What's the point of owning a home anyway? Lessons Learned from a 5-Month Camping Experiment

Hood River, Oregon

If you've sat down and spent some time thinking about your values and determined, like I did, that you value living a life closely connected to nature and the outdoors above almost absolutely everything else in life, that decision, that value, will then begin having an impact across every single aspect of your life. One of the places that I found this value exerting its influence upon my life was in my actual, physical living situation.

Committing to going outside and being active every day was one of the first steps I took to better live out this value, but the more time I spent doing just that, the more I found myself lamenting all of the many hours of the day that I was spending inside, stuck in a tiny box. I was staring at a glowing screen all day, squeezed inside four walls, with minimal exposure to the outdoors, save for the few precious moments that I was able to liberate myself from the suffocation of those things we call houses.

The deeper I dove into embodying this value of connection to the outdoors, the further I wanted to take that connection. Eventually, I reached a point where I asked myself questions like, "why am I living in a house, anyway? Do I really need all of these many tiny boxes connected to each other? Do I really need more than just ONE tiny box? How many creature comforts do I actually need in my life? Can I endure a little bit of discomfort? And if so, for how long? Can I continue to work and be productive even during some discomfort?"

And on and on the thought pattern went. These questions snowballed and compounded to the point where I was completely unsure what the point of paying a mortgage on an overly extravagant house was in the first place. If I was so enamored with leaving the house, if one of my primary values in life was getting outdoors, why was the biggest line item in my budget far and away my mortgage?

I know, I know: we have a cult of homeownership here in North America, and questioning the status quo is radically uncomfortable for most people. It takes energy and willpower to question the standard wisdom that's been handed down to you. But I've never been comfortable buying into a belief system handed down from ages past without taking the time to examine it to see whether or not those beliefs and values actually serve me in my current situation, instead of the other way around.

So the question is: What's the point of owning a home, anyway? 

If the goal is to spend as much time outside as possible, if the goal is to explore the world and go on adventures as often as possible, owning a house and paying a mortgage only serves to be a massive boat anchor tying you down to one place, one location, and forcing you to produce an unnecessary amount of income to service that massive amount of debt.

So back in 2018, I decided to flip the bird to living in a house, and exchanged the supposed comfort of a heated home for my glorified tent-on-wheels. I packed my shit up and headed to the desert.

I didn't have a specific plan for how long I'd be camping for or how much of an experiment it would be. And I didn't know how radically that decision would transform my life. Instead, I simply knew what a few of my values were—namely, connection to nature, adventure, and experiencing new places—so I decided to take one of the most logical next steps to live in a way that was consistent with those goals.

That decision to head to the desert snowballed into 5 months spent living in a glorified tent, road-tripping and mountain biking across North America. And from there, the road trip has catapulted into over 2 years of full-time travel, with no signs of stopping in sight.

But if I narrow the focus down to those 5 months spent living in the desert and the woods, here are a few of the surprising things that I discovered.

Lessons Learned from a 5-Month Camping Experiment

You can get used to the discomfort.

There's no two ways around it: living in the woods can get downright uncomfortable at times. I think the main reason there's such a cult of homeownership here in the USA is that we, collectively as a nation, are addicted to comfort.

We need our thermostat set to a perfectly-controlled 72 degrees at all times. We expect to walk to the fridge and grab a cold drink whenever the urge strikes us. Alternatively, we expect to be able to heat anything to a blistering boil in a matter of seconds in our microwave. Clean drinking water is available instantaneously just by pulling down a handle. Someone comes and picks up our garbage at least once per week. Our beds are soft and warm—or firm and cool, depending on how you like it. If you need light to see, well, just flip a switch.

None of these things are guaranteed when you live in the woods. During my experiment, I was residing in a glorified tent and had zero easily accessible creature comforts. While my tent was elevated off the ground, even my protection from the elements was shaky at best. A stiff windstorm could (and had previously) wreak havoc on my rig.

But if you can break the American addiction to comfort, you'll find that it's possible to get tougher, adapt more readily, and live well even if everyday tasks like taking a shower or disposing of trash become much more difficult.

You can take small steps to overcome discomfort.

Sometimes, the smallest tweaks to your process and your daily routine can make the biggest difference in overcoming the small discomforts of living in the woods. As just one example, I found one of the most profound easy wins was to simply keep my own high-quality toilet paper on hand. Instead of dealing with the thin singly ply that's stocked in pit toilets in parks across the continent, having my own dual- or triple-ply paper made even pit toilets feel like my own personal throne.

That, and you don't have to panic if the park is completely out of TP.

You will begin to intimately experience the rhythms of nature and feel the world as it slowly changes around you.

The upside of living in a tent is that you can become much more in tune with the elements and the natural world around you. If a big cold front loaded with moisture is rolling in, you will find yourself viscerally feeling the changes in the air around you. The tone of the wind as it blows through the trees changes. The dew in the morning evaporates at a different rate. So many small things will begin to indicate how the world around you is changing, moving, or breathing at any given time.

You don't need the perfect or most expensive rig to live in the woods full-time.

Too many people seem to think that they need the perfect or most expensive rig to embrace this mobile, nature-loving lifestyle. You see it all the time on social media: the young millennial trading in their comfortable life in a house for the oh-so-trendy #vanlife without ever having tried it out before. Sometimes they've saved for years to buy the van, and other times they simply financed it on a whim. But the problem is, for some reason, they thought they needed to buy a $200,000 lifted Sprinter van before they could trade in the house for the trees.

You don't need to buy a $200,000 Sprinter or a Class A motorhome. You can take the plunge immediately and use whatever gear you currently have at your disposal.

Does the nice van or camper make things a little more comfortable? Sure, of course it does... but think about that addiction we have to comfort. Perhaps spending some time being un-comfortable could be a huge benefit.

In my case, I simply loaded up the little tent camper trailer that I had already owned for 5 years and just hit the road.

You'll still find and create a daily routine.

Even in the midst of discomfort, you'll still be able to find and create a daily routine. I developed a routine for making coffee in the morning, cooking almost all my meals on a camp stove, disposing of trash, finding a place to shower, filling up on clean water, working on and storing my bikes, and so many other daily tasks.

Discomfort and everyday challenges make working slightly more difficult, but far from impossible.

While being able to roll out of bed and walk ten steps into my home office was ultra-convenient, I still found that I was fully able to work well and efficiently while living in the woods full-time. Sometimes that work took place in the camper or at a picnic table, but other times it took place at a library, or a coffee shop, or a co-working space. I thought that finding a way to work efficiently would be the biggest challenge, but it turned out that with a little focus and commitment, I could launch straight over that hurdle.

The "big hurdles" aren't nearly as significant as they appear when you're on the outside looking in.

As with the challenge of working, it turned out that that most of the "big hurdles," the most formidable challenges, aren't nearly as massive as they first appear. Take some time to think about and brainstorm the biggest challenges you think you might face, but then don't stop there. Do some research to see how you might overcome them.

I personally thought a workspace would be the biggest challenge, but a cheap inverter to plug into my car's cigarette lighter combined with the right cell phone plan was the perfect solution. Coffee shops, libraries, and co-work spaces work great as well.

Maybe not having a consistent physical mailing address seems daunting? Check out Anytime Mailbox.

What about storing the gear that you're not currently using? Storage units aren't that expensive (and are WAY cheaper than a mortgage), especially if you do a little shopping around.

Is your job not flexible enough? That might have been an almost valid excuse in years past, but in a post-COVID-19 world, remote work is everywhere.

Maybe you aren't a single dude and instead have a spouse and kids? Plenty of families are living the full-time nomad life, too. Check out @pedaladventures for just one great example—they're currently on year 9 of living this lifestyle.

No excuses.

The opportunities for everyday adventure multiply exponentially when you surround yourself with nature 100% of the time.

One of my main goals with camping full-time was to increase my amount of adventure time. This benefit that I had hoped for? It truly came to fruition!

You have to choose your camping location carefully in order to make it happen, but if you do, you'll find yourself with fantastic mountain biking, hiking, and paddling available directly from your campsite without ever having to get in a car! Even if you do need to drive a few miles, the nomadic lifestyle affords numerous opportunities to constantly explore new trails all across the continent.

You still need to take some time off and learn to relax.

With so much adventure readily at hand, I found it even more difficult to take time off to relax and recover. Thankfully, hammocking is perfect for doing just that. Read way more about the incredible benefits of chilling in a hammock in this recent article.

Owning a house truly is a boat anchor tied locked your ankle.

Unfortunately, during the initial 5-month camping experiment, I was still servicing half of a mortgage, which made the full-time travel gig very difficult financially. I also found myself having to cycle back through Colorado every month or two to take care of things with the house—whether it was moving furniture, making repairs, or something else. Trying to live in the woods and still keep up with the house showed me how much of a boat anchor dragging me down that property truly was.

I have since offloaded it, and while sometimes FOMO strikes, I have barely looked back.

Can you use your property to catapult your nomadic lifestyle forward instead of holding it back? Of course you can. From renting it long-term to cashing in on AirBNB, or maybe even house hacking if you're truly advanced, you can 100% leverage your property to turn it into an investment instead of a liability. The wide variety of options available is outside the scope of this article, but if you're willing to question the status quo and consider alternative options that aren't in the mainstream, the sky is truly the limit!

At the end of my 5-month camping experiment, I found that homeownership was proving to be more of a hindrance than a benefit to me at this point in my life. As I've continued to experiment with a fully nomadic lifestyle, I've found so many additional ways to not only survive but to thrive in the absence of a permanent residence. If you're reading this article and have considered ditching the house, let me encourage you to give it a try. That one decision could radically change your life!