A 17-year-old German teenager lives the lifetime of a modern nomad, leaving his parents’ home to travel by train and travel across the country.
While most 17-year-olds are only starting to contemplate the idea of leaving the nest, Lasse Stolley has been on his own for over a year and a half. Convinced that his education was over, he convinced his parents to let him leave their home in Fockbek in Schleswig-Holstein and embark on a unique train journey adventure. It took a lot of convincing, but they finally agreed, and for the past year and a half, the German teenager has mostly traveled by train, traveling throughout his home country while working as a self-employed programmer during the day and sleeping on night trains at night.
Photo: Daniel Abbey/Unsplash
“I have been living on the train as a digital nomad for a year and a half,” Lasse said Business expert. “At night I sleep on a moving Intercity Express (ICE) train, and during the day I sit in a chair, at a table, working as a programmer, surrounded by many other commuters and passengers. I travel from one end of the country to the other. “I’m visiting all of Germany.”
In 2022, he devoted himself to climbing, selling most of his belongings and packing the rest into a 36-liter backpack, which he has been carrying with him since then. Minimalism and resisting the urge to purchase latest things is an important a part of his lifestyle because he has to take every little thing with him wherever he goes. It’s not all the time easy, but he found a solution to make it occur.
“The challenge of not accumulating more and more things is a central element of minimalist living. Especially with a backpack, you quickly reach your limit of space,” Stolley said. “The most important thing is my laptop and noise-canceling headphones, which give me at least some privacy on the train.”
After deciding that he wanted to go away his family home and pursue a nomadic lifestyle, Lasse Stolley signed as much as the German rail discount program and purchased a Bahncard 100, which allowed him unlimited hopping on and off any Deutsche Bahn trains. He estimates that this unusual lifestyle costs him around 10,000 euros a year, which does not sound like much, but it surely’s also not the most comfortable solution to live.
“The initial months were difficult and I had to learn a lot about how everything works. Everything was different than I imagined,” said the teenager. “Every evening I have to make sure I catch the night train, and sometimes I have to reschedule it very quickly because suddenly it won’t arrive.”
Life on trains also has its benefits, nonetheless, because it allows the young nomad to go to virtually every a part of Germany, from the sea in the north to the Alps for a nice hike, in addition to bustling cities reminiscent of Berlin and Munich. Everything is accessible by train, and he has turn out to be accustomed to traveling about 600 miles a day. He estimated that he had traveled over 300,000 miles on trains since leaving his parents’ home.
When Lasse is not working on his laptop, he lounges in first-class carriages and eats mostly in Deutsche Bahn waiting rooms at train stations across the country. Personal hygiene is a bit harder because he has to shower at public swimming pools and leisure centers.
Living on trains is not ideal and 17-year-old Lasse Stolley doesn’t see himself doing it for the remainder of his life, but it surely’s working for now because he still has a lot of Germany to see. In addition, his Bahncard 100 remains to be valid for six months.
