Living in beatrice for a month
By Ryan McDermottFor the month of November, Alyson and I decided to live in Beatrice:
Beatrice is a 1976 VW Bus with a westfalia compervan conversion. She belongs to some friends of ours, but they have let us be her caretakers for a while. We love her.
Why are you doing this?
In some senses, this month was a love letter to beatrice, and the time period she represents. One of our friends summed it up really well for us, when he was describing his love for VW busses:
“If you had a VW bus, it meant you could go anywhere. It meant you were free.”
About five years ago, I was working for my dad, and despite it being a great company, where I learned a lot (stuff I should probably write about), where I had supportive, really nice coworkers, I was unhappy. Unfortunately, I made most of my coworkers pretty aware of my unhappiness. On a particularly grumpy day, my dad came into my office, and I explained to him some version of the following:
Me: I feel stuck. I have to come to work every single day for 8 hours, and I feel like it eats so much of my time. Sometimes I just wish I could add up all of my bills for the year, save up that money, and just not have any responsibilities or obligations for that whole year.
Dad: Well what would you do?
Me: I don’t know, probably try and build a software company.
Dad: How much are all of your finances for the year?
Me: Well…I don’t know, my rent, student loans, car payment, utilities…it’s probably like $15k/yr.
Dad: Okay. Well if you quit today, but you have to quit today, I’ll give you half of that. And you can have half of it again in six months, but only if you need it.
Long story short: I took him up on his offer (thanks dad!). We found me a replacement, and after about a month of winddown and handoff: I left. And I built a (small, but profitable) SaaS company.
The effects of that cannot be understated. Because of this newfound freedom, when a friend of mine asked me to take her place teaching in India for a week, I could say yes without hesitation, when another friend offered me a job as the program director of her non-profit, I could say yes without hesitating, when Aly and I want to travel to burning man, or to hackathons, or arts festivals, or anything: we can. It’s meant that I’ve gotten to travel the country shooting flame throwers, building art, talking about education, and interacting with interesting people.
The key to all of this was that for 6 months, I didn’t have any obligations. All I had to do or think about, was work.
To me, that sense of freedom is foundational. It’s what you use to build everything else on top of.
So the reason for doing this was: freedom. Aly and I wanted to pre-emptively know what the answer to the question would be if some dream oppurtunity presented itself, but it required us to move out of our house.
So we moved into a VW bus. We showered at planet fitness, we cooked a lot of beans and sausage in a rice cooker, and we had probably the most productive 30 days either of us has ever had.:w