“My name is Matt Foley and I am a motivational speaker,” began Chris Farley in a classic “Saturday Night Live” sketch from 1993. “Let me give you a little scenario about what my life is all about. First off, I am 35 years old, I am divorced and I live in a van down by the river.”

The studio audience roared at this sad sack who hit rock bottom. And why not? He was totally pathetic. Foley acted as a cautionary tale for two high-school slackers — played by David Spade and Christina Applegate — who demonstrated the fate that would befall them if they wandered down the wrong path.

Farley went on: “You’re probably going to find out as you go out there that you’re not going to amount to jack squat. You’re gonna end up eating a steady diet of government cheese and living in a van down by the river!”

Twenty-four years ago, calling your car home was Plan Z. Now it’s a generation’s greatest aspiration.

In “Van Life: Your Home On The Road” (Hachette), out now, author Foster Huntington waxes poetic on the many virtues of vehicular dwellings: the freedom they afford, the travel they allow, the lack of responsibility they enable. Why stay safe at home when you can chill out in a vulnerable roadside van? Why contribute to society when you can contribute to CO2 emissions?

Why be an office slave when you can be a social-media star?

To wit, the hashtag #Vanlife has become an Internet sensation, tagged on more than 2 million Instagram posts. Peruse them, and you’ll discover a parade of privileged hippies for whom life is just a never-ending Coachella. They’re Peter Pans who lounge in hammocks, sip pour-over coffee and shamelessly flaunt their Baha-style hotness, all the while acting as though they’ve rejected the real world’s shallow commercialism and vanity. Millennial martyrs, if you like.

Yet their existence, glamorously filtered and posted on Instagram for all to “heart,” is as capitalistic as an old-school Wall Street dream. For Huntington, who says his own van life was funded by his advance from an earlier photo book called “The Burning House,” rebellion is definitely proving a money-maker.

Huntington’s latest book is made up of interviews with van owners about where they bought their retro rides, stories of their journeys and the ways they’ve tricked out their portable pads. Some boast sinks with running water, wood-burning heaters and space for a puppy.

Like many an essayist, Huntington’s adventure began because of the unbearable oppression of New York. The city that gave us visionaries like Eugene O’Neill, Theodore Roosevelt, Bernadette Peters and Biggie Smalls is rendered here as a prison for twenty-somethings that exists merely to provide “security, comfort and predictability my generation was conditioned to want from a young age.”

You know who’d do anything for some security and comfort, bro? The beleaguered people featured in another recent book, “Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century” (Norton).

They’re older Americans who, due to the slacking economy, have been forced to live out of RVs, roaming the country in search of tough, low-paying jobs. They have no choice but #vanlife.

That’s what’s so problematic about this fad. It’s not the adherents’ love of the open road, or that they disappear for months on end. #Vanlife’s cardinal sin is smugness.

“We human beings are, by our sheer nature, transient,” van dweller Callum Creasey, who is a photographer and filmmaker, opines to Huntington. “Our ancestors were nomadic; they would move across the land in search of a safe place to make camp.”

Unsurprisingly, many of the book’s contributors are artists, photographers and filmmakers: careers that allow for location flexibility. Abandoning a steady gig to swan around the country dressed like a character from a Wes Anderson film is a luxury that most people, even in boom times, cannot afford.

Sean Colliver, a college student, proudly describes #vanlifers in the book as “a bunch of dirtbags that just want to be outdoors and do rad things.”

These dirtbags sure are giving a lot of people like me road rage.