My wife and I are wrapping up our first week as full time van-lifers, and so far we’re loving it.
We are still working remotely (we’re both online personal trainers), so to a degree our schedules are still dictated by work. But by and large we are living a much slower, healthier pace of life than we were previously.
And that’s the whole point.
For over a decade my wife and I have owned gyms and coached people. Prior to that we had a lot of side hustles. We’ve been married going on 18 years and haven’t once taken a vacation. For the first 3 years of running our gym we took zero days off.
Sick? Go to work.
Birthdays? Holidays? Go to work.
Special occasions? Go to work.
We both have very strong work ethics and have always met adversity by working harder. And that worked for a time. Until it didn’t.
Covid forced us to close our business, and brought with it a lot of legal trouble that has occupied our minds and time, and really had a negative impact on our health.
And now that we can move forward, we’re taking the approach that living slower is far superior to living faster. Hustling harder is something we got really good at. But it’s not good for your health. And here we are, supposed to be modeling healthy lifestyles for our clients.
We decided to cut ties with as many expenses as possible, and to stop making lazy landlords wealthy off of our labor. That led us to take up van life.
And already, after 1 week, we are settling into much more healthy rhythms of living. Work when the sun is up. Eat food cooked slowly over a fire. Go to bed when it’s dark. There are plenty of high end RVs camped beside us with televisions and satellites and all that. But that’s not what we wanted. We didn’t want to just take apartment life mobile. We wanted to unplug from the least healthy things for a while.
It’s proving to be good for us. We’re eating and sleeping better. And we’re getting better physical activity and experiencing a lot less stress.
We’re currently in southern New Mexico, camping in a town with a population of less than 300 people. We haven’t been indoors (except to use the bathroom at the campground) in a week. We haven’t interacted with more than 5 people, all outdoors, in a week.
So far, slow living is suiting us just fine. And what I expect is that we’ll be so free of stress and bullshit that our creative energies will recharge and we’ll be able to serve our clients at an even higher level than when we were just hustling and pushing for more and more sales all of the time.
Enjoy these pics from the middle of nowhere, where we are letting the land heal us, where the tumbleweed blowing by is worth stopping what you’re doing to watch in silence.
Have you felt the call to slow the fuck down lately as well? What is your own inner voice guiding you towards these days?