I spent my twenties hitchhiking the world, with not even a van, I was often sleeping in my tent or at mosques and gurdwaras. Along the way I made a lot of conne

I spent my twenties hitchhiking the world, with not even a van, I was often sleeping in my tent or at mosques and gurdwaras. Along the way I made a lot of connections and I learned several languages to proficiency. Hitchhiking is, after all, talking to people every day, often relative elites in their countries if they own their own car. That international experience eventually got me steady work, to this day. My tree-planting, fruit-picking, busking, or Christmas-lights-rigging friends generally managed to move on to very respectable careers, or simply living from renting out property they bought -- if you were making a couple of hundred euro a day, but living on 5€ as a shoestring traveler, you could eventually buy a flat and begin the real estate investment game. We all frequently joke about how bourgeois we have become today. That said, my circle was all Eastern Europeans, and things might be harder for USA Americans where cost of living is high and blank stretches on your CV are viewed with suspicion.