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I had no idea the movie Nomadland was the Notnilc’s “Best Picture,” receiving the Oscar. I examine the Notnilc’s interest in the “van life” topic. Is the movie used to promote “van life” or to scare the heck out of people via the movie’s overall dark feel and sad themes? – Matt
I am the no mad nomad. I wonder and I wander. Authentic sadness and authentic bliss is mine. I signed up for the full experience. I saw this movie, it was very emotionally charged. In this realm, I am mostly enjoying the entertainment of people trying to make sense of the nonsense. You are one of my favorites Matt.
I just watched this last month. It was the first newer film I’ve seen in a while & I had very similar thoughts as what you’re presenting. I wondered how & why ‘the notnilC’ would be pushing this with all the accolades it received. I looked & saw most of the people in this were not professional actors & were likely just good people like ourselves. I don’t have any wisdom to drop here on my opinion on what it’s pushing here, I leave that to you. Blessings
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Looks about right,
This situation has baffled me as well. I enjoyed the movie (even watching the trailer made me tear up), I read the book (which is also very good) and then when I saw that it won an Oscar it stopped me dead in my nature-of-reality-checking tracks.
There was a time (around 2015ish) where I was obsessed with tiny home living. I researched the lifestyle, I started getting rid of all my belongings, I had discussions with tiny home builders… and then one day the dream just fizzled out for me.
The logistics of it all (with a hubby and two children also in tow) seemed quite improbable. Mainly I couldn’t figure out where would we park the darn thing. I am still “tiny home curious”, I appreciate the simplicity, not being tied down, the ability to be off grid.
But now with all the emphasis notnilc has been dumping into “minimalism” and tiny homes, the rebellious old-guard nature of my being is wondering what that silly notnilc is up to. My instinct is to ALWAYS do the opposite of mainstream because I can usually see through the trick.
Except when it comes to this freaking movie and the nomad lifestyle. I’m glad you decided to explore this topic. It is a bit of a pickle for those of us reality bloodhounds.
“They” mostly won’t let you build a tiny home anywhere. You must keep your carbon footprint low with a big house, you know. The utter insanity of these weirdos “in charge” piss me off so bad. I tried to build one on my own piece of property and they said no. So, I live in a tiny house in a park now owned by a big holding company or something like that…not a good thing. Doubled the rent for new owners by nearly double. Now no one can sell their homes because no one else can afford to live here. Anyway, I like the tiny home thing. Small home. Big garage. Really. You just need a place for storage mostly. Big hugs from the liberal hellhole of Oregon. At least we still have a lot of pretty trees.
Pardon the redundancy with the word doubled. You know what I mean <3
There are tons of RV parks in the Southwest USA though where you can park a mobile home right?
I’m a house cat. My husband and I bought a $250k “starter home” back in 1998, and here we plan to stay. It’s not fancy, but it’s comfortable, a 60’s California ranch house (a single level, with four tiny bedrooms and two small, full bathrooms). 1800sf. I’m in my late 50s; we raised our son here, and we have enough room for him to stay as long as he wants. He’s almost 28, but he doesn’t make the $150k+ a year to afford to even rent a small studio apartment in the area (VERY high cost of living here). Instead of college, he worked in an industry that interested him since he was 16, socked away everything he made, and in the past year, he’s been developing his own business from the ground up.
My husband makes enough money for us to live comfortably, if simply. We never vacation, we own/drive old cars (the “new” car is a 2010 Ford Ranger), and we rarely eat out. But we don’t have much debt (we’ll probably have a mortgage until we die, but no credit card, medical, or consumer debt), and I help financially support a channel or two and a friend who struggles paycheck to paycheck in a single-wide in Ohio when I can.
Tiny home living or van life doesn’t appeal to me one bit. I have my family of origin here (which is growing, and whom I love), a small handful of close friends, and my roots. I don’t long to travel, don’t need much except food and my hobby supplies (I chose a cheap hobby, thankfully), and I have QoC for a “community”. I think living like a nomad would kill me, though I appreciate some like it.
Thanks Matt and Rob. You guys are the best. QoC people are MY people. 💚
One of the notnilc themes is always “more”. How can there be more with less. Scooters for example, cheap reliable effective means of transportation. Notnilc can’t have that, so it glorifies scooter riding, promotes it even. Promotes it right into Oblivion. Pretty soon a scooter costs 3-4 dollars and are only ridden by guys with ironic mustaches who made a million on Bitcoin.
Tiny house living is not cheap, van life isn’t cheap (I lived in a 14 foot cargo trailer for 5 years). Batteries, solar panels, inverters, fuel etc. I was massively well funded at the time so it went unnoticed.
Perhaps it will make it easier to sign a 20 year loan on a van? Perhaps it will make it easier for municipalities to charge a “transient fee” for van livers (liver cooked in a van, tell me more)
The first steps of regulation are definition . Can’t regulate the nomad life till you define “nomad life”
What is a trailer? A trailer carries a National Trailer Manufacturer’s Association placard, that what a trailer is.
3-4 thousand dollars. 3-4 dollars would be an awesome deal.
lol….thanks for the clarification….seriously could not figure where you were going with that. Great comment!
Yeah. I think one of the obvious points is to now regulate even more harshly against these folks. So many of the videos show the nighttime knock on the vehicle. “Don’t you dare park your vehicle here on the PUBLIC street, son!”
Yes, acclimating the participants to the inevitable boot on their neck.
A better solution would be to just move abroad to happier freer cheaper countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Even Eastern Europe is good. So is Latin America though that may be less safe.
Check the financing. The beard nomad is all about commercialization. How many links below is too many? Now the control system has a mouthpiece, more effective than laws are ideas.
Just part of the notnilcs ‘you will own nothing and be happy’ agenda… Once there vehicle fixes become too expensive….
Most of their actions are multi-purposed. Confusion, achieved by conflicting statements or “facts” is a popular way to steer the crowd and also a preferred tool to hide the true agenda. Wear a mask. Better 2. No, 4! Masks don’t work. Wear a mask.
With the “Minimalist” fantasy, the romantic Freedom Illusion, the “giving life meaning” this movie helps desperate people to move out of their houses and into their cars, giving them hope. This will be a very good way to corral freedom loving sheeples who distrust the system into areas, where they can be easily picked up and put into a tiny home 15 Minute community for “Homeless folks”. Create the problem and be ready for the solution. More and more states and cities make sleeping in your car or overnight camping illegal. Too many homeless people and the crowd cheers because the good government removed them from YOUR lawn.
Also we are in the middle of a war against humanity with a focus on Spiritual warfare. It is not only about transfer of wealth, degeneration, dumbing down and controlling the cattle but also about DEMORALIZATION. Give people hope (MAGA) and crush it. Take everything. Their morals, their money, their faith, their dignity, their family, their sexuality and at last, their HOPE. Then they will welcome the Moshiach. Mazeltof.
My first thought is “they’ll” use this to crack down even harder on folks who aren’t even allowed to park on PUBLIC streets in their “mobile” homes. The truth is given a real choice, if this world was real, folks would’t be living in their Prius’. This world however, is batshit crazy. Thanks Matt. You always make my Sunday complete with Freevoice!
Yes. The Netflix movie will be played over and over with the battle cry “what are we going to do about these nomads” without ever asking if we should do nothing
But in the Southwest USA there are many RV parks and campgrounds where one can park an RV or van. It’s very convenient there.
I used to fantasize about nomad living. That’s the great thing about fantasizing … you don’t actually have to do it. I watched Cheap RV Living quite a bit … then … just after the movie released I saw Mr. Wells strongly promoting the “Action Jaxon” to fellow nomads … I never took a peep at his videos again. It’s all you need to know.
Also this movie was a big promotion for Amazon.
Unfortunately I feel the same way. I will never forgive or forget what “they” did during covid. What makes it Harder is I know I am also being played by the system.
If I know the system hasn’t front yard mined with anti-personnel mines, I’m still zig zagging running out my front door
You can do it by just taking a road trip around America and staying in campgrounds and RV parks.
I won’t waste my attention to the film. If I have to watch her sour puss the hole time. Not even a crack of a smile, very depressing. They want you in smart cities where your easily controled like their farm animals.
A better solution would be to just move abroad to happier freer cheaper countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Even Eastern Europe is good. So is Latin America though that may be less safe.
The melancholic overtures create a melancholic theme intentionally…..the music, waves crashing etc.. certainly creates an overall despair and sadness..plus, they want to promote doubt and the threat of possible alienation with family, disconnection and even “danger” for those considering going off grid and exiting the system, the dark forces must control all groups of society….what if you need a hospital? ..medication etc…don’t forget “you need us…”
Yeah, I don’t know what’s (not necessarily) wrong with me, but I literally cannot watch anything that the movies put out, it just gives me the creeps. Whatever story it is… and I was a grad film student and that was my passion (“before”). It’s just rubs me the wrong way, I don’t mean to be extreme, it just takes away my humanity.
isn’t it obvious?
the monsters would just love to see everyone dispossessed, and homeless
van life is not a picnic
except for a few very peculiar people, it is a tragedy
here, the machine romanticizes the ‘freedom’ of vagabond life, leading the most vulnerable further away from more coherent lifestyles/livelihoods
I spy zabruder before 9/11. I’m just one of those people.
This lifestyle has nothing to do with freedom. It is a survival game.
In my early 20’s I took a 2 week trip with my best friend. we drove from northern Canada through the US and into Mexico. It was an amazing time. We lived in a little truck, cooked meals on a little stove outside, slept under the stars. It was only 2 weeks, but the feeling I get when I think of that trip is pure freedom and love. The feeling I got watching this trailer and listening to the sounds is the exact opposite. Maybe the whole point is to make people feel this way. The only way I can describe it is a line from a writer I love…”bony and severe”
sadly i cant curse in the comments, although it’s called freevoice. i just wanted to say that the movie is some kind of experiment because it is very ugly, with sad colors, main actress looks ultimately depressing, with short hair, no feminine aura. but maybe that’s the point, life is like this? but van life is supposed to be freeing? it’s just ugly life on bigger roads.
Thanks for reviewing the film I sent you Matt. It has a lot of depressed people in the film, but they are real and not actors and have a lot of deep meaningful quotes and insights in the film. It reminds me of “depressive realism” the concept that depressed people see reality more accurately than happy people do.
Don’t forget that the Oscars are given out by NATAS, which is Satan spelled backwards! No joke. Look it up.
Yeah, or the reality that many of us will soon be homeless transients? I mean, they do control the weather which has been climate changing rapidly in the homeless direction.
Reality bloodhounds!?!?!? Bwahahaha! I love that. So funny.
So Matt Foley was a notnilc prophet.
I have far too many thoughts about this so I’ll try to keep this brief. I did the van life for 5 years starting in 2016. It was the best five years of my life. I went to Bob’s RTR gathering, traveled to the most beautiful places, felt peace and freedom and met wonderful friends on the road. That being said, I had a nice savings account and wasn’t living on a fixed income like most of these folks. But I think it is about showing society there’s a different way to live but get ready because this is your future. Living as a single person is getting harder and harder. Hyper inflation is coming, power outages, etc. you cannot escape it as it is inevitable. I think the NOTNILC is using the film to condition us into less is more because we will eventually own nothing and try to be happy under their ultimate control. Also, I never saw the movie because I was living that life, didn’t need to see it.
Don’t forget Matt, that the Notnilc is very generous in allowing us to see the full film on YouTube for free too. lol
I noticed the same thing Matt. The people in the film are supposed to be happy and free. But they seem kind of gloomy and there’s a dark depressing vibe in the film too. I didn’t get that. Now I see why that might be if the Notnilc is discouraging this lifestyle. Btw I’ve lived this lifestyle for a few months before back in 2006 when I did a long road trip around the Southwest USA, and it was happy and adventurous, not gloomy like this.
A better solution would be to just move abroad to happier freer cheaper countries like the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Even Eastern Europe is good. So is Latin America though that may be less safe.
I started taking an interest in this topic years back when it first started becoming popular. I follow some people who live the lifestyle and it’s extremely draining, stressful and difficult when you don’t have direct access to your parents credit card… From what I’ve been seeing recently, you can’t park these anywhere to sleep without being woken up by some tyrant cops or security demanding that you leave. You also can’t park it on the street. Matter of fact, 99% of incorporated & even unincorporated communities have an ordinance that you can’t put a tent or RV on a piece of land that you own…
I spent some time as a long haul truck driver. The average person doesnt fully understand just how expensive living on the road is. A shower at a truck stop is $20, a slice of pizza is $10, paid and preferred parking is starting to become a thing at truck stops now…. It’s not unrealistic to say a van lifer could sleep at a truck stop, but it’s also frowned upon to take up a spot meant for a trucker… some places will again, ask that you leave. Truck stops are also extremely dangerous and undesirable places to be. I didn’t even like being at them.
Really the only place you can park a RV/van is in parks or campgrounds. Staying at parks is insanely expensive, many of them don’t have places to get food. Gas for an RV or a van is going to cost you as much as rent, if not more…
Living in a space like that is not good for the average human. It can be fun for a little bit, but it gets old and depressing very fast. Especially when it’s out of necessity.
Your van or RV is going to have maintenance issues… now you have to figure out where to stay while it gets worked on.
How are you going to make money? That’s the most important part of this. There’s not nearly enough remote working positions out there that actually pay enough to meet the demands that this lifestyle will require. You’ll have to sign up for a workplace sharing program and it’s not going to pay nearly enough to cover all of the expenses that come with this living arrangement.
Notnilc is pushing this lifestyle extremely hard because it’s simultaneously rejecting this exact type of lifestyle by having no parking arrangements, infrastructure and zoning laws alone. Pushing this way of life onto people in already desperate situations, is going to make their situation even worse than it was before…
Poverty has never been more criminalized in major cities and towns than it is today. Unless you are a trust fund kid with a really nice van and endless money to dip into so you can stay at all the parks and resorts you want to… than this is a completely miserable and horrific lifestyle to live wrapped up in a very cozy and glamorous looking blanket thanks to all the influencers living this very comfortable lifestyle on mommy & daddy’s money.
Every form of nomadic lifestyle has been criminalized or made nearly impossible to live if you’re broke, thanks to the creeps in control here. Van life is no different.
I lived in this rig for 5 years on the road , roughly 41 states. Staying in RV Parks ain’t were it’s at, I lived mainly on federal land and wildlife management areas. The lifestyle change is what everyone leaves out. If you’re trying to figure out how much gas it takes to run your generator 24/7 or how many acres of solar panels it will take to run the AC and electric clothes dryer, your in the wrong zip code.
A primitive campground in the big Cypress everglades recently went from free to 29 dollars a night. Long term in a campground is low living.
To me boondocking is were it’s at. I just bought an adventure motorcycle and am bumming my way across Florida under Even more primitive conditions. Not everyone can live in a tent, or bath under a pitcher pump .
Kinda cramped.
Gone are the days that Matt can dismiss Mandella critics and the loads of falsification as “trolling” https://mileswmathis.com/mandela3.html
Hey Matt,
Sorry for this message that is all over the place. It’s not fully related to this video, but maybe there’s something there..
I’ve just spent 4 weeks on the road in my van, covering around 6,000 km from Germany through the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary to the Romanian Black Sea and back. While the trip was more of a vacation than a permanent lifestyle, I can share my personal insights from the experience.
There’s so much to share that I don’t know where to begin, or how to put it all in words. But to make a long story short, I will outline some main points like this:
This route isn’t very touristic, and I came across very few other travellers along the way. That gave me the chance to experience authentic local lifestyles, cultures, and nature up close. (They are pushing tourism and it will be another trap soon).
I’ve seen rolling green hills, dense forests, and tidy villages in Germany; medieval towns in the Czech Republic; castles rising above the valleys in Slovakia; vast Hungarian plains; and the wide flatlands of Romania leading all the way to the Black Sea.
What struck me, though, is how much of it feels strangely sterile. Everything seems domesticated or modernized, some areas more, some less, but what we often imagine as the richness of past European culture has, in many ways, been erased. The land itself doesn’t truly feel like it belongs to the people anymore. Instead, it feels tied into global systems of finance, where ultimately all roads lead back to stock exchanges and centers of power abroad (without naming a few).
It’s a sad realization. Maybe that’s why the face(s) in the movie seems burdened—worried, tired, or quietly miserable.
And when you ask people about their history—about the wars, communism, revolution, capitalism, or the cycles of poverty—most don’t seem to have a clear picture of what really happened. The ones that do are just some old forgotten people.
The architecture, too, reinforces this feeling. Whether in Hungary, Slovakia or Romania, the styles are strikingly similar, same as in Germany, France, Italy, or Spain, with only slight variations in motifs. Even across the ocean, in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, or the United States, you can see the same. How was this one pattern been stamped across continents and we don’t know? Yeah, it was the roman empire, they say.
It makes me wonder if something similar happened in the Americas—an erasure, a rewriting, a forced uniformity. I don’t know exactly what, but I have seen it with my own eyes and not some IG reel. The pattern is there, and once seen, it’s hard to unsee.
I tried watching this movie awhile ago and just got bored…couldn’t get thru it.
I lived in squats with a group of like minded individuals during the mid to late 1980s thru to the early ’90s. It was great at the time; we were all young and able bodied…not worried if we had to use candles, go without showers etc…it was the first time in my life I felt part of a ‘family’…we would find rows of empty terrace houses etc, once we lived in an old orphanage (there was around 40-50 of us there as it took up a whole city block, even had a wall around it)….but, and those of us still around have talked about this; it’s not something you could do as you get older…