Traveling Cowboys: Kicking off Fulltiming and the Dreamy Lifestyle of a Nomad in North America - Starting in Canada

This is Serious

I've counted every hour I've spent commuting to and from work. In my thirty-long working years thus far, while committed to the soul-destroying act of a "rewarding corporate career", I clocked more kilometres than most. Three hours a day. Fifteen hours a week. Sixty hours a month. Seven-hundred-and-twenty hours a year. A full ninety, eight hour work days on the road, every year! Two-thousand-and-seven-hundred "rewarding" days of my life staring through the windows of a commuter car. A lifetime lost!

As the days clicked by, I wore out cars. I sacrificed my time, to be amongst people I deplore. I did "work" with little to no value, without recognition, so that I can have and afford the "expected lifestyle" for my middle-class family. Every day I asked, "Is this meant to be life?" until one day I proclaimed, "This cannot be it!" 

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DO YOU YOU WANT YOUR DESTINATION OR BUSINESS FEATURED?

It was a lifestyle that took seventy cents in every dollar I earned, for direct and indirect taxes. The remaining thirty cents I paid towards extortionately high and never-ending loan interest and fees to banks for accommodation (mortgage), transport (vehicle finance) and insurance. With the responsibility for four dependents, I lived for the welfare of the government and the profits of the banks, and for the privilege to borrow a small amount back on my high interest and low fee credit card to feed my family and fill a house with trolly loads of meaningless stuff. A home located in an artificially crafted "lifestyle community" or suburb.

The house I lived in belonged to the bank and what I was allowed to do with it was determined by the city or town. Even the insurance company prescribed what I can and cannot do with supposedly "my vehicle". Starting and operating a business was even harder, but a story for another time.

Inevitably, anyone in my situation - which is an increasingly more significant number of people - come to realise that this cannot be it! There must be more to life and better things to do with my time in a place and space I want to be, that is mine, and where I am in control and can choose, where I can hold on to what I make and can live with what I earn. Where I can work and spend time with people, I actually want around me.

Observations

So far, I've migrated through three continents looking for this place and life, and came to realise it may be nothing more than an elusive dream. Or, is it?

Is the dreamy digital nomadic lifestyle pre-empting what so many people have lost and are hoping to attain, ultimately again? Are technology and mobility finally putting it within reach for us to go and live and wander. To go to places where we want to be, instead of where we have to be. Can we go where we are valued and where our experience is needed? Is the life of a Fulltimer a way to ultimately be free to live more with less?

My generation will probably never see retirement. When we read the newspapers, we realise that there probably won't be money left in the public purse for pensions when we clock around sixty-five. Why then delay the inevitable. Get out. Hit the road now. Live!

As we wake up beside the ocean or in a forest next to a lake, will birdsong or crashing waves become the rhythm of our routine? Will we finally be free from the daily grind and "ideal life" the Baby boomers craftily "left us"? Is home-anywhere the salvation for the Generation X'ers, to live and do what we love. Will we finally be able to say, this is it!

The Two Cowboys invite you on our journey as we learn how to deal with the challenges of the self-imposed nomadic lifestyle.  Come with us to explore and enjoy the spoils along the way, as we explore a new, and hopefully better way of living. The house is for sale. The storage container packed. The RV stocked. The maps rolled out. The dart is thrown.

See you on the road, fellow travellers.

Hendrik van Wyk

Home-Everywhere Cowboy

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Photos

Two Cowboys Van

Back from Hiatus and Hurting

It is the Year 2015!

... or is it?

State of Mind

The last entry in this blog was in 2013 when I called out IT Managers for the poor job they do. Naively, I was hoping for some recognition that there is a preferred practice for Management in IT, and that as Managers we should strive to do better, building on established and verified wisdoms.

Now, two years on, things are even worse. More waste, denial, and all round simpleton stupidity is as rife as always in this business of IT. Hence, a new Blog name: "This Cannot be IT!" 

This industry has no shortage of satire. However, my own career mind-space has deteriorated to the point where I am on the brink of distancing myself from a twenty-year career, to take up ice cream vending at a small beach in Mexico. Call it a midlife crisis, but I cannot fathom perpetuating the delusion one more year. It is not funny to me anymore. This is my requiem.

There is no way one can continue with another decade in the same vain: Dancing the "corporate dance", quoting the buzzwords, nodding the head in manufactured agreement, thanking the backrubbers, despising the backstabbers, sitting in endless meeting after time wasting talkfest (meeting), all while being expected to keep the seat warm and to "remain nice" (This one particularly irks me!). I once commented to a colleague that middle management acts like a troop of baboons: "Grooming each other". With this mind image, I've not been able to look at meetings in the same way ever again.

A blog post got me fired before (guess which one?), and I am probably going to upset a few people, personally and corporately, with what I am about to post. The next Blog entries may completely alienate me from colleagues, all future association, and IT related income. But, unless I call it out (removing the names to protect the innocent), I feel I am merely perpetuating the pain - my pain. It is driving me nuts! 

For You

Maybe, just maybe you will find my rants amusing. I hope to entertain you. Maybe you recognize truth in it, identify with it, and like me, naively belief it can be addressed if it is called out. Who knows, maybe you have a story of your own you may want to share in anonymity. This can be the "Snowden Files of Corporate IT Idiocy". 

Why do it, you may ask? 

Here's the answer: If one gives oneself out as an expert in a field, it is one's duty to purge the field from charlatans, mediocrity and stupidity, while contributing to a body of knowledge for all its benefactors - customers and colleagues alike. Maybe, by calling out the Emperor's Clothes, someone else recognizes it for what it is. Maybe, there are opportunities where the good can be preserved, and the sacred be restored. If not, see you at the beach...

Hendrik van Wyk