It was August 2022, and I had just spent the previous night sleeping in a crowded campground in Long Island. I had a tent, which was already more equipment than anyone living in an NYC apartment normally has, but I had little else besides my sleeping bag and a blanket to separate me from the hard ground overnight. I didn’t sleep well, and my body ached. That discomfort wasn’t the end of the world, but it planted the idea in my mind that there had to be something better.

Sure I knew the most straighforward thing was to buy some sort of pad to sleep on, but I wanted something different — something that allowed me to do more with less. While researching, I stumbled on the idea of hammock camping. I loved the simplicity of it. You take a few minutes to suspend a piece of fabric between two trees and it magically supports you. Even though I understand how it works, it feels strange when you first sit in the hammock and the straps don’t suddenly ride down the tree, sending you plummeting to the ground.

I kept the idea of hammock camping in the back of my head, and a couple of weeks later I had the unexpected opportunity to turn it into a reality when I flew to Washington state to go on a roadtrip with my cousin. I really loved the idea of camping out there, but we had just flown cross-country and didn’t have any gear to our names. This is where the simplicity of the hammock felt ideal: I suggested that one night instead of sleeping in a hotel, instead, we just buy two hammocks and sleep in the woods. By woods what I mean is that Washington and Oregon allow for something called “dispersed camping” in the national forests, meaning you can camp for free outside of designated campgrounds. Usually the popular official campsites are booked out months in advance, but you can find great dispersed campsites last minute. While you actually can just randomly pick any spot in the forest, usually there are places where people have camped before that already have makeshift firepits and clearings.

With the plan in place, we drove into the Gifford Pinchot National Forest near Mt Saint Helens and found a perfect spot to set up our camp and our hammocks. We slept in them relatively easily and naturally and the next morning we woke up feeling energized…really energized…weirdly energized. Who knows if it was the fresh air, the hammock, the darkness, or the surrounding beautiful nature, but something unique had happened.

We replicated this same exact feeling in a campsite near the Olympics and another near Diablo Lake; it had happened again and again. I was convinced that it couldn’t have been a fluke.

After the trip, I could not stop thinking about how well I’d slept in the hammock. It took over my thoughts despite the fact that I’d invested as heavily in my bed as you could imagine…probably around $3000 in total. A beautiful solid wood bedframe with an upholstered headboard, an expensive mattress, high thread count sheets, shredded memory foam pillows, etc. The bed was also located in a really nice master bedroom with its own closet and bathroom. My ego was tied to the amenities and sunk costs of this room.

But also the bedroom was lit up by the lights outside and my windows were so thin that they might as well not have been there. If there was a conversation happening outside on the busy street, I could hear it. It was enough to open me up to the idea of something new.

Moreover, at the time, I was also single and thought to myself that if I ever was going to try this idea out, it’s now. So I subjugated my ego and purchased this stand, this hammock, and put them into the other tiny room in my apartment I was using as my office. The stand barely fit with barely an inch of clearance on either side, but it worked out and actually looks really nice!

Now for the verdict: Did I recapture the magic I had found sleeping in the forests of Washington? I really think so. and I’ve been sleeping in the hammock ever since. Some takeaways:

• The first thing people constantly ask is if my back hurts and the answer is no. First, it turns out you’re supposed to sleep diagonally in a hammock, which makes it so you lay substantially flatter, and secondly it’s not inherently bad for you to have the minimal amount of rounding in your spine from not being perfectly flat.
• The most interesting thing is that it’s easier to get up in the morning. You’d think that being sunken into a hammock would make it harder to leave than a bed, but I feel like it’s something to overcome unlike the neutrality of a bed so I’m energized to fight my way to my feet.
• It’s a good example of how less can be more. I had the fancy big bed, and I had the big room, but I was ultimately happier in the much cheaper and smaller hammock setup. Moreover it’s an example of not giving into sunk costs
• A lot of the enjoyment of sleeping in the hammock is that it’s uniquely my decision. It wasn’t because anyone told me or suggested it to me. I sought it out and made it happen. I love that and it brings me a lot of happiness.

In the long term though…either I’m going to have to invent a comfortable way to get two people sleeping in the same hammock or accept that my hammock days could be numbered. For now though, I can keep being eccentric lol