I lived out of a backpack for two months on a Pacific Crest Trail hike. I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism, and could henceforth live happily without a lot of stuff and conveniences.
Not so much. Now a couple of decades later, I've got a house and garage crammed with stuff. Yesterday I had a plumber here working on a leak, and this morning I have no running water, and here I am bravely holding back tears. My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.
You couldn't survive with just a backpack if other people "overcame their materialism" and didn't own all of the capital that allowed you to survive, like providing you your equipment, food, knowledge, and emergency rescue if it came to it.
Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism, or in common parlance, a first world problem. It is a luxury that cannot be indulged by poor societies.
The good news is, it took me nearly 20 years before I started taking hot showers for granted again. It really did make me very grateful for a lot of things.
But I’ve also had similar thoughts to you.
I watch a lot of hiking videos of the PCT etc as one day I’d like to walk it.
When I watch those videos, and when I see people on social media telling folks to “drop out of the system, be free.” I can’t help but wonder exactly who is going to prepare their dehydrated meal packs for them.
Absolutely nothing wrong with taking such trips, made me a better and more grateful person, but it’s not an alternative lifestyle.
This perspective reminds me that when people ask, oh you grow your own food and have food animals, it's like living off grid? their perspective is that farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries. there are many high-tech inputs for all types of modern farming, such as chemicals (even if they are organic chemicals), fuel, machinery, seeds, infrastructure, knowledge, financial instruments, and a market. in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe...
> in order to live off-grid, first you must invent the universe...
Nobody is reinventing the universe, they just want a buffer.
A buffer is a well made item that you can repair yourself, so you're not forced to purchase a replacement.
A buffer is a shoebox with a lifetime supply of your favorite shaving razor.
A buffer is a garden, a pantry of canned goods, a few hens to lay eggs for you.
Each of these buffers insulates the bearer from the effects of supply chain disruption or even unemployment. Walmart could be out of eggs and razors -- but you'll be fine for quite some time, even if you didn't incubate your own chicks or make the razors by hand.
> farms get their input from the ground and sky, but this hasn't been true in centuries
Yes, industrial scales require industrial inputs, but a few hens will happily yield you a few eggs a day while living off your garden scraps and the insects they scratch up. And their waste returns nutrients to the soil -- a boone for a garden.
There might be some version of a future where robots take care of managing the industry for our benefit in a post-scarcity setting, allowing us humans to live as simple a life as we want, knowing that when a material need arises the robots will be willing and able to quickly fulfill it for us.
I don't think that's where we're headed, but I like imagining.
I grew up watching Star Trek and its replicators ("Tea, Earl Grey, Hot"). So a core part of me is excited about this ideal future world where we wouldn't need to work to sustain ourselves, but would be free to use our time to explore the universe, or learn, or make art, or manage a vineyard.
To me this vision of us being able to do whatever we want, while machines are available to take care of our necessities, to the extent we chose to rely on them, is almost heaven-like.
And for a prehistoric context, according to researchers such as James Suzman, earlier in human history, we were a lot closer to this ideal than we are now [0].
Chief O'Brien is the underappreciated hero of Star Trek making Picard's lifestyle possible. I'm happy to see his hard work, often crawling on all fours in awkward spaces, got highlighted more in DS9.
Or in other words, there were no automatic maintenance machines in the Star Trek universe at the time, it was all handwork still. Manufacturing and food prep was done by machines which solves some part of it I suppose.
I think if you look closely it was just hidden behind various structures, like e.g. hiring seasonal workers from abroad, housing them in your own (substandard) buildings, and cutting their wages by the amount of rent that you charge so their take-home is well below minimum wage. But they tolerate it because it's still better pay than they can get in their home country.
While slavery exists in various forms (wage slavery, prison labor, etc.) it is still important to make the distinction between those and the extreme form of chattel slavery that existed from the 16th to 19th century. People, and all their descendants, being literal property, able to be tortured, raped, and murdered with the same legal status as a couch tossed in a dumpster, is not the same as modern versions of slavery.
> Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism
It's like kink-shaming being someone's actual kink.
Criticizing "hedonism" is its own kind of hedonism because you are overindulging yourself in your own sense of pride and smugness for "being better than everyone else"
Not that the author of TFA is doing this, but claiming that you have overcome materialism while at the same time posting about it on instagram with your latest iphone, recording yourself on insta360 cameras, with your apple watch-recorded heart-rate superimposed on your videos is a bit silly.
Poor societies are perfectly capable of criticizing hedonism. I don't see what's luxurious about criticizing the many examples of absurd resource waste through luxury good consumption.
> It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.
Not sure if I'm missing a joke, but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down. Regardless of positive (running forward) or negative (going backward on the treadmill) life changes, your happiness will probably stay relatively consistent because you're on a treadmill and there's nowhere to go.
The live out of a backpack lifestyle is definitely a unique way to experience the modern world and I'm sure it's fulfilling for the author, but you can even tell in their post that life caught up with them somewhat and they needed to start staying in one place a little longer in order to maintain social relationships. Their linked post about walking every block of Manhattan and tracking all of their movement since 2015 feels like the exact opposite of a minimalist lifestyle and it seems to me like they live out of a backpack not out of some anti-materialism lifestyle, but instead just as a practical way to fuel this obsession with traveling and tracking.
I admit, I've seen the author's Instagram story about walking 100k steps in a day in NYC and watched the whole thing because it's interesting, but I also take that and posts like this with a grain of salt. I'll happily take my horde of shit I need to get rid of in the garage over obsessing about how I can optimize tracking my every movement.
>Not sure if I'm missing a joke, but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down. Regardless of positive (running forward) or negative (going backward on the treadmill) life changes, your happiness will probably stay relatively consistent because you're on a treadmill and there's nowhere to go.
That's not the point of the treadmill analogy.
It's rather that you need to keep walking to maintain your stationary position, just like on a treadmill.
Meaning the level of headonism you become accustomed to fades/blunts with time, and you want more, so you need to keep moving forward to stay at the same (hedonic) position (level).
What the parent said, then, is valid: "climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless", being on a hedonic treadmill is our default psychological state. But to slide off and accept less hedonic level is very difficult.
rockostrich says >"but the whole point of the analogy being a treadmill is that there's nothing to fall down."<
Spoken by one who obviously has not fallen on a treadmill! Allow me to correct your misunderstanding:
Falling on a treadmill is almost precisely the same as being drunk and disorderly and falling while facing the door of a saloon: that is, as if two thugs had grabbed your arms and thrown you unceremoniously and bodily out the door legs first and face down. Meanwhile you are (unsuccessfully) struggling to right yourself for some unknown reason [it's like a reflex response].
Not a nice experience: it taught me to always use a treadmill that had the safety clip that stops the machine if you move too far.
As for the comparative experience (being thrown out of a bar by thugs), the less said, the better.
Perhaps the joke is that the valence of going backward or forward isn't equivalent. IIRC, some studies show that people will generally accept smaller gains to avoid the possibility of loss. Eg, loss has a greater (negative) emotional impact than equivalent (positive) gains.
> I don't think it's reasonable to compare the risk of suffering a large loss with the risk of missing out on a large gain. If your annual income is $N, missing out on a gain of $N is bad, but not nearly as bad a suffering a loss of $N.
- A comment I saw elsewhere on HN today
It's quite rational, in many cases, to consider loss of an object X worse than gain of X. A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.
Isn't this the accepted advice for investment. Putting money in something that gains X% consistently with years of proven sustained growth vs putting money in something with potential 100X% growth but could give you negative growth if it fails has always been the advice in long term financial planning
> A less rigorous example I like to use: it's far easier, and unequal, to kill a person than revive a person.
People's intuitions aren't going to work right for situations that are impossible. I don't think you should use that example. (Or if you mean medical revival from the edge of death, then it's very difficult to visualize a "kill" that's actually an equal amount of damage.)
And things you own are fungible while people are not, which is itself enough to ruin the analogy.
It also relies on all your intellectual and creative persuits being digital in nature, otherwise all you have is the social and the travel.
The lifestyle appealed to me too and I even worked towards it, but I don't think it could be a full time thing for someone who loves making things, "building a life" does in a sense require some permanency past your laptop.
I don't know if you use some sort of safety treadmill but on many, you will fall if you don't/can't run anymore. There's your metaphor for life. Also, running on a treadmill is/can be viewed an image for not moving forward despite all the running you do.
Yeah, I thought the treadmill image was about having to keep running just to stay in the same place (a Red Queen’s race) rather than anything about falling down.
> My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.
For me, in situations like this the frustration comes from having invested so much into something that isn’t delivering what it was supposed to.
For example, when my 20 year old car broke down it was an inconvenience, but I could also shrug it off because I got my money’s worth out of the car long ago.
If an expensive brand new car broke down I would be inconvenienced, but the situation would be much more frustrating because I spent so much on a new car to avoid these issues.
When you are at home, you expect to have running water, on a hike, you expect not to and plan around it.
But there are things you expect while on a hike that are unlike your daily life at home. Things like your day job, traffic, pollution, etc... If you had to share your trail with diesel trucks and get regular calls from your boss, you would probably be upset, even if that's what you have every day at home.
Yeah, when we stop moving, it's so easy to start hoarding.
I lived in Mexico for 10 years with just two duffelbags of clothes and essentials. I could carry both on a plane unchecked and be anywhere with nothing left behind, and I loved it.
Now I look around me in my apartment I share with my girlfriend and have things I wouldn't have even conceived of, like a gaming PC with two monitors (for what??) and a closet full of clothes as if I don't wear the same 5 things.
I met a family who had just moved to Wisconson from Italy last week. The four of them (Mom, Dad, ~14yo son, and ~12yo daughter) packed everything they were going to bring with them into a backpack and two checked bags each. Incredible! What would you pick?
I have a garage and a shed (OK, fine, it's a 24x36 barn) and a basement and a home office that barely contain the enormous quantity of my stuff at home. And yet I honestly think the highlight of this summer was waking up to the sunrise on one of the remotest parts of the Appalachian trail through the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with no possessions that wouldn't fit in a 22L ultralight backpack - including several of the same items as this guy's kit.
On the one hand, most of the stuff is replaceable, "fungible" if you like, rather than sentimental. On the other, I keep it because I like to have certain capabilities, like cooking and auto repair and home building - I can't fit a tablesaw or pressure washer or food processor in a backpack; I've got a rack of 24 giant totes in the garage with painting supplies and plumbing supplies and bike parts and specialty auto repair tool cases and on and on that each occupy more volume than the one backpack this guy lives out of. I also recognize that this is a colossally inefficient way to allocate things among a group of people: I'm not going to pay a painter $1500 to do a crappy job to repaint my bathroom when I can do it myself with far greater quality for $100 in paint and a couple hundred bucks worth of tools in a giant tote, and neither are most of my neighbors, but this means that a sizeable fraction of people in the neighborhood live around our own personal totes of painting supplies.
If I was going to pay someone else to build and repair and maintain and clean the house/apartment/condo/hotel that I live in (when I'm not in a tent, that's only about 5% of my time), and to take care of the cars and bikes that I ride in and on, and to cook the variety of food that I eat, and on and on, I would have a lot less stuff. If I bought tools to do these tasks that I would use once and then sell/give/throw them away...that would be unaffordable for me. One of the lessons that my Dad passed down to me is to never buy a thing unless you have the resources in time, price of consumables, tools, and space to clean it, maintain it, fix it, and store it - those are real costs beyond the sticker price of a new toy.
Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
>Where does the money come from that allows one to sleep in hotels, ride in rental cars, travel in airports, and eat in restaurants for years on end?
If you keep your standards modest, the math isn't as bad as it intuitively seems.
A $100 hotel per night is the equivalent of a $3000 mortgage/rent. And if you're living out of one bag you don't necessarily need that and probably have cheaper options like hostels (or tent camping) available.
If you're working a software job or have worked such jobs long enough to have a few million in assets gathering interest, the cost of living isn't prohibitive.
At no point was this positioned as a "for everyone" approach. It requires resources and compromises. None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
That said, the cost is not significantly different from other forms of living. The average rent in SF/NYC/Seattle/London/etc. is sky high as well.
>None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
For western standards they're not particularly expensive either. The most expensive things are the Macbook and the iPhone, and like 30%-40% of the US population has one or the other.
> None of the gear in this article is particularly cheap.
The $4 baseball cap isn't bad :) Darn Tough socks are also arguably also pretty cheap over a lifetime of use since the company mails you a free replacement pair if you wear one out
I feel like the real problem is tying one's purpose to employment. If you can't find value in your life without someone telling you what to do you should take some time off work and reflect deeply on that.
You don't have to sit at home in retirement. You can go out and be involved in any number of communities - volunteer, join local government, go do fundraising for a cause you care about. The biggest difference there is that if you're not enjoying it you can just leave and not worry about how you're paying rent.
I certainly feel a lot better than where I was latterly. Would have preferred some projects that got a bit sidetracked for various reasons. Overall, pretty happy not having a full-time job. As I clean some things up though, definitely looking forward to having a more scheduled (if part-time) plan.
Can work for money or not, but if you are and your employer creates unacceptable or undesirable conditions you can immediately say Fuck You and just go do something else without worrying about covering the necessities of life.
Nah. That's not how it works. I could retire, but choose to keep working. The idea that you can simply step out is based on the idea that you don't need work.cbut in my case I need it for its social aspects and to stay motivated to do things. I still have the same issues as other people where in the mornings I just want to stay in bed. But I still go to work. Because I know it's ultimately a better choice.
It means you get to choose what to work on, instead of being forced to do work you don’t want to do to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.
sorry if this comes across the wrong way, but you don't have to be retired. there's plenty of purposeful things you can find to give your life meaning. Given that you don't need to be paid, there are even more opportunities that could benefit from your expertise that you've built up over your career or careers.
Different people make different choices on how to spend their money. Some spend their money on cigarettes, or sports season tickets, or modifications to cars, or collections of things. Some give most of their spare money to their church or a charity. Some send money off to relatives. Some travel.
Hotels wherever you are probably aren't $100 a night.
If you have a mortgage below $1000 you have something that almost no one in a western nation will ever see again. Congratulations, but your anecdote is irrelevant to basically everyone.
The current 30 year fixed mortgage rate is about 6.3%. It should probably be higher. A $1000 payment would mean a loan for about $160000 - significantly less if property taxes and insurance are included in that mortgage payment. There are very few places in the world with a significant number of available jobs where most people can buy a house for that.
Let's look through the midwest and throw a dart at Akron, OH. You're within commuting distance of Cleveland, you've got a university and an airport, there are probably jobs.
Property taxes are 1.8%. Home insurance is hard to estimate but let's pretend $1500/yr. Average home sale price is around $137K. That puts you closer to $1200/mo, and most places are far worse.
Yeah, a 28yo on a 'permanent holiday' has a very different life than someone like you who is doing, say, renovation work in the house you own. They are opposite stations in life in many ways.
As for your final question, I was living in a cheap country. Rent was $200/mo with roommates. Taxis/Uber was cheap. Food was cheap. I made a modest wage in software.
There’s nothing like the pleasure of idling in a pointless MMO on one screen while half-watching youtube autoplay on the other. Alternate Monster with White Claw and you’ve got peak hedonism.
You missed the geekbar and the penjamim. For max effect also put on a twitch streamer in a different game, listen to imported pop music or edm, and idle in a discord. Oh and have a collection of fidget toys on your desk.
You can’t even carry one duffel bag unchecked on a budget airline anymore, unless its a very small one. Some of the cheaper airlines even charge extra for overhead luggage.
That might be true for domestic US flights, which I don't have experience with, but every airline between US and Mexico, or inside Mexico, has an option for 1x carry-on and 1x "personal item" where the personal item just needs to somewhat fit under the seat in front of you.
This goes for Mexico's budget airline Viva Aerobus too.
I cooked. Everywhere I've lived had a pot, pan, cutting board, knife, etc. And I'm sure I bought some so-cheap-its-disposable kitchenware from time to time.
I have a load of crap I've accumulated over the years, but I try to regularly look at and consider everything, with the aim of simply imagining life without it. I'm reasonably confident that I could get rid of most of it without missing it much if I had to - but for now I'm still holding on to them in case they become useful again. It currently costs me less to keep them than to replace them in the future.
I used to do the one bag thing while travelling until I had more disposable income and could afford taxi rides, baggage fees and all of that.
I used to own only things that I could move on my own and fit in a normal car, until I had more disposable income and hiring movers became a non-issue.
I still try to maintain non-attachment to material things but I now welcome enjoying material things in a functional way. For example, I own a ton of kitchen gadgets and that allows me to make interesting food, but I'm not married sentimentally to any particular gadget.
> I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism, and could henceforth live happily without a lot of stuff and conveniences.
Same. Exactly the same.
I have often reflected that I have never been as happy as when I had the least stuff, either.
I often wonder if it’s a) correlation or causation and b) whether the stuff is caused by dissatisfaction or the dissatisfaction is caused by the stuff, or both.
Either way, I’m currently undergoing an intentional downsizing in my life, toward minimalism. Not the kind where I use it as an excuse to buy (more) expensive minimalist gear either.
I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in. Replacing them is far from my mind, but prising them out of my fingers is a very real challenge. It’s hardly backpack living, but it’s definitely moving in that direction.
As always, moderation is important for any normal person. I think that applies to minimalism as well. Use it to cut unnecessary stuff out of your life, but unless you're some outlier then it's probably not good to try and live the most minimalist life that you can without causing some terrible mental health effects along the way.
> I’m shedding hobbies and interests that I have because I believe that they’ve become distractions that I bury myself in.
Maybe you just haven't found the right hobby? Hobbies should feel rewarding, not like a distraction.
And perhaps? For me, the reward comes from the learning. (Who would have thought, being a software engineer by trade).
Luckily my brain has a self-invalidating cache, but my home, not so much. Perhaps I will find the right hobby, but it should not be something that involves the accumulation of things, because the things weigh a hidden cost of possession. It’s this hidden cost that hurts, like a tax, an inefficiency of the mind, or being. It’s insidious because it’s almost impossible to attribute the friction with the possession, because you’re often not actively dealing with it, but it’s there. It’s like, you know you have 32gb of RAM, but for some reason you’re only working with 20gb but you can’t inspect what’s stealing the other 12gb. It’s only after removing things from disk, do you start to see the RAM getting freed up, and then you begin to appreciate the extra mental resources.
Not sure if you have a background outside of software engineering, but as someone who got a degree in mechanical engineering and then shifted over to software engineering I've landed on home/car maintenance as a pretty good base hobby to fall back on. There's always more to learn, you can do most of it with a pretty limited set of tools, and it has the added bonus of improving daily life.
This may be a bit specific to me since I bought an older house and car in the past year and they require a bit more TLC. My partner and I painted all of the rooms (tools are just paint, brushes, and rollers). I've replaced almost all of the outlets and switches, including putting in a few zigbee switches (Sonoff ZBMINIR2s to be specific) since we have no overhead lights in any of our rooms and the switches don't control the right outlets... The only tools for that work are a screwdriver and a wire stripper. We also hung some cabinets in our living room and put up some bookshelves (made easier with power tools, but possible with hand tools). When it got warm, we did a bunch of work outside including some brick edging (bucket, mason line, and a trowel) and a fire pit (shovel, level, rake, and tamper).
Cars require some more tools but you can do pretty much every bit of maintenance work with a standard set of wrenches, a jack, and jack stands.
Everything just sits against the wall or in a toolbox in the garage. It's a big 2 car garage but it fits a home gym set-up, a TV on a cart, a workbench, a bunch of furniture that we need to get rid of on FB Marketplace, and there's still room to pull in a car (mine is in there right now since I'm changing the spark plugs).
Away from home, I quickly find myself lamenting all the time I spend washing all my dishes, cookware, and laundry. Nothing is ever completely dry, and if you are tent camping you spend 30 minutes striking and 30 minutes pitching every day.
I enjoy the outdoors but it’s also a great reminder of how much I love my dishwashing machine. Repairing it might take a few hours every few years, but it saves far more time on net.
I've been practicing this from a different perspective. It's not necessarily bad to have stuff or buy stuff, but you have to spend just as much time getting rid of things and evaluating their continued usefulness as you spend shopping and buying new things.
In tech terms, if you have a queue which you only ever add items to, well we all know what happens.
This second part of the process is overlooked, and particularly because our corporate overlords don't make any money from this careful consideration and management of our lives and the items within it. At least with my parents generation -- the boomers -- they went all in on purchasing with never getting rid of anything. Like a dragon and its hoard. Looking at craigslist estate sales is so crazy, because you see someone's lifetime of absolute junk they spent all their time accumulating, but obviously no time getting rid of anything. In fact, they just died and made it someone else's problem to deal with it.
I believe any free space we have will be taken unless you actively fight for it. And while it is hard to maintain free space, clearing up taken space is even harder -- the discussion is usually what to put instead of something.
> I got comfortable with it and told myself that I had overcome my materialism
Vervaeke's "Meaning Crisis" talks have interesting things to say about this sense of the world between modes of "having" (material) and "being" (existential).
Fromm's point is we get mixed up. We try to satisfy our being needs within
the having mode. We suffer from "Modal Confusion". Think about how much our
culture is organized around this because it serves a lot of market interests
if I can confuse you, if I can get you to try and pursue your being needs
within the having mode.
It's wild how fast we adapt to comfort, and how quickly the baseline shifts. One minute you're thrilled to drink creek water through a filter and sleep on rocks, and the next, not having running water feels like a personal apocalypse
Maybe one good thing about the torture of living in NYC is you get used to the torture of living in NYC.
My very small, very expensive apartment has had no running water throughout the work day for the past two weeks because of water main construction (which I get woken up to at 7am every day). There's a jerk chicken restaurant next door to my apartment that blasts music all day long outside. Roaches and mice and rats. Long crowded subway commutes. I do hate this life in various ways, but I guess it toughens you up and you get used to it.
Earning good money is magical, and having so many services available within strolling distance (or at most a subway ride) is magical. Noisy neighbours, vermin, and unreliable water supplies are problems that should be fixed, but there are good reasons so many people choose to live in cities.
There are things I can't think of my days/weeks without. So for
> In 2015 I got rid of everything I owned that didn’t fit in a laptop backpack
There go my badminton rackets, cricket bat, and cycle. I couldn't care less about everything else :)
(To be fair, the rackets may possibly fit into my Osprey 45L. Never tried.)
On a more serious note: How much does health-care certainty factor into such travels? I am someone who doesn't have a family. So if a sudden death comes, I couldn't care less (I mean as of now - in advance), but I am perennially scared of falling sick and possibly needing care and hospitalisations, and when travelling (or without a base i.e one-bag kind of setup) and then there's at least the allergies, it becomes such a nightmare if you live in a country that doesn't have universal health care and is decidedly third world irrespective of the GDP.
I am asking because when people blog about such plans and minimalism, the gory details of behind-the-curtain things are often left out, maybe not deliberately.
Yes, this was a long distance hike, it isn't practical to carry multiple bags. The backpack also included tarp, sleeping bag, food, fuel, water, stove. Roughly 5 days between resupply stops. The supply stops are often quite remote, far away from healthcare, so you would rely on the kindness of strangers for transport.
Maybe, but as someone who's done a 4-month backpacking stint, I was over it after 1 month, so I think even just that amount of time is enough to make an impact psychologically. By month 3, I was acclimated to it, but still eager to be done with it.
(As an aside, the experience actually made me less enthusiastic about nature and gave me a deeper appreciation of civilization. Never in my life did I have such deep gratitude for having a flat paved sidewalk to walk on.)
After several weeks I got to a campsite that had a picnic table. It was such a pleasure to have a place to sit upright and prepare my dinner. I'll never take one for granted again. After getting used to doing everything on the ground a table and a bench are a luxury experience.
We're in a mode where we're 'camping' with a 5th wheel trailer. It has COMPLETELY altered my travelling experience in ways I never expected. Being in Nature, with a clean bathroom and warm shower and cold beer makes the experience amazing.
More in line with this thread: Our house is full of stuff. It's a long story that ends up being: four adults living in the space that holds two comfortably.
Having the trailer lets us spend time in a relatively uncluttered environment. IT's a reset that lets me not get quite so worked up about the time I spend not-camping.
I thru-hiked the PCT in 5 months 10 years ago. Same experience. I remember eating on the trail 2 bricks of instant ramen for dinner every day and being utterly content. It was the most raw form of living I've ever experienced.
Not so much. Now a couple of decades later, I've got a house and garage crammed with stuff. Yesterday I had a plumber here working on a leak, and this morning I have no running water, and here I am bravely holding back tears. My inner dialog is "this is unacceptable!" It turns out that climbing on the hedonic treadmill is practically effortless, but sliding down it is full of splinters.