https://www.youtube.com/@norgatherintobarns/
I’ve been watching this Youtuber called “nor gather into barns” since yesterday night, and just now I finished all of his videos. I feel this urge to recap everything that I’ve learned about this person, and to try and list it out. Or to write something about this person.
We don’t know his name, we know he is currently 27 as of last month.
He doesn’t have a home, or permanent residence. His main work is as a transporter; he usually drives other people’s vehicles from one state to another within the US, oftentimes along with the requester’s pets as well. With the money he makes, he likes either spending it on travel, or more recently, on gambling playing poker.
His father is Korean, and I believe his mother is Irish. He had a video of him introducing one of his father’s favorite dishes to cook, kimchi bacon. He had a video of him crying while talking to his mother, in which he inexplicably but perfectly switches to an Irish accent (I thought it was maybe an audition side honestly, of a script from a movie I don’t know about, but I didn’t find anything that matched), which is where I deduced his mother’s background from.
He mentioned then how he wanted to be held by his mother, but at the sametime feeling apprehensive towards seeing her again - “three fucking times you visited me, and for what, to inject this darkness and misery into my mind”. In the same video, he mentioned how he doesn’t know if he would be able to stay in one place for the rest of his life, even if he quit the transportation job which necessitated his frequent traveling at the moment. In a different video, he mentions how he’s thinking of wanting to start a family and raise children.
He was apparently married before, and had stayed for a while in Arizona with his significant other. He mentioned in a different video that Bisbee, Arizona was one of the few places in which he had stayed for an extended amount of time in his adult living life.
He spent the first two years of his life in Germany. He then went back there; he was couchsurfing in Berlin about half a year ago, and met a girl there, whom he confessed deep feelings for but did not have them reciprocated.
It seems his phases of settling down in one place are correlated to if he’s found a girl he likes. In France, I believe he lives with a girl named Inez for 2 weeks. He confides to his friend that Inez was asking him for some more personal space, and that he thought the constant time he’s spent together with her was the reason for this. That perhaps it would be easier if they had a more “normal” situation, with them both living in France and having their own living situations to go back to at the end of the day. He says that her feelings are understandable, but this hurts nonetheless.
This feeling of a conflicting internal dichotomy (in his case, mobility versus meaningful permanence) is what I believe helps explain what I feel when I watch his videos.
The immediate reaction is a shock that’s almost close to disbelief. Here is a person not too far from me in terms of age and education, in a living situation that couldn’t be more different. He’s pretty much homeless, sleeping outdoors in a lot of the videos. He showers sporadically, and wears the same clothes for weeks, and yet he’ll go into stores, poker places, kiss girls, it’s crazy how someone can pull it off, if it were me I would be way too self conscious of how I smell to even entertain the thought of mingling within civilization. Sometimes he talks to rats, he’ll go for days without eating a cooked meal. Watching from the comfort of my heated apartment, in my bed, it feels like unnecessary torture.
The scenery shots are beautiful, and I can understand that a life spent surrounded by these views could be an enthralling one, but I don’t feel persuaded by them to want to partake in the lifestyle myself.
His motivations became more clear when I saw the video of him with the lady he met in Spain. He explained how, when he was on the road, his thoughts and worries would be about more proximate, immediate issues, like where he would find food, and where he would sleep the night. These thoughts would help him feel more present and in the moment, leading him to feel more alive. I could appreciate this point of view; in modern civilized life, immediate needs are taken care of so easily, that most of our efforts are in focusing on the future (mortgages, retirement, etc.), or on things that are more complicated (projects, deadlines, work, etc.). So focusing on more primitive needs would understandably lead to feeling more directly part of life.
I myself have entered the point of life where I’m feeling the impending weight of responsibilities and functions inching onto me. It’s not a bad feeling, but it’s probably unknowingly made me more curious about what the exact opposite of my situation would be. And so it’s more informative, enlightening, almost awe-inspiring, to see what exactly it is.
One of the things that struck me while I was watching his videos was how much he trusts life. While in Spain, he rides his bike in the scortching heat, through a steep hill, without having eaten a proper meal in days, and stumbles across a fig tree. The fruit is ripe and it looks delicious when he shows the inside of one that he bit off, and he says “There’s always free food”. At one point in Spain, he reveals he only has about $500 left, and begrudgingly buys a cooked meal from a street cart, while noting that he still needs to save money for transportation costs, which I assume is for flying back home to the US. I would absolutely shit myself if I were in that situation. But in the end, he does exactly what he wanted to do: he makes it to the city of Granada, which he saw in an Anthony Bourdain episode, and then he befriends some people who take care of him.
Upon reflecting on my own daily life, I realized that on the contrary, a lot of modern civilization is built around distrust. Money ironically could be seen as a form of distrust; I can’t just take food from the store, and tell you that I’ll make it up to you later, so I need to give you what you need immediately. You could say credit cards are a form of trust, but they’re a calculated form of trust, or rather risk, so the storeowners don’t have to worry about trust at all. Because I don’t have to worry about trust, I never think about the concept of trust in the first place, it’s embedded in society.
I don’t think I’ve ever once had to, flex my trust muscle to any true extent in my life, and especially not anywhere near what he’s had to do on a daily basis. Will people help me jump my car when the battery dies? Will I not accidentally lay in a pile of poisonous insects the next time I sleep outside? Will people rob or hurt me while I’m homeless? What happens when I run out of money? Will anybody be there to help me out? What if my bicycle breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and I can’t be saved? These are questions that he never asks in his videos.
And so I also find myself with an internal conflict watching his videos; the dichotomy of wanting to flex my trust muscles - to feel like life is something that works for you, if you just open yourself up to it - and yet feeling the inevitable, comforting grasp of society that has catered for my every need and rendered the muscle useless, and feeling it squeeze tighter year by year, out of love, out of caring, while I watch a man live out of his car, perhaps also wondering on some nights how it feels to be held like this.