 I live full-time as an American RV nomad and I'm having a love-hate-love relationship with the book and movie Nomadland. Today I'm going to tell you two things. If I think we're going to see a stigma about this life going forward and if I think there's going to be a crush of new people on the road. Hey bird watchers it's Robin with creativity RV and I know that you guys have been waiting for me to come back for my break. No worries next week I'm starting with a new view cue and back to the regular videos. But today I have got to talk to you guys about Nomadland because I'm having a roller coaster of emotions. If you're new to my channel here's my story. I had never even been in an RV. I hadn't spent the night in one. I came from a corporate job and chucked it all because I had a catalyst in my life like many of us out here. If you want to know more about that I've got videos in the past and blog posts. You can also see a TEDx talk that I did called Why I'm a Nomad. I'll put the link for it below. Here's the deal with me and Nomadland. The book by Jessica Bruder came out in 2017 which is the same year that I hit the road. I worked really hard to get on the road and I had heard some comments from other Nomads that the book was negative and made us look kind of sad and desperate and weird. I had a good thing going and I did not want to mess it up by hearing anything negative so I just pushed it to the side and kept it moving. In 2018 I did a written interview with Bob Wells from Cheap RV Living. He asked me to do some interviews for his channel and encouraged me to start this channel. I did a video series called Be a Nomad, Change Your Life which turned into the book and Bob asked me to come back to talk about that at the RTR in 2019 so I came back and did the opening speech at the RTR that year. I heard some rumors that Nomadland was being turned into a movie and they were actually at that RTR filming and that Bob Wells was going to be in a couple of campfire scenes as an extra. I thought that was cool but really didn't give it much more thought until 2020 when I saw the trailer for the movie and I'll tell you that trailer could have been a home movie of my life. Every place they showed was a place that I had just been like out in the desert at a campfire with friends and at the Laundromat Mall and going down these winding roads that were really isolated only to meet a group of really great friends that I had connected with as a Nomad. Before I cracked open the cover the first thing I did was read some of the Amazon reviews from other people that have read the book and maybe I'm a little bit sensitive but I got a little fired up about some of these reviews because while they gave the book five stars they used words like horse story terrifying cautionary tale sad and I thought oh god this is exactly what I was afraid of but still I sat down and cracked open the cover only to find that I love the book. The writing was spectacular and the research was immaculate and everything she said was true but the more that I read the more aggravated I became. Here's what the book is about. It's about seasonal workers or work campers who are struggling financially and are forced to go on the road and they have to go from really tough arduous labor-intensive jobs all around the country just to make ends meet. It's absolutely true. There are lots of people that have been squeezed by the economy where wages have not gone up but housing costs have and then when the recession hit in 2008 a lot of people were forced to make some hard choices and a lot of those people were forced to go out on the road. Most of the people that she talks about in this book are women. Women are twice as likely to be in poverty as men and on my channel 64% of my viewers that subscribe are women and they're over 55. I've interviewed almost a hundred nomads and I could tell you this story that she's telling rings true but I started to get aggravated because it's not the only story and a lot has changed since she wrote the book in 2017. So I put the book away and went out to the desert out here with a couple of friends into nature went four-wheeling and just tried to appreciate this life which I love. I came back with a fresh eye realizing that this book was written four years ago which is an eternity when you look at everything that has changed in that time because of technology and the pandemic. The number one concern that I have from my viewers on this channel is making a living while they're on the road. Because of this I wrote another book called work from home while you roam the ultimate guide to jobs that can be done from anywhere. What I found is that there are a ton of opportunities out there for people to make a living on the road besides work camping or doing seasonal work like I saw in the book. Now I have an entire chapter on seasonal work with links to apply and how much they pay and everything. I'm not against seasonal work. I'll talk about that again in a minute and why people choose it but I found myself reading the book wanting to reach into it and talk to Linda and Swanky and the other characters and say come over to my campfire and sit down and let's talk about everything that's out there now so you can choose. You can make a living online now or you can be a work camper. You know even Jessica Bruder said in her acknowledgements for a nonfiction book you have to tell the story and then at some point stop even though the story continues and that's exactly what's happened here. We're really lucky right now because for the first time in history we can actually make a living from the road in a lot of different ways and that's especially true for senior women. I can tell you that I did an interview recently with the Lee recruiter from a human intelligence company. They had 153,000 open jobs to do online from anywhere on their website and the vast majority of those jobs were for women over 55. The problem is these women don't even know that those jobs are there. They are and that's what's changed since this book came out. I went back to the book and just kept reading. I have to tell you the book just blossomed. Yes there's a whole section that talks about how workers are exploited and what they have to go through. But then it transitions into talking about all of these nomads that are out on the road and she comes to Ehrenberg and she comes to the RTR and she actually goes out and camps with people and she says in the book that she couldn't figure one thing out. She couldn't figure out why some of these people seem to be in such dire straits but had so much joy and so she actually got a van and went out on the road more to figure out why that was. The thing that Nomadland did in both the book and the movie is it captured this sense of joy that people can feel on the road that I haven't seen in anything else on this topic. It is a new life for a lot of people and there are challenges when you get out on the road. There's a lot that you have to do when you have to do a lot for yourself but you have a chance to experience new places and freedom and nature in a way that most of us did not before. I can speak for myself that has been totally true. Of course the book Nomadland is nonfiction and follows real people but the movie has kind of an every man character named Fern who was surrounded by the real nomads in real life that are in the book which I thought was great but Fern she had a loss in her life that kind of catapulted her onto the road and the same thing was true of me. Now of course Fern's life in Nomadland does not look fun at all. She's living in a van, it's cold, she doesn't know what she's doing and she has to go from job to job to job to make ends meet. With the nomads that I know in my experience and in my interviews most of them do not go from job to job to job. Most of them choose to do these seasonal jobs three to six months a year and then they can take the rest of the year off and chill out. In fact I talked to one of my friends that actually does this to see what she thought of the movie. She said you know I really love my work camping jobs. They can be jobs that I don't necessarily like but I make great friends and I say to myself this job is for three to six months and then I get to go and live the rest of my life I can do anything for three to six months and I thought back to when I felt like I was a prisoner to my paycheck and I hated my job and I didn't get to leave in three to six months. Yeah seasonal jobs in work camping can be hard but it also gives some of us a real sense of control over our lives and freedom that we didn't have before. A lot of people look at a life in a Stixon Bricks house and they think that those people are okay or they feel safe but a lot of people are in debt and they're barely making it but they don't see another way. Now living out on the road is not for everybody. If you're thinking about it you can try it. Some people try it and they decide it's not for them but it does give a lot of us a really cool positive option where we get to live our lives in a way that we never imagined. Now a lot of people might be concerned about the stigma of living in a van or RV full-time and all of us that have gone on the road have experienced this in some way but I'll tell you there are as many stories out here as there are rigs and there are people who don't have any money and they're barely making ends meet and it's tough but I'll tell you sometimes I talk to those people and if they did live in their rig and they didn't have seasonal jobs they would be homeless and living in that rig is actually saving them and they find out that they love it but you also might see some little old lady in a van and you think that's true of her and it's not she might own 10 houses and the guy down from that woman might be a graphic designer or somebody else is grieving the loss of somebody and they're on the road trying to travel for two people and even though there are so many varied stories out here there's still going to be a stigma. In fact I'll tell you that I had a friend yesterday that I've been camping with that ended up in the ER in a local hospital and they don't know anything about her but she's out here for the season in warmer weather like a lot of us are in like the Nevada California Arizona area and she was sitting in this ER behind a drape and there was a new doctor that was visiting from another country and the nurse was trying to explain to him how my friend was a resident of the east coast but was staying out here for the winter and he said a lot of people come out here to live in the desert in the winter because they can't afford a house and it was completely degrading for her while she wasn't feeling well and she was having a health scare she felt like they were looking down on her she felt completely judged which was completely unfair but what are you going to do all you can do is live your life if you want to be on the road and you know be a positive example for other people of how we could actually do this and thrive because there are a lot of us out here that are doing just that and I know a lot of you are like shut up don't tell people how happy you are in this life don't tell them that some people thrive and don't tell them that you like nomad land because then a lot of people are going to come out here and we're all going to be piled on top of each other because everyone's going to want to be a nomad but I'll tell you this nomad land does not glamorize this life sure I think a lot of people will look at the life and investigate it and some people may come out and try it and then leave because it's not for them but I'm not worried about there being a crush of people where we can't camp in solitude the way that we like to if anybody goes online and looks at a map of the public lands in Nevada there's more public land than there is private land and most of that is available for us to camp on for free so I don't think we have to worry about that I recommend both the book and the movie nomad land I thought it captured this life in a way I've never seen before and by the way it ended up that Bob Wells didn't just have a little cameo in the movie he was amazing he had a big part if you didn't know to me he looked like a great actor in that thing and I'm really proud of him I'll see you guys on Sunday for a new view queue I've got so much going on that I'm excited to tell you about until then I hope you're all doing well out there staying healthy have happy travels and be free