> > Anyone else have this experience in their early twenties?
>
> I so very much want to have this experience, but I have never had the means. I can't realistically imagine any way that I could do this without being forced to come home a week or two later to find all my worldly possessions on a road or in a dump somewhere, my bank account empty, and me with nothing on which to rebuild the shattered remains of my life.
>
> OK, maybe it isn't that bad, but seriously, I want to know how people manage this.

You're thinking of it as a long-term thing. Just go do it for a weekend.

People who do it for a year or more generally manage it by selling all their stuff or putting it in storage, and finding a way to make enough cash along the way to live on. Usually they live very basically, maybe out of their vehicle or a tent. I know several people who are long-term ocean nomads -- just as an example, here is how one particular guy does it (as far as I know about his life).

This guy has a very old (early 1930s), very small (much smaller than mine), very cruddy wooden sailing yacht which he has lived on board for at least five years and probably much longer. He would be somewhere in his mid 30s, I think. He mostly sails in the Pacific and spends a few months each year (the hurricane season) in New Zealand waters, as many of the South Pacific cruising people do. He lives alone on his little boat except when he finds a girlfriend he can convince to go along for a few months. (They tend not to last more than a few months, and then he generally leaves them someplace like Tahiti or New Caledonia or some other nation of their choice where they can get a flight home or find another boat going where they want to go.)

This guy pays his way with travel writing and photography which he produces on his travels and sells to publications in various countries. He is a very good photographer, both underwater and on land. I think he also owns a house or flat in England which is rented out, to provide a reasonably steady income.

There are a lot of people who live like this. Some prefer to sail solo, others do it as couples or with temporary extra crew which they pick up as needed along the way; in the most commonly used ports around the Pacific you can usually find nomad boats looking for an extra person.

I describe all this just to assure you that many, many people choose this sort of lifestyle and do it quite successfully for many years, or a lifetime. I have known a family whose two children were nine and fourteen when I met them, and they had been sailing around the world for at least the younger child's lifetime -- he was born on board and had never lived on land. He was home-schooled on the boat and his older sister was doing high school courses by correspondence. Both of them were several years above their age group in their schooling, and decades ahead of most adults in self-sufficiency, knowledge of various global cultures and languages, and general life experience.