Last time we spoke I harked back to our first ever night in the van, the beginning of a new way of life and a turning point for our family. Since that pivotal moment we have spent time in both England and Wales, including the counties Dorset, Devon, Wiltshire, Suffolk and Monmouthshire. We’ve also moved through the seasons of summer and autumn and we’re now standing on the threshold of our first winter living in a nomadic home on the road.
Turning our back on conventional living in a house with all the comfort and security that way of life provides was a deeply considered move, not a decision we took lightly.
Personally I prepared myself for daily discomfort, hardship and the unknown. I am not an open person. I don’t like change and I am not open to experiences that are new or different. For this and other reasons, I anticipated living in a van would be challenging. For example, imagine going through each day not knowing where you’re going to sleep that night.
On the other hand, I hoped that by opening up to more uncertainty and discomfort I would make space for a different kind of day-to-day to emerge, one that would free me from the rat race to some extent, severing some of the bonds that bind me to the exhausting, unremitting daily grind.
When early-adopter and Paid Subscriber Tarlie read the last article she wanted to know whether van life has enabled me to slow down and escape the rat race. Does it feel like I have stepped off the wheel, she asks.
I wrote a reply to Tarlie in response to her question in the comments of the original article and I am now going to expand on that here.
Have I managed to escape? The short answer is yes, and no.
I have managed to step off the wheel but the bad news is that it is now impossible for anyone to exit the rat race completely. The wheel upon which the vermin run is accelerating, with little respite, requiring that we run harder and faster just to stay on.
Life on the wretched wheel is agonising, exhausting and the experience will eventually crush us, but without the wheel we will perish, cut off from life’s necessities. Crash off the wheel, as I did, in a desperate search for another way, and I now find it harder to get back on, but get back on I must.
The rat race, the wheel, the cage that surrounds them and the men in white coats who work in the laboratory are all part of what I call the system, a term borrowed from Darren Allen's work.
The system is manmade (and I do mean made by men) but is now so advanced it has its own anti-human agenda, which we call progress.
It is now almost everywhere. It is omnipresent, insidiously worming its way into our once private places of human refuge. We are all complicit in building it, maintaining it and helping it grow and infiltrate more of our lives, to the extent that it is now widespread and ubiquitous.
The system is the unnatural, industrial-technological, world machine that we built and that now surrounds and envelops us. It is what we call civilisation and our civilised society is enmeshed within it.
It helps to understand what the system is by considering what it is not. The system is not the Earth. It is not nature, wild and visceral, beautiful and terrifying, filled with abundant bounty and plentiful pain, carnal and interconnected, death just a moment away, life erupting spectacularly in the next.
The system is what we have built on top of the Earth and in many ways, at the expense of it, burying this precious blue marble under so much rubble.
The system has been under construction for some time, around 10,000 years or so if you start the clock at the point when a beautiful, free, conscious, blissful, tribal group of anarchic hunter-foragers living in the real-life Garden of Eden right here on Earth, decided to start cultivating grain1.
Ever since then we have been continually distancing ourselves from our primal place within nature and the universe as a whole, by pursuing comfort and security through endlessly more complex technological means.
This has been going on so long and is so out of hand that it is now impossible to meet our basic human needs on the Earth; draw water, forage food and fuel, make clothing and build shelter, without interacting with the system in some way.
Around 800 years ago when the ancient Commoners’ Rights were first laid out in the Charter of the Forest (1217) it was still possible to glimpse a way of life that is now out of reach.
As a commoner on common land you were able to exercise your rights to graze animals, put pigs out to feed on acorns, gather firewood and take fish - pasturage, pannage, estover and piscary respectively.
Try exercising any of these rights today and you are likely to meet with significant obstacle and opposition. Although, having said that, try finding anyone who still wants to exchange their homely creature comforts to exercise their rights these days. They are few and far between.
Here in the van we often invoke estover, taking wood for fuel, but we do it on private or public land, and we do it covertly, because these days it’s called trespassing and theft.
Take one of life’s most elemental essentials as an example - water. In a time long since lost and probably never to return, we would have been able to draw drinking water from any river, stream or fresh-water source that we could locate on our travels.
In our modern industrial world this is a ludicrous concept because the water is so dirty and desecrated. We must all get our drinking water from the tap instead, and we will pay for the privilege and be grateful for the magnificent work the water companies are doing, cleaning, maintaining and protecting our national water sources on our behalf.
Step outside the system or live in a place that does not have a mains water connection and we suddenly face a problem - where to obtain drinking water. The only solution, other than to abandon the unconventional choices we have made, is to take water from public and private taps whenever we can find them. This is called stealing. Someone else has paid for this water to be drawn, cleaned and supplied.
The point is the system we have built has desecrated our water sources and put them out of reach, making it impossible to get hold of drinking water without interacting with the system in some way.
In his book The Unabomber Manifesto, the brilliant visionary and murderous madman Ted Kaczynski, who I will paraphrase in the following paragraphs, notes that human beings have a need to achieve goals through something he calls the ‘power process’.
In order to avoid serious psychological problems, human beings needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and they must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining their goals.
Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are necessary, but in our modern industrial society we obtain these things without direct effort.
Only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy our physical needs. Until recently it was usually enough to go through a training programme to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert the very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence and, most of all, simple obedience.
Failing to attain important goals, such as obtaining food, water, clothing and shelter, results in death, but when people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities.
To achieve these goals the system demands that we make money, a meaningless abstract concept, digital numbers on a vast global financial computer system, to get hold of essential things you need everyday, like food and water for your body, fuel for a vehicle and electricity and gas for your home.2
To make this money, we have to do pointless bullshit jobs, which from nine-till-five-Monday-to-Friday, bury us under the mountain of meaningless non-essential activity we call work.
Tragically, the system cannot be salvaged or changed for the better. Nothing will make this system more bearable or human-centred other than its complete disintegration and collapse. Unfortunately, since there are too many vested interests at work within it, the wheel will just keep on turning, until the whole thing implodes, at which point there will be a painful regression where everyone is forced to focus only on those goals which are important to survival (food, water, clothing and shelter). Cheery thought eh?
Mercifully, as human beings, we have been blessed with a pathway to freedom - something we call consciousness.
This strange, mysterious, undefinable vibration is the only true way we can step off the wheel and escape the insanity of the system.
Whether you are aware of it or not, you spend much of your time viewing the world and interacting with it through an insecure, fearful, narrow mind. This limited and restricted way of being, common to us all, is controlled by something called the self.3
The self is the prison we have built within our soul to survive the drudgery of the system. It also defends us against the overwhelming wonder of the incomprehensible universe, which would obliterate us in a flare of transcendental fire if we let it in for even a moment. This we call merciful, beautiful death. The return.
If you are conscious, you are able to step out of your narrow mind and taste the unlimited expanse of everything, the universe, the vastness of all things, unite with the ancestral mother Gaia, without being destroyed.
One of the most potent and effective places you can draw close to this sort of conscious experience is in the wilds of nature. Not the local park or outdoor activity centre. I’m talking about those places on Earth that have somehow maintained their innate sacred heart, resisting the violation and corruption perpetrated by unconscious men. Somewhere like the jungle described here by filmmaker Werner Herzog:
“Nature here is vile and base. I wouldn't see anything erotical here. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and... growing and... just rotting away. Of course, there's a lot of misery. But it is the same misery that is all around us. The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don't think they - they sing. They just screech in pain.”
If you can find a wild place on Earth and if you are conscious, even for only a single moment, you will be instantly transported back to those ancient halcyon days of beautiful freedom that human beings used to experience everyday.
When you experience these moments you transcend the system, step off the wheel and merge with the natural earth and all its wonder and wisdom. Once you have tasted consciousness and invited it to become a constant companion, you can make changes in your life to improve the chances of experiencing more truly human conscious moments.
You will have to give up some daily comforts, and the idea of guaranteed security, and you might have to live on less money and buy fewer things and you will almost certainly be criticised and questioned by conventional folk (often friends and family) who aren't as interested in consciousness as you are, or more likely who are terrified of going out of their minds themselves.
However, your reward will be to come into contact with the meaning of all things and you will understand for blissful fleeting moments, what it's all about, this being here, on Earth, as a human being, an indispensable part of the cosmic story. This is where misanthropy falls away and meaning takes its place.4
Unfortunately the system is powerful. Waiting in the wings it will demand you get back on the wheel to satisfy its requirements. It will use fear and insecurity and separation and shame to lure you back. This is unavoidable. The trick is to start wrestling with it a bit, improving the balance, reducing the time you spend running on the system-wheel and increasing the time you spend connecting to consciousness. This is what I have tried to do with the recent choices I have made for me and my family.
What we have created is a magical intergalactic spaceship, housed in a 2018 Mercedes Sprinter, that can transcend the technological system (up to a point) and transport our family out of the dreary day-to-day monotony of institutionalised civilisation, catapult us over the prison wall and out into nature and the elemental borderlands, where we feel the weather close up and encounter wildlife on the doorstep, where we make forests and coasts and fields our temporary home. Consciousness is not guaranteed but it is more available to us when we live like this.
It’s not a one way journey, we return to the system regularly to attend to its requirements.
But that we have the opportunity to make such breakout voyages is extraordinary and wondrous. Well worth all of the associated hardships, compromises and sacrifices.
See Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, particularly Part Two, The Agricultural Revolution for details on why that little escapade caused, and continues to cause, so many problems.
Not to mention all the things you need to acquire for the additional artificial goals, which we call hobbies, but which are really just distractions from the core dissatisfaction and lack of meaningful essential activity.
See Self & Unself, The Meaning of Everything, by Darren Allen
https://expressiveegg.org/portfolio/self-unself/
That’s not to say all of us are able to contribute to the great pancake in the sky, but the fact of our consciousness means we have the potential to make significant offerings to it.