Yeah, but when the article features lines like:

To me, the van was what Kon-Tiki was to Heyerdahl, what the GMC van was to the A-Team, what Walden was to Thoreau. It was an adventure.

and

Living on the cheap wasn’t merely a way to save money and stave off debt; I wanted to live adventurously. I wanted to test my limits. I wanted to find the line between my wants and my needs. I wanted, as Thoreau put it, “to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life … to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

not to mention,

I refused to join those ranks. I became a deserter, an eccentric, an outsider. At Duke, I felt like an ascetic in the midst of wealth, a heretic in the Church of the Consumer. I had to hide.

it seems like dude was dead set on not doing the conventional thing. The writer also makes it seem like he eschewed human contact too, which I don't think is particularly healthy, but whatever. He wrote a book, which someone published, which is good although it does kind of brand him as one of those gimmick guys.