Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.

The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country.

The last free place in America is a parking spot.

(On her blog, Silvianne Wanders, she also characterized the transition like this: “A not-quite-retirement-age baby boomer gives up her sticks ’n bricks former miner’s cabin, her three part-time jobs, and her attachment to any illusion of security this tattered remnant of the American Dream might still bring to her tortured soul. The goal: to hit the road for a life of nomadic adventure as the Tarot reader—Shamanic Astrologer—Cosmic Change Agent she was always meant to be.”)

Her options for work would dwindle with age, rather than broadening to reflect her years of experience.

“We’re facing the first-ever reversal in retirement security in modern U.S. history,” she explained. “Starting with the younger baby boomers, each successive generation is now doing worse than previous generations in terms of their ability to retire without seeing a drop in living standards.”

Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime. Author James Rorty noted this during the Great Depression, when he traveled America talking with people forced to seek work on the road. In his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, he was dismayed that so many of his interview subjects seemed so unshakably cheerful. “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe,” he wrote.

America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould.