I still can’t fully tell if this documentary was meant to be an obvious 40-minute parody or if the #VanLife phenomenon is just too ridiculous to be taken seriously. To be real, there’s nothing dumb or wrong or even worthy of being made fun of when people choose to live on the road. It’s actually pretty great because, to the point of this film, the thought that #VanLife has replaced the traditional American Dream of a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence is a testament to the amount of actual wealth and opportunity we have today.
But it’s hard not to laugh with the people who do it all for followers. To Forrest Stevens, the disingenuous nature of a person moving into their van to get thousands of likes and cash a check for it all is worth poking fun at. In fact, he makes a run at #VanLife stardom himself but there’s only one catch: he doesn’t actually live in a van. He consults social media gurus, he picks the brains of Instagram famous #VanLifers, and he even nails the necessities like curating a solid manbun.
“I even tried to capitalize on the trend,” he says. “But I didn’t get many likes. Clif Bar and Kettle brand didn’t reach out to me with a sponsorship deal. For me, it was a great way to travel but a hard way to live.”
So Forrest isn’t the first person to pull the curtain back on the different realities of #VanLife and actually living in a van. And he’s definitely not the first person to point out that plenty of people chose this life long before it became a social media movement. But he makes good (and hilarious) points nonetheless. Like the fact that sometimes the obvious difference between being an unknown vanlifer and an Instagram famous one is just being pretty, skinny, and making sure you’re in the right bikini in all those Instagram posts.
Because as one Youtube viewer points out, “If you just like camping and living in a vehicle but don’t have an Instagram, do you still exist?”
