I don't need as much as I thought

I started working young. My first "real job" - where I was putting in about 40 hours a week in the summer and consistently after school and weekends - was when I was 13, working at my family's feed mill. From there, bagging groceries, tutoring, directing traffic and doing security for the police department in college, and various other odd jobs to put myself through school. Between work and school, I've had a full plate as far back as I can remember.

But for the first time since I grew past 100 lbs, I finally took a solid 41 days off from work. (Technically, I was still working remotely, but I was doing paid work less than 20 hours per week. So we'll count it.) This is the first in a series of things that I learned during this hiatus.

Revelation 1 - You don't need all that junk.

41 days is a long time. You can't go nearly that long without the basic comforts of life without being miserable. So when we started packing for an extended time far away from home, we had to make sure that we grabbed the important things and packed them all into our 26 by 8 foot trailer. Yes, you saw that correctly - Everything we needed had to fit in a 26 foot trailer that included a kitchen, full bathroom, dining room table, queen size bed, bunks, and enough space for 2 dogs, a woman, and a man to move around comfortably. I also built an onboard solar power plant for all our energy needs, but more on that in another post.

In the end, we each took the equivalent of about a suitcase worth of clothes, 2 internet hotspots (AT&T and Verizon), 3 computers, some toiletries, food, a couple board games, dog stuff, and a whole lot of tools to fix/build anything we needed along the way. The trailer and the truck bed looked pretty empty, but we thought about it pretty hard and figured anything we forgot, we'd just have to buy along the way. So we took off, leaving a whole house full of possessions behind for the foreseeable future for a socially isolated and safe pandemic getaway. We knew we were headed west and for a good long while, but that was about all the planning we did.

The list of things we missed

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What I learned

As I mentioned, we left an entire houseload of worldly possessions and the house itself behind, keeping just a few things and a "home" that had 150 square feet of living space. And in 6+ weeks away from all those things, never once did I stop and think, "I wish we had that thing we left back home". In fact, not one single time did I even think, "I sort of miss our house". All of the money we spent collecting those things, All the money we were still spending maintaining a house we were thousands of miles away from, and we didn't even miss it. We didn't miss it in even the smallest little way.

Some takeaways

• If you're doing something just for the money, STOP. The amount of stuff you need to be happy is very small. If you're not happy and you're not finding fulfillment in what you're doing, consider finding ways to scale back your life so you can do what makes you happy instead.
• Retirement implications: We had everything we needed so we could be happy in that little trailer. Even all of the electricity we needed to maintain our comfort could be generated onboard. There are a lot of reasons I am nowhere near ready to retire, but money is certainly not going to be one of them. Now that I know I can be happy with so little, that's one thing I'll never stress about.
• How much time have I been spending on a cluttered lifestyle? Too much. (And most of my friends would already describe me as a minimalist before this trip.)

I've got a few other insights I want to post about. Stay tuned. I plan to keep this super informal. I hope the insights are helpful to someone else. But if not, I can assure you they've been helpful to me.