The “RV Entrepreneur Summit,” held at a mountaintop lodge overlooking Alabama’s Lake Guntersville in the summer of 2019, promised attendees a long weekend of networking with full-time R.V.ers, workshops, and gear training with “brand ambassadors” from outdoor recreation companies. For as much as $300 a pop, attendees—22-year-olds living out of self-built vans, families with children in pop-up trailers, and grey-haired empty-nesters in house-size R.V.’s who hadn’t quite reached retirement and still needed to work to pay the bills—gathered in the lodge’s conference room, swapping Instagram handles and eating energy bars. I was one of them. At the time, I had been living in a van for nearly a year. Here we would learn how to live out a counterculture lifestyle but keep making money while doing it.