First off, allow me to introduce myself; My name is Jon Meyer. I am a filmmaker from the Northwest. I've lived in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon for most of my life. A couple of years ago I achieved my dream of making films for a living largely in part by making the decision to live in a van. Living in the van not only helped me to achieve this goal but helped me to realize that I had achieved this goal. The "van life" as I call it, provides a constant daily reminder to what is actually important in life and that the amount of money you have is not a scale to how successful you are, or should I say that the term "successful" is not defined by how much money you have but how efficiently you use it. If you have no money and still make a film you are successful.
When I was young my father used to say to me, "Find something you enjoy doing for work and never work again". I thought I fully understood what he meant but now I have an expanded interpretation of it. Before I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker I pictured a scientist working on an exciting new formula that would explain how stars blew up and then collect his paycheck at the end of the day, go home to his mansion (because he's a badass scientist of course) and continue to work on his stars project with a huge smile on his face. Now I see the same thing applied to filmmaking only the paycheck only shows up about one third of the time and as long as I'm not hungry or cold and not working a dumb job where I stare at the clock my whole shift then the saying applies. When you spend a lot of time at a job you don't like then there is time of your life that you don't like. I don't like that. Life should be enjoyable no matter if you are rich or poor. you're only the age you are at that time once in your life, might as well not hate it. It sounds like an oversimplification -and it is, but that's exactly what you need to do sometimes to see what's happening to you, oversimplify your situation. Are you satisfied? Are you happy? or are you waiting to be satisfied and happy? Throughout my childhood and into my adult life I saw a pattern among people around me; as soon as they made more money, they spent more of it and were always struggling. Seeing this, I decided that I would make it a goal that as soon as I made more money I would just keep spending the way I had before and thus always be ahead. Well, easier said than done. My problem wasn't the lack of self control in my spending but rather I just couldn't figure out how to make more money. So I decided to spend even less than I already did and that involved a few serious sacrifices.
When I was young my father used to say to me, "Find something you enjoy doing for work and never work again". I thought I fully understood what he meant but now I have an expanded interpretation of it. Before I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker I pictured a scientist working on an exciting new formula that would explain how stars blew up and then collect his paycheck at the end of the day, go home to his mansion (because he's a badass scientist of course) and continue to work on his stars project with a huge smile on his face. Now I see the same thing applied to filmmaking only the paycheck only shows up about one third of the time and as long as I'm not hungry or cold and not working a dumb job where I stare at the clock my whole shift then the saying applies. When you spend a lot of time at a job you don't like then there is time of your life that you don't like. I don't like that. Life should be enjoyable no matter if you are rich or poor. you're only the age you are at that time once in your life, might as well not hate it. It sounds like an oversimplification -and it is, but that's exactly what you need to do sometimes to see what's happening to you, oversimplify your situation. Are you satisfied? Are you happy? or are you waiting to be satisfied and happy? Throughout my childhood and into my adult life I saw a pattern among people around me; as soon as they made more money, they spent more of it and were always struggling. Seeing this, I decided that I would make it a goal that as soon as I made more money I would just keep spending the way I had before and thus always be ahead. Well, easier said than done. My problem wasn't the lack of self control in my spending but rather I just couldn't figure out how to make more money. So I decided to spend even less than I already did and that involved a few serious sacrifices.
When I first started networking around Portland in 2009 with other people in the film community I learned an important lesson early on; there are many people who want to make films for a living and aren't able to land enough paying gigs consistently enough to pay their bills so they end up being categorized as hobby filmmakers because of two reasons: #1, They have a job they hate that has nothing to do with filmmaking that takes up much more time than they have to make films. #2, their films aren't any good because they have a job they hate that takes up all their time that has nothing to do with making films.
At that time in my life, I had a job at a doggy day care and directed a comedy web series on the weekends. I was definitely one of these people who sit around at the bar complaining about the lack of good paying film related jobs around town while losing sleep at night full of self doubt to whether I could even cut it if such an opportunity were to present itself to me. How could I gain experience if I'm at my job all day? I could do it on the weekends and slowly get better little by little but that's what the competition does and there's a lot of competition. Everyone I talked to seemed to be waiting for a large sum of money to be invested in them somehow so they could plummet themselves into a project and quit their job. I didn't have any leads to such an event and like I mentioned before, how would I know what to do with the money even if I got it? I already cut down most of my living expenses to almost nothing because the Doggy daycare payed minimum wage but there was one big one that still haunted me at the end of every month: rent. The thought of living in a van to avoid this bill began weighing heavily on my mind. As I began to think more seriously about it, all the logistical problems of making the change in lifestyle began to present themselves one by one.
At that time in my life, I had a job at a doggy day care and directed a comedy web series on the weekends. I was definitely one of these people who sit around at the bar complaining about the lack of good paying film related jobs around town while losing sleep at night full of self doubt to whether I could even cut it if such an opportunity were to present itself to me. How could I gain experience if I'm at my job all day? I could do it on the weekends and slowly get better little by little but that's what the competition does and there's a lot of competition. Everyone I talked to seemed to be waiting for a large sum of money to be invested in them somehow so they could plummet themselves into a project and quit their job. I didn't have any leads to such an event and like I mentioned before, how would I know what to do with the money even if I got it? I already cut down most of my living expenses to almost nothing because the Doggy daycare payed minimum wage but there was one big one that still haunted me at the end of every month: rent. The thought of living in a van to avoid this bill began weighing heavily on my mind. As I began to think more seriously about it, all the logistical problems of making the change in lifestyle began to present themselves one by one.
Problem #1: what was I going to do with all my stuff? Answer; sell whatever I can, give away whatever I can, throw away the rest, and never look back. I think back now and I can't even remember what took up space in my old apartment although at the time it seemed very hard to part with a lot of my possessions. I think I had an orange chair I really liked. Who cares about an orange chair? I don't anymore.
Problem #2: Where would I shit and shower? (Peeing is easy, there's bushes everywhere). Answer: Gym membership. Yes, it's adding a bill when I'm trying to eliminate them but $35 a month is nothing compared to renting even the cheapest apartment and as a bonus you get a gym! There were times when I reflected on this "bonus" as I stepped out of the Jacuzzi and walked over to the sauna after explaining to my worried mom over the phone how I was able to get through the cold winter living in a van. I chose 24 hour fitness mainly because it was open 24 hours, it also happened to be the cheapest one in town and had the most locations. Of course the gym membership isn't the only place to take a shit at 3 am, there's always gas stations and Subway.
Problem #3 How will I eat? Food is a tough one. Living in Portland certainly made this easier as there are healthy options for very cheap at local restaurants around town. The trick here is to find the real deals and exploit them. Happy hours, Burritos, a good breakfast sandwich at a coffee stand, are great things to have over and over again to get full for three to four dollars a meal. I didn't go out for every meal. I kept a lot of snacks in the van and had my handy propane camping stove. One pot, one pan, one plate, you get the idea. There's a lot you can do with a little camping stove. The hardest part was cleaning up because water was usually in limited supply. I learned how to wash a dish with hardly any water in the dark. I never had to worry about getting rained on when I did dishes because I learned that if I put the dirty pan and dish on the roof when it was raining, by the morning I'd just dump the water off and they were clean. Thanks Mother Nature, you're my dish bitch.
Problem #4 Where do I Park? If you're lucky you have a friend's house with a level driveway who's really cool. I was not so fortunate, besides that's not really living in a van, that's living in a van parked in your friend's driveway. Completely different. One is bold and free the other makes you a cheap mooch. So where was I? Ah yes, "Where am I?" That was the question I found myself asking myself almost every morning. See, the trick to sustaining the van life is to find a new place to park every night. You don't want to wear out your welcome anywhere because after all, it is in fact illegal to sleep in your van parked on city streets. Cops are not something you want to deal with because they will eventually start to remember what your van looks like and then you're really screwed. Worse yet, you'll get a note on your door like the one I got once. I guess I should mention now so my stories make more sense that my girlfriend and fellow filmmaker; Rachel eventually moved into the van with me (which is a whole new blog post about how that works). Rachel and I had the van parked in the same location in a neighborhood for about a week once because we were saving to fix the broken transmission when we got a note on the door. It said "It's time to move on or we'll make you wish you did". A little ambiguous, kinda threatening, definitely not friendly. We pushed the van down the street and around the corner which was not easy and it didn't entirely solve the problem. When the van was running fine (which was most of the time) we moved it every night. We eventually made a mental list of some good spots that were out of the way in industrial Portland or on a street that had houses on only one side for some reason, but even then we kept them in rotation. My favorite spot was overlooking a bluff into a nature preserve with the city skyline just beyond. It wasn't far from a great cheap breakfast place and we never got hassled- I like to think largely because we stuck to our rule and didn't over use it.
Those are the big four problems to overcome. The list of unique things you have to deal with when living in a van goes on and on but that's why this won't be the only entry into this blog. As you can see, "the life" is not for everyone but it's one that at the end of the day when your full and cozy, you feel quite accomplished. That feeling is something I've grown to treasure greatly because those are things I had previously taken for granted or even entitled to. I'll leave you with a music video I directed for the band "Whalebones" which features the very van Rachel and I lived in. I feel of all the videos that we shot that included the van, this one captures the spirit of "the life" the most which is to me complete and joyous freedom, and like the lyrics, an intentional oversimplification.
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