Nomadland by Jessica Bruder

 This is about the book, not the movie. 

It’s a rather sad tale of USA hopelessness in a situation in which the rich are getting a lot richer, and fast, while people are losing the jobs and homes/houses they invested in while buying into The American Dream. The dream is over but the dreamers carry on fantasizing of an unencumbered life free of mortgages, rent, taxes, and debts. The problem is that most of the people in the book are quite old and still have to make some kind of a living by bringing in some income. Although they are out of “sticks & bricks'' stationary housing they have shifted to some form of mobile housing. These, just like the old housing, vary widely. Some with more money have big RVs with the motor and all in one unit. Others have tiny trailers that they pull with a car. Some have converted standard vans, or built something onto the back of a pick up truck. Many have solar collectors to generate electricity which puts them off the grid to a degree, but not off the tit of the gasoline companies. Worse than that is the type of exploitative jobs they have to take, mostly as Amazon warehouse workers. Some owe money on their mobile homes.

   The book goes into detail describing these hellish jobs in which the workers are forced to become part of the Amazon machine in these partly automated vast facilities. The company has a structure for recruiting these transient workers. It’s called CamperForce. The company has them drive in from all over the country to work during the holiday shopping season push. They don’t even have to supply old style company town housing, just lots where these workers can park. But the people have to put up with it being one of the few income options to augment inadequate Social Security monthly checks. 

   Other such jobs are beet crop harvesting and workers who take care of US Forest Service campsites. These campsites, of course, are not managed by the USFS, but contracted out to some outfit that needs to make a profit by overworking the people they hire. Making something that could be a pleasant job in nature into another exploitive trap. It’s the good old American Dream of profit out of the sweat and toil of slaves or virtual slaves. We like to make the masses miserable to protect the interests of “investors”. It doesn’t matter that in the process workers who have no investments, other than their bodies, break down. That doesn't matter because after all humans multiply so there is another sucker, worker, soldier, born every minute.
  

   The author does a CampForce Amazon job herself. Having the option to bail out of it she soon does. She also does some sugar beet harvesting in North Dakota. Both of these gigs are hellish and dangerous and mostly performed by workers in their 60s. Jessica Bruder was in her 30s when she wrote this and she could last at them.

   The main character she follows is Linda May. Linda has a sad story that has driven her to this mobile life but she wants to get out of it. She buys land out in the middle of nowhere desert and wants to build an Earthship house. Something made out of tires packed with dirt/earth. We leave her at age 66 dreaming a never very practical variation of The American Dream.
(Well, she’s even older now and in the movie. Maybe the movie money helped her build her house. Getting over by being pulled out of obscurity, A Star is Born, well, there is alway some hope in fame and fortune.)