Confusing your own needs with someone else’s
We live in a camper van and travel around searching for work. It’s a type of life not many could imagine living – especially people with houses filled with modern comforts.
The friends we’ve made have generally had stabile lifestyles. When they see our van and the way we live, they think we’re doing it out of desperation. They try to help, try to give us some ideas how to get out of this situation, how to make it nicer and easier.
We started to think that maybe we should get big solar panels and a dual battery system so we’d have a fridge, a blender and a coffee maker… and maybe some lights installed. While we’re at it – a water pump would make life a lot easier… Not to mention a faster gas cooker and a bigger gas bottle. Also, the pop-top roof canvas has been ripped and repaired a million times, we’d need to change it and the inner roof could be changed at the same time.
“If you put in five to seven grands – it’ll be perfect!”
That sentence finally woke me up. It’s an 80’s car, it would be ridiculous to fix it with that kind of money. So, I started to list the things we absolutely NEED. The list was short and quickly fixed. After 200$, the van was perfect.
What happened to the rest? They were not our needs, but someone else’s.
It made me think about desire – needs and wants. How short conversations with different people had made us feel that we were not living the life we wanted. And that must happen to everyone all the time.
We’re scrolling through people’s seemingly perfect lives in social media and seeing all these different opportunities, lifestyles, jobs, partners etc. It makes us think we’re lacking on something; we’re missing out on things we didn’t know we wanted.
We start to work towards them; putting in money, effort and time. But the day we get those things, we realize we didn’t want any of them, we just thought so. We thought they’d make us feel important and secure and we’d become part of something.
Sometimes it can be hard to realize which needs are your own and which someone else´s, especially when you’re taking a different path than everyone around you. It’s important to stop for a moment in the middle of the hustle of the modern life and ask one’s self if the direction is right. In the end you’re the only one who knows what you really need, you just need to listen.
xx
Travel Thoughts 
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