Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom

by Ken Ilgunas

And while I yearned for new experiences, I recognized that every year I was getting more and more into debt and becoming less and less free.

I’d once heard that we are nothing but our stories. Forget the blood and bones and genes and cells. They’re not what we are. We are, rather, our stories. We are an accumulation of experiences that we have fashioned into our own grand, sweeping narrative.

It was a question that hit me like a hockey puck to the back of the knee—the one body part my equipment didn’t cover—because it reminded me of the one thing I’d neglected to prepare for throughout my college education, which was learning an actual skill.