Well, yes, I lived the crypto-bro meme. I bought bitcoin low, sold it high, and then splashed out on an Italian two-seater. And here it is:
Sorry, I'm not rich yet! And if I was, I probably would just get a bigger and better commercial vehicle, not a Lamborghini. But, as the title suggests, the idea here isn’t really commercial, at least not initially. Yes, you are looking at the future new home of The Lorryist, Casa del Camionero. At least for some of the time. Yep, this is going to become a camper, my camper. As regular readers may recall, I’m building my way back from zero, well… building my way back from having just €106, a small laptop, and the clothes on my back. And this van is part of that journey, if you see what I mean.
There is a certain philosophy to this rebuilding, born out of my supposition that we are entering a pivotal moment in economic and societal history. So, therefore, I have avoided leverage, i.e. debt, and I’ve tried to set myself up to be in a position to cope with all sorts of difficult scenarios.
Regular readers my also recall that I was planning to get a truck, and this is quite clearly a van. Aha, well perhaps not in the eyes of His Majesty’s Government. The magic numbers - in the UK and Europe - are 3.5 and 7.5 tons. At these gross weights various different legal requirements kick in. Casa del Camionero has a legal max weight of 5.2 tons, placing it firmly between the two, although most of the legal requirements only kick when it's put to paying work. The larger permitted weight is actually still useful for private use. Knowledgeable readers will quickly realise that 3.5 tons is rather light. Quite so: load a large 3.5 ton camper up with things like water tanks, shower units, electrics, the kids and the family dog, and it can quite easily be illegally overweight.
But, more to the point, these Iveco’s have the highest permitted towing weight of any van in the UK. So when the time comes, that’s what I’ll be using to make money; a trailer.
In this ‘stack, I’ve floated the idea of Merchant Truckers; itinerant traders who will do almost all aspects of certain types of trading, using mobile technology and AI. In other words; they will manage the administration, handle the transport and strike the deals.
And the spirit of Lorryism is that we don't just write about ideas, we have a crack at them as well.
So that's the plan, to start to create a vertically-integrated, individualistic enterprise, bringing as many of the trading tasks in-house (well… in-van…) as possible. Ever since the start of the industrial revolution, work has become productive through specialisation. My thesis is that new tech will favour de-specialisation, that self-contained individuals will be better off as tech and AI start to favour generalism.
I've got some ideas as to how I might put this into practice, in the real World, and how it all plays out will be revealed here.
That will all be in the near future, but in the meantime I'll be reaping the financial benefits of vanlife. It's not that I can't afford the rent I'm paying, it's just that the commitment is a drag on other plans and possibilities. I'm not in this rented property much anyway; spending more than half my time in my employer’s truck, and other times travelling, or staying with relatives. And it’s not like I'm unused to living in a vehicle. I've lived a completely gypsy lifestyle before, when I was trucking across Europe. If nothing else, the lower overhead will let me concentrate on more imaginative projects. If the merchant plan starts slowly - which is highly likely - I'll be more free to do things like write this newsletter. Doesn't it give most of us a little thrill, a little smile from the heart, to imagine a lifestyle that sidesteps the chains of modernity? I think it may surprise the wealthy how unfree many working and middle-class people feel. The ponzification of real estate has played a large part in this. And then legal stipulations created a double whammy for the ordinary person. Owning your own piece of land should be incredibly liberating. You should be able live on it, trade from it, even produce your own food from it. The essential thing is that owning a piece of land should give you options, i.e. freedom. Even freedom to do something completely unrelated. Even create more and better online content. In a world searching for answers, the web is a great resource for any working person who is able to contribute. But then people fall into what I’d a call the “content trap”. Which is where someone has a normal job, and creates content in their own time, then hits the point where the job starts to restrict the content, but the content doesn’t pay enough to pay the bills. And the bills mostly relate to accommodation. The content creator either gives up, or has to put the brakes on the content creation, which might deprive the World of some valuable wisdom. Or they may start to concentrate on making the content more commercial, diluting message the World may need to hear.
In an ideal World, owning a plot of land would ensure that this isn’t a problem. You have it, it’s yours, there’s nothing to pay. As long as he can scrape together enough for some food, our budding online truth-seeker is free to teach the World, if he owns even a small plot of land.
But owning land, in our present age, is nothing like that. Sure, it’s possible to buy a small piece of scrubland, a fraction of an acre, for a reasonable sum, even in the UK. But you won’t be able to do anything with it. In this country you’re not even allowed to camp out in your own vehicle on your own land, not for any extended amount of time. At the same time a property developer- with enough time and resources to lobby local government for a change in planning permission - might buy the larger plot that the scrubland is part of. Then they build cookie-cutter houses there, and soon the same tiny bit of ex-scrubland is now “worth” £350,000, and an ordinary person can’t afford it unless he signs up to debt slavery for half his life. That leads me to an answer I’d give someone about free-markets: I think they’re a great idea. Someday we should try them…
So, for me, the solution is a van. Or at least it is if it’s a problem which needs a solution. As I say, the idea is to expand options, to allow for possibilities. I can see why so many younger people are turning to vanlife. It’s not losing, it’s not being homeless, it’s fully owning your most important asset, your home, and owning it outright. When you think about it, a person with a large mortgage on their home is still basically homeless, as is a person paying rent.
Back in 2003, I rode a bicycle all around Europe (I was fit then!). I started out alone, but met plenty of people on the adventure. At a campsite in Andorra, I found a British couple who had set forth on a similar journey in their VW camper. But I soon discovered, over a meal in their little bus, that theirs was a journey without end. They had no home, in the traditional sense, back in Britain. They worked for a campsite in England for 3 months of the year, then used what little that paid to set off once again around the continent. I never wanted to totally emulate them - I’ve always wanted to be productive - but I’ve always hankered for elements of such a life.
We’ve come to assume being tied to one place is a fundamental human trait, but that’s not always true. And hasn’t always been true. Nomadism was prevalent before the coming of agriculture 12,000 years ago. Perhaps the ties of farming and industrialism are starting to break for some of us. Underneath there are thousands of years of evolved wandering yearning to break free. I was driving in Spain with my kids, along one of those straight roads that seems to disappear into the distance. I found myself pointing to that vanishing point on the horizon and saying “that’s where I live!”
Perhaps that’s my home.
Love the idea of being able to be self sufficient in that way: how does it compare sustainably to home ownership? Petrol? Electric fuel? Pollution?