LinkedIn's From van life to careers, figure it out as you go covers a couple who have spent several years as VanLifers.
It includes an excellent video that is the most professionally done of any VanLife video we've seen and is well worth watching.
For those not familiar with with the VanLife trend, it refers to the growing number of mostly millennials who have traded in their homes and apartments for life on the road in vans.
Key quote from the article on the featured VanLife couple:
The couple is among other digitally savvy nomads, who have customized Volkswagen Syncros and other vans to live and work on the road rent-free. Some have parlayed their nomadic life into social media fame under the hashtag #vanlife. But Jess and Jorge aren't modern hippies abandoning capitalism. Between their Instagram posts, YouTube videos, blogging and photography, Jess and Jorge are hustling hard from inside their roughly 80-square-foot van.
It's become a bit of a craze and there are millions of #VanLife posts on Instagram, Pinterest, Facbook and Twitter.
These posts tend to show pictures of young, adventurous, photogenic millennials - often with adorable dogs - enjoying the great outdoors in beautiful places.
For example, the picture below is from the blog of the #VanLife Hearnes family and shows them having fun while touring Utah with their dogs.
What these pictures don’t tend to show are the downsides of VanLife.
These include limited access to bathrooms and showers, breakdowns, bad weather, work problems and the wide variety of challenges associated with living in a very small space.
The LinkedIn article and video are somewhat unusual in that they cover both the pluses and minuses of VanLife.
VanLife is part of the broader digital nomad trend. Digital nomads are folks with a location-independent work and lifestyle that allows them to roam the earth working and living anywhere that has a good Internet connection.
Digital nomads have become so common that Estonia and other countries are even considering offering special digital nomad visas.
We’ve long followed the digital nomad trend. The reason is these people are mobile workers on steroids and they provide insights on the future of mobile and distributed work.
We’re just starting a project that includes more research on VanLifers and digital nomads. We’ll report our finding in the coming months.
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