The End of #Vanlife?
How will Vanlife’s appearance on Joe Rogan affect the future of a movement?
The Vanlife movement, a movement of which I’m a relatively late but full-throated member, has taken its fair share of blows as far as alternative living trends might go. Born out of the Tiny House movement, Vanlife was a dynamic and nimble way of expressing one’s intention to live a more considered life. Fewer things allow for a life less encumbered by the trappings of consumerism, fast fashion, and waste. A smaller space requires one to move through space with grace and purpose — couples even more so and they were better for it.
Throw into the mix the drivetrain of a contractor van, the notion of sustainability, DIY-ness, and the desire for people stuck in cubicles to watch you live the life they wish they lived and you, my dude, have a high octane internet movement generating huge amounts of revenue. Its popularity and distribution are hard to quantify, as images and videos are shared and reshared on Instagram hundreds of times a day by a commensurate number of accounts. Currently, content tagged as #vanlife hovers at a little over seven million posts.
With that fortune come the standard slings and arrows.
Outside of the movement (in its current form) existing as a hyper-glamourized fiction developed by the internet, for the internet, and promulgated by Millenials responding to the grim understanding that they’d been defrauded by previous generations and thus were being forced to awkwardly redefine the word “home,” Vanlife took some hits that threatened it’s continued credibility among the cool.
One of the first came in the form of YouTube “creators” Wandxr Bus — obvious imposters who, to their credit, developed a channel intended to produce maximum results with a minimal amount of effort. Many users before and after have created correspondingly insufferable content, but the Wandxr Bus vlogs could have been grown in a lab, checking every box for which the Google algorithm was on the hunt: boobs, butts, sunsets, and smoothies.
Another jolt occurred when teenage heroes, Steve-O and Wee Man, got into the game and further removed the crusade from something that was homespun and handmade into something that you paid a company 80k to trick out.
Coronavirus did its work, too, disrupting travel plans years in the making and forcing people like us to temporarily abandon dreams of digital nomadism. At a certain point, there came a sad and intimate sense of resignation that what started out as a forced lifestyle for some and an unintentional side hustle for others had morphed into an industry. A secret had been monetized.
As the perceived legitimacy of the trend towards mobile-living wanes, a final blow might have been struck within the first four minutes of the 1465th episode of podcast juggernaut, The Joe Rogan Experience. His guest, YouTuber and extreme pain in the ass if you’re @jack, Tim Pool, had driven 4 days and approximately 2800 miles in his very deluxe, very techy, and very commissioned Transit Van.
A beauty by any standard, Pool’s conversion is impressive. It had to be, considering the more than four hours of content he produces for his three YouTube channels every day (yikes). The rig needed to look like and function similarly to a NASA launch command station. Mission: accomplished. Pool opens the show with an explanation of the process by which the van was converted and his initial difficulty in finding a company to do it.
“…and I guess because the Vanlife thing started getting big, I did a Google search and couldn’t find anybo — ,”
“The ‘Vanlife thing’?” Rogan asked incredulously.
“Yeah! Vanlife, man.” Pool replied in surprise.
“What’r, what are you talking about?”
Rogan laughed as he asked the question, chuckling at his having no knowledge of this apparently important element of the 2020 cultural Zeitgeist.
Pool went on to briefly describe the phenomenon. He spoke of its popularity on Youtube, Instagram, and other platforms. He cited, by description only, uber-successful creator, Hobo Ahle, who’s video, “How I Shower in my Van,” has garnered a record-breaking 2.6 million views at the writing of this article. Pool, as we van people are want to do, dipped into some of the more lavish details about his conversion van as well; an AC, a Playstation, a Winegard 4G/5G WiFi rebroadcaster. “You could live in that thing,” mentioned Rogan.
The most popular influencers and creators of Vanlife content on the internet have a subscribership in the thousands on the low end and in the hundreds of thousands on the high end. A brief but likely intensely intriguing discussion about living and working in a van was just broadcast to a listenership in the millions. Episode 1465 and the episode in question is 30 hours old and currently sits at 2.1 million views on Youtube. Podcast download numbers will be several orders of magnitude higher than that, with an average JRE episode ranging from seven million to ten million downloads. Save for a few other remarkable people, one of the most popular voices on the planet uttered the word “Vanlife” and it can’t be undone.
Not to be misinterpreted as a slight against either Rogan or Pool but the truth is this: Vanlife, as it’s become, is conceptually over.
But is that such a bad thing?
Vanlife, in part, was a reaction to a housing crisis. The Sprinter vans of old looked quite a bit different than the beefed-up and tank-like Sprinter vans of today. To a lot of people with little in the way of options, they also looked like houses. It shouldn’t come as any surprise then that the Tiny House and Vanlife movements surged in popularity around 2008. Foreclosed homes and shuttered businesses set the stage for mobile living and van dwelling. As we move through the COVID-19 pandemic and a halted economy, we may watch things repeat. “Nah, it’s not the final blow. Maybe (it’s) bigger than ever as people can’t afford shit due to Coronavirus.” YouTube creator and Vanlife satirist, Dave2D explained with a bleak but realistic assessment, “No rent money equals Vanlife.
A lack of affordable housing is, to most, an objectively bad thing. Yet it is what people built in the midst of financial collapse and in spite of greed that makes the movement such a beautiful and compelling one. People took to the outdoors, reassessed what it was to live a life, and did what people do: survive and adapt. It’s possible we lost sight of that truth along the way and traded in our ethics for clicks.
It’s unclear what, if any, effect on the Vanlife Industrial Complex Rogan’s podcast will have; how the so-called “Rogan Bump” might wear away at or bolster the validity of the campaign. It’ll certainly render those people in North Jersey who built out Pool’s van very busy. It’ll likely inspire those who have the luxury of choosing to live in a van, as we did, to make the leap into mobile living. It might also take the shine off the idea. It was special when only a handful of people were brave enough to do it. It was looked down on and mocked, a lifestyle suitable only for vagrants and itinerant derelicts.
Now that it’s reached the top of Mount Visibility, it might be, for lack of a better term, played out. It might reek of uncoolness and be relegated to the devastating category of ‘basic.’ For us van dwellers — for the people who truly do seek out experiences over things and wish to maintain freedom and mobility — ‘basic’ might be just the insult we need to survive.
