Lifestyles of the Rebellious and Unattached

I think about this a lot. What traits do we full-timers share? I think I’ve finally nailed it: we share a lack of strong ties. Call it non-attachment, if you’d like. Either willingly or unwillingly, we no longer have connections to nearby family, to a special home, to long-standing family traditions, strong friendship circles, a work community, whatever. Nothing holds us to place, so we change place often; we travel.

What’s distracted me from seeing this commonality until now are the diverse ways that people live in their RVers, the lifestyles of the rebellious and unattached, as it were. I’ve talked with people who hit the road because they’d dreamed of and planned for traveling after retirement, to people who knew they couldn’t afford their mortgage as they aged but knew they could transform a van into a home. People who hit the road after high-stress, indoor careers made them feel incapable of living indoors a day longer. People who lost every member of their family, people whose family are abroad, people who hate their family, people who can spend time with their family better by taking their home with them when they visit. People who don’t have a local artist’s gallery, who don’t have a group of friends to play music with, who don’t have a strong network of friends from work or from a hobby or from school. People who aren’t attached to their garden or the river below their house or the beautiful artwork on their walls. We are all unattached.

And yet, how differently we all live. People park their RVs in one spot for the winter and one spot for the summer, traveling only twice a year between the two. People stay in a fancy RV park for a month, with full hookups so their work processes are easier, and then they move to the next full-hookup spot. People who choose the cheapest places to stay, people who choose the remotest places to stay. People who travel in caravans together. People who volunteer or work at national parks and appreciate the perk of living in the park. People who get off grid and don’t ever check back in.

These lifestyles are infinitely different, as are we all. Yet, we are, all of us, rebels at our cores. We have turned our backs on a standard, Western lifestyle of a home in place, of a set community, so we can each live in our own chosen ways, away from societal norms to our own chosen degrees. Some people are outcasts not by choice; they can’t keep up a life in society, or they distrust society, or they have been burned by society. Many of us intentionally choose to live away from society, away from standard expectations, away from attachments.

For some of us, losing these attachments has given us a greater sense of being alive. Without the distractions of “normal” lives, we feel like we’re living more intentionally. We’re immersing ourselves in nature. We’re seeing humanity not in segments, not like urban people near us leaning a certain way politically or rural people near us leaning another way, but as all people everywhere. We’re seeing both human development and the protection of nature on a broader scale, and that gives us a perspective we feel should be part of everyone’s life views.

We are rebellious, we are unattached, and, maybe I should add, some of us are slightly more tuned in ever since we dropped out.

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Post script that possibly undermines this and possibly should be skipped:

I’ve written about elements of all this in previous posts, so this is a summary, with an added—and maybe short-sighted—twist of categorizing people. And that’s a bad habit. I once did primary research and wrote a paper I was proud of about how women tell stories versus how men tell stories (now I try not to use those binary categories). Heck, once I spent a year writing a paper on certain common traits of three characters, all leading to a conceit I thought was insightful regarding feminist theory. During my paper’s defense, my thesis committee declared that the whole point of feminism is to tear down defining walls, so they said my conclusion was harmful. Point taken, but the timing of the delivery of that point was to tear down my committee chair’s tenure track, not to make a statement about theory. There went two years of academic work and a career dream in one spiteful meeting.

The lasting impression I hold (other than that academia is a dog-eat-dog world, especially among feminists) is that I tend to place people in categories. Heck, I did it right there. Instead of “feminists,” I could have said, “people with a strong desire to protect their power positions in academia.”

And here I am, categorizing people again in this post. I’m not trying to imply that we full-time RVers are smarter than the average bear or that people living in sticks-and-bricks are unenlightened. I started this line of thinking while in a conversation with other full-timers about what trait we all share that prompted us to hit the road, and that trait turned out to be non-attachment, which lead me to think about the benefits that non-attachment facilitates. And those benefits often include greater awareness.

If you’re interested in hearing more on any of these ideas or want to call me out on something misguided here, please say. I can take it: At least you’re not my thesis committee hell-bent against my committee chair. Other pertinent elements to that meeting were: a full-body cast (not mine), the dreaded “crying during your defense” which I proudly avoided but my chair did not (she was in the cast), and Grateful Dead tickets for Las Vegas that I was not gonna waste. A story for another day, seeing as how this post-script is already as long as the post.