitled:
Now, I'll be frank that at my stage of my life, having worked since age 13 and now 60, a life in which I could take my wife in our camp trailer and go annually from Alaska back home, catching the seasons (fish, hunting, etc.) would appeal greatly to me.
It wouldn't appeal to my spouse, so this will be another dream unrealized.
But two young people living as vagabonds with a cat? Well, it's not for some reason.
Let's be even more frank. This trip is made possible only by the pharmaceutical industry as it's made possible, probably, only due to birth control. There's something weirdly narcissistic and self focused about it, therefore.
In a prior age, being an adult for most people meant taking on adult things, and that meant for most people, given the nature of nature and what that means, ultimately meant getting married and having children, the second following from the other. Chemicals made the first possible without the second, which ultimately radically muddled the minds of many as to the true, deep, existential nature of the essential act that goes with that marriage. In turn, that really gave rise to the "alternative" definitions of everything we have today, as the deep natural nature of that relationship became one for self defined entertainment, although at some level the deeper meaning is never lost.
Also lost, however, that going forward with the true nature of the relationship is deeply adult.
Or, in a former era, for one reason or another, it meant going into adult life on your own, and plenty did it. But that was a pretty serious affair in and of itself. People like to say "marriage is hard", which it isn't. Being on your own, as an adult, and as you age, is hard. Frankly, for most people, it got pretty hard in all sorts of ways by the time a person was in their late 30s.
Traveling by van around Australia? I'm sure it's fun. But is also dropping out, in more ways than one, including dropping out of a part of nature while viewing it. The cat? Probably not a conventional pet the way pets were in prior decades, but a substitute child, that instinct never really gone.
Dropping out, however, also says something about the state of our world.
Some people have always dropped out of the active world, to be sure. But it's become a sort of post-pandemic pandemic. Quietly Quitting, Laying Flat, and this. All symptoms of a world we've built that we don't like.
In an earlier era, this very British couple (and I know that one is Australian) probably would have met and farmed. They seem to be angling for a simple life.
One pretty hard to achieve in our world today.
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