Running Away: The Gen Z Way
By Turi Sioson
At the end of June, my friends and I had spent a long weekend in West Texas, momentarily running away from summer classes and our jobs; we left with few other objections than to linger in the pleasure of good music and pretty views and free time. It was the first time in my two decades that I had gotten a real glimpse of an independent life—not that I was away from the people I love. In fact, I was in frequent contact with my family and in the nearly constant presence of my best friends, but from the mass-marketed version of society that so exists in my hometown, I had broken away, only briefly, from the ties of labor and formal education that feel to me like chains on my creativity and pleasure and joy.
For three and a half days, I felt uninhibited in a way that I could not put my finger on throughout our camping, our cooking dinner, our movie nights, or our long drives through mountains and plains. I was present only as I had ever been on other outings that took us swimming at sunset or painting on docks, wrapped in sun and flowing water and clothes that truly expressed who I am. For several days after I returned from our excursion, I could not place where my frustration stemmed from as I navigated once again through the long days of customer service and discussion posts, contoured with the promise from every non-Gen Z person of a future of the same kind of banality.
And then came the TikToks: first only a few, sparse and with a day or two in between. Landscapes of the grandeur of nature I had felt in West Texas; national parks and daytrips; travel in countries I had always wanted to visit, if only, before, in a vague way: Japan, Oregon, France, Italy. Then they were on my FYP every day: travel tips and remote job hacks and jokes about dropping everything and running away to a new country; a new city—wherever your pleasure and purpose could shine the brightest.
Finally, I realized that the intense yearning I had been feeling since even before my West Texas trip—but certainly after the sudden and intense frustration that had rolled through following it—made perfect sense: I was pining after the “runaway dream,” in which I would be able to quit my job, or drop out of college, and chase after everything that makes me truly creative and happy and full of passion.
But how do I make this happen? How do we, as a generation, escape the lack of stimulation that comes with living in a capitalist society and follow passion rather than pressure for real?
In a way, it’s been done before. Search “travel” or “living in nature” on Pinterest or YouTube and you’ll be flooded by images of millennials living in glamped-out, immaculate-looking vans that certainly cost thousands of dollars. They've chosen this “free” lifestyle over their 9-5 job, or even simply the prospect of one. They stand in expensive clothing in front of waterfalls and on mountaintops; in deserts and forests. And for a dazzling, wonderful moment, the runaway dream seems beautiful, flawless, and easy—so real you could touch it. But if you look a little closer, you’ll notice that nearly all of these images are of white men and women who have come from wealth; if you watch even just a few videos, you will not hear about any concrete way they can afford such a luxurious lifestyle that they have branded as “simple.”
In a discouraging Marie Antoinette-esque reality, the “van life” aesthetic seeks out just that: aesthetic. While I don’t doubt that many, if not most of these people are truly happy and chose their lifestyle based on passion, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable seeing such an exhibit of wealth passed off on the Internet as a humble, easy, and “poor” lifestyle. In reality, they were born from and bred by the abundance of money. The spectacle that “van life” is made out to be cashes in on privilege, wealth, and capitalism as a whole. By showcasing a life that is impossible without the existence of such things, the runaway dream that imagines a breakaway from capitalist ideals and conventions crumbles at our fingertips.
But what bothers me the most about this “van life” aesthetic is the sense of conformity that makes its way into an ostensibly free lifestyle—there seems to be little room for the variation of the passions and pleasures that so make up an individual. While my runaway dream largely looks like nature and small communities, as well as space for me to create and slow down, I have friends whose dreams look like living in big cities with the freedom to create and pursue their art without the weight of cut-throat competition or the worry over affording where they live. And still an even bigger variable, I have friends who simply want to work a simple job, with just enough money to live comfortably and to have time for pleasure, but without the stress of, “Can I afford to work this job forever without starving?”
On the other hand, the runaway dream that is so prevalent at the moment within the Gen Z sphere prioritizes individuality and contentment over conformity and aesthetic. Instead of seeking out what seems shiny and wealthy-looking, the Gen Z runaway dream seeks a life that is not necessarily luxurious, but more so enjoyable, with money enough to have freedom, but not anything more extravagant than that. Furthermore, our runaway dream works through the loopholes of capitalist labor (small jobs while traveling to make just enough money to be happy, remote work, even saving for a while through a traditional 9-5) to make out of it a life that feels more true to ourselves.
The runaway dream is about choosing what makes us happy and what makes us feel alive. It is about choosing ourselves, without the pressure of what others may think of our choices, or what capitalism or society will think of them. Whether this looks like swimming every afternoon in a sunlit lake, having time and a designated space to create, working a retail job that makes you feel happy and fulfilled, or traveling to the ends of the earth, there is no set path to take to achieve it, and the only true objective is to do what feels right.
But what sets the Gen Z runaway dream apart from the “van life” aesthetic is that it is not afraid of a true lack of wealth. We can recognize what we do and do not need for our runaway dream, and have realized that what we need does not require the kind of extravagant wealth that this idea of “van life” demands.
Our small trip to West Texas was only a slice of this runaway freedom I and so many other Gen Z have been yearning for. We did what felt right to us; we chose groceries and activities based solely on what we were craving. And still, it took us money that we had been saving—specifically for this kind of freedom—through months of work at our restaurant job that far from aligns with who we are. This was not a freedom that was built overnight, as brief as it was.
To make a lifelong reality of it plausible, Gen Z is pulling away from idealizing labor with its only reward being monetary; we are taking no pleasure in the overindulgence of extreme wealth. Our runaway dream is messy — it envisions hardships just as much as happiness, something that the “van life” aesthetic often lacks. It envisions a life that breaks down, as much as possible, the societal misgivings that have made a passion-driven life seem like such a fantasy.
But with a little bit of self-awareness, belief, and a choice to put ourselves first, the chase for our runaway dreams does not seem so long. ◆