It’s been about a month since I posted a video on YouTube. In that time I’ve gone on vacation, experienced crippling back pain which sent me to the emergency room and on to see multiple doctors, and opened a booth at a local toy mall. I don’t live in my van, I don’t make any money from any of my vanlife content, and I don’t have any sponsors, so unfortunately when life happens, the van stuff tends to move to the back burner temporarily.

I knew I had something I wanted to say in this video, but I had a hard time saying it. In almost every aspect of my life I find it easier to express myself through written words than through speaking, so I’ll try here to clarify what I was trying to say in the video.

Essentially everything I know about valife has come from YouTube, which has advantages and disadvantages. The upside is that I had the benefit of thousands of vanlifers’ experience. Not only has every problem related to vanlife been solved a hundred times over, but there are probably dozens of videos on YouTube explaining how to resolve it. Topics like solar panels and van plumbing which previously required research to understand have been compressed into bitesize, easy to digest content. And that’s great.

The downside to all of this is that everything’s already been done for us. How do people go to the bathroom in their vans, or take showers, or stay warm in the winter? Just Google it. Watch enough vanlife tour videos and you’ll start to realize that many if not most of them look similar. It’s a bit like buying two sets of LEGO bricks, one with the instructions and one without.

Those “vanlife blueprints” extend past the building of vans. They also apply to marketing, managing van-related social media, and what type of social media content works. I’ve seen a lot of pushback about creating YouTube thumbnails with goofy faces or clickbait titles, but there’s a reason people use them — it’s because they work.

This seems like an obvious statement but people who create social media want people to watch it, and the easiest way to “be seen” is to create content that looks similar to other popular content. It puts people like me, small time content creators, in a tough position. Over the past few months I’ve tried making videos that are a compromise between how I enjoy spending time in my van and what I thought would like up with YouTube’s algorithm enough to get them pushed in front of people’s eyeballs. By and large, it hasn’t worked. I’ve watched YouTube channels much newer than mine surpass me in numbers of subscribers and views. The more I chase those numbers, the less fun I’m having.

There are certain things I simply can’t do with my videos. I have a day job; I can’t camp for weeks at a time on BLM land. I can’t camp near the ocean (I live in Oklahoma). I can’t prance around in a bikini (I mean, I could…)

The narrative in this week’s video is a bit of a parable. (Is that the right word?) Obviously, I didn’t leave the future of my vanlife to which direction a skunk went. (Although to be fair, getting sprayed in the van would have put a real damper on things!) But what I did decide over the past few weeks is that, and again this sounds obvious, doing stuff that isn’t fun, isn’t fun.

I needed a reset, and I took one. I’m looking forward to getting back out on the road and in the van, but doing things my way. I can see clearly now the rain is gone. 😉