A person who spent nearly six years living in a converted Sprinter van wakes to a sharp knock on the door, the kind of interruption that becomes routine when your home has wheels and no permanent address. Van life has marketed itself as an escape from convention, a visual shorthand for liberation and adventure splashed across social media. The reality, for many who actually live this way, reads differently: a precarious existence marked by constant displacement, legal harassment from local authorities, social loneliness, and the grinding exhaustion of never quite belonging anywhere. The knock itself carries weight. It represents the friction between the romantic narrative that draws people into van conversion and the harsh day-to-day experience of inhabiting a vehicle in a world designed around permanent structures and fixed addresses. For those who enter van life with genuine idealism, the gap between the Instagram version and the actual lived experience can feel like exile rather than escape, trapped not by walls but by the absence of them, moving constantly but never arriving.