Nomadland Quotes

“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.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“THERE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN ITINERANTS, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like: Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute? For many the answer seemed radical at first. You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick-and-brick domicile for life on wheels?”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“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.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“A deepening class divide makes social mobility all but impossible. The result is a de facto caste system. This is not only morally wrong but also tremendously wasteful. Denying access to opportunity for large segments of the population means throwing away vast reserves of talent and brainpower. It’s also been shown to dampen economic growth.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The last free place in America is a parking spot.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The truth as I see it is that people can both struggle and remain upbeat simultaneously, through even the most soul-testing of challenges.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“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.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Someone asked why do you want a homestead? To be independent, get out of the rat race, support local businesses, buy only American made. Stop buying stuff I don't need to impress people I don't like. Right now I am working in a big warehouse, for a major online supplier. The stuff is crap all made somewhere else in the world where they don't have child labor laws, where the workers labor fourteen- to sixteen-hour days without meals or bathroom breaks. There is one million square feet in this warehouse packed with stuff that won't last a month. It is all going to a landfill. This company has hundreds of warehouses. Our economy is built on the backs of slaves we keep in other countries, like China, India, Mexico, any third world country with a cheap labor force where we don't have to seem them but where we can enjoy the fruits of their labor. This American Corp. is probably the biggest slave owner in the world.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Wages and housing costs have diverged so dramatically that, for a growing number of Americans, the dream of a middle-class life has gone from difficult to impossible. As I write this, there are only a dozen counties and one metro area in America where a full-time minimum wage worker can afford a one-bedroom apartment at fair market rent. You’d have to make at least $16.35 an hour—more than twice the federal minimum wage—to rent such an apartment without spending more than the recommended 30 percent of income on housing. The consequences are dire, especially for the one in six American households that have been putting more than half of what they make into shelter. For many low-income families, that means little or nothing left over to buy food, medication, and other essentials.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“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.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The capitalists don't want anyone living off their economic grid.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Some call them "homeless." The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they've adopted a new word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as "houseless”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The most widely accepted measure for calculating income inequality is a century-old formula called the Gini coefficient. It's a gold standard for economists around the globe, along with the World bank, the CIA, and the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. What it reveals is startling. Today the United States has the most unequal society of all developed nations. America’s level of inequality is comparable to that of Russia, China, Argentina, and the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“And in a culture where economic misfortune was blamed largely on its victims, Bob offered them encouragement instead of opprobrium. “At one time there was a social contract that if you played by the rules (went to school, got a job, and worked hard) everything would be fine,” he told readers. “That’s no longer true today. You can do everything right, just the way society wants you to do it, and still end up broke, alone, and homeless.” By moving into vans and other vehicles, he suggested, people could become conscientious objectors to the system that had failed them. They could be reborn into lives of freedom and adventure. ALL OF THIS HAD A PRECEDENT.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“And there is hope on the road. It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself.
A bone-deep conviction that something better will come.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“After the New Deal, economists began referring to America’s retirement-finance model as a “three-legged stool.” This sturdy tripod was composed of Social Security, private pensions, and combined investments and savings. In recent years, of course, two of those legs have been kicked out. Many Americans saw their assets destroyed by the Great Recession; even before the economic collapse, many had been saving less and less. And since the 1980s, employers have been replacing defined-benefit pensions that are funded by employers and guarantee a monthly sum in perpetuity with 401(k) plans, which often rely on employee contributions and can run dry before death. Marketed as instruments of financial liberation that would allow workers to make their own investment choices, 401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism. Translation: 401(k)s are vastly cheaper for companies than pension plans. “Over the last generation, we have witnessed a massive transfer of economic risk from broad structures of insurance, including those sponsored by the corporate sector as well as by government, onto the fragile balance sheets of American families,” Yale political scientist Jacob S. Hacker writes in his book The Great Risk Shift. The overarching message: “You are on your own.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“vandwellers are conscientious objectors from a broken, corrupting social order.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“a vast majority of us vandwellers are white. The reasons range from obvious to duh, but then there’s this.” Linked below the post was an article about the experience of “traveling while black.” That made me think: America makes it hard enough for people to live nomadically, regardless of race. Stealth camping in residential areas, in particular, is way outside the mainstream. Often it involves breaking local ordinances against sleeping in cars. Avoiding trouble—hassles with cops and suspicious passersby—can be challenging, even with the Get Out of Jail Free card of white privilege. And in an era when unarmed African Americans are getting shot by police during traffic stops, living in a vehicle seems like an especially dangerous gambit for anyone who might become a victim of racial profiling. All that made me think about the instances when I could have gotten in trouble and didn’t. One time I got pulled over at night while reporting in North Dakota. The cops asked where I was from and recommended some local tourist attractions before letting me off with a warning. In general, people didn’t give me grief when I was driving Halen. I wish I could chalk that up to good karma or some kind of cosmic benevolence, but the fact remains: I am white. Surely privilege played a role.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“the Amazon encampments began to seem more and more like microcosms of a national catastrophe.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Introverts Unite: We’re Here, We’re Uncomfortable, and We Want to Go Home,”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“People come and go in your life. You don’t get to hang onto them forever.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“AT THE SAME TIME Empire was dying, a new and very different kind of company town was thriving seventy miles to the south. In many ways, it felt like the opposite of Empire. Rather than offering middle-class stability, this village was populated by members of the “precariat”: temporary laborers doing short-term jobs in exchange for low wages. More specifically, its citizens were hundreds of itinerant workers living in RVs, trailers, vans, and even a few tents. Early each fall, they began filling the mobile home parks surrounding Fernley. Linda didn’t know it yet, but she would soon be joining them. Many were in their sixties and seventies, approaching or well into traditional retirement age. Most had traveled hundreds of miles—and undergone the routine indignities of criminal background checks and pee-in-a-cup drug tests—for the chance to earn $11.50 per hour plus overtime at temporary warehouse jobs. They planned to stay through early winter, despite the fact that most of their homes on wheels weren’t designed to support life in subzero temperatures. Their employer was Amazon.com.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Sameer and LaVonne were not naive. They know that, in the eyes of the law, they are homeless. But who can live under the weight of that word? The term “homeless” has metastasized beyond its literal definition, becoming a terrible threat. It whispers: Exiles. The Fallen. The Other. Those Who Have Nothing Left. “Our society’s untouchables,” LaVonne suggested on her blog.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Swankie arrived at an RTR session wearing a T-shirt that said “Introverts Unite: We’re Here, We’re Uncomfortable, and We Want to Go Home,”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“Many hoped life on the road would be an escape from an otherwise empty future.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“reason Amazon can take on such a slow, inefficient workforce,” noted one itinerant worker on her blog, Tales from the Rampage. “Since they are getting us off government assistance for almost three months of the year, we are a tax deduction for them.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The top 1 percent now makes eighty-one times what those in the bottom half do, when you compare average earnings. For American adults on the lower half of the income ladder—some 117 million of them—earnings haven’t changed since the 1970s.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“(It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.)”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“roughly the same interior length as the covered wagon that carried Linda’s own great-great-great-grandmother across the country more than a century ago.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“401(k)s were part of a larger cultural drift in America away from shared responsibilities toward a more precarious individualism.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century