What Do I Want My Life to Look Like?

So...just what is my ideal life?

I think I may have been one of the few people who actually LIKES meetings. In my old job world, I always looked forward to most of the meetings that filled up my calendar every day. It was a time to exchange ideas, talk over plans, debate different possible approaches and/or generate new ways of thinking and solving problems. In the best meetings I got to throw around some amusing anecdotes. A witty rejoinder or two.

In short, meetings fed the social beast in me.

But, now, those meetings are no more. I spent the first two months of my "Gap Year" riding solo across the country, so no meetings were going on during that time! Now that I've been home for about a month and trying hard to both minimalize my life AND, simultaneously, generate new income streams, I spend most of every day alone in my house either working at the computer or cleaning/organizing/selling. No meetings happening in my house either, so my former constantly-full world of meetings and social contact literally evaporated overnight.

And now I'm not only wondering whether or not I can't handle being alone most of every day in this fashion, I'm also wondering if I WANT to be alone most of every day in this fashion.

And, in the middle of the night last night, that question woke me up and kept me from going back to sleep for hours. And, in trying to answer it for myself, I began to see that the REAL question I needed to answer for myself is "what does my ideal life look like?"

Everything I've had in my mind thus far consists primarily of either 1) what I DON'T want to do (i.e., be tied down to a specific work location I have to be at physically all day every day, go back to a job in corporate America, etc.), or 2) a now-too-vague idea of what I would like to do (i.e., make money from writing in some way, or live a "flexible" life, etc.).

All of this thought and quandary came to me last night because I had read this article at RootsRated about something called "Dispersed Camping."

Hmmm...might this be what I want my life to look like?

Essentially, dispersed camping is when you camp at un-improved sites along the backroads of Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Forest, or Wildlife Refuge Area lands (or their state-run equivalents) FOR FREE. Yep. For free. And even though there are usually limits on how long you can stay there (a typical limit is no more than 14 days out of 30), those limits are plenty lax enough to, essentially, allow you to camp for free throughout the entire year if you are willing to drive around a bit.

So, theoretically, my only expenses under the "dispersed/free camping" model (if I choose that route) would be, roughly: health insurance, car insurance, gasoline for the car, maintenance on the car, car registration, cell phone bill (which would also perform as my major source of internet access), food and entertainment (e.g., Netflix account, some books for my Kindle, etc.). All that means it fits my new attempt to drastically lower my expenses.

But how lonely will it be? Can I manage that?

Not sure at all what the answer is to that.