This just happened to me the other night.
I’m in a dispersed camping spot in a National Forest. It’s not crowded. I go to sleep around 9:30PM and wake up at 4:30AM to someone parked right next to me. There’s no trees between us and no possible way that they did not see my car.
As I drive out of the forest I pass dozens of empty spots.
This has happened to me twice. Who are the people who do this? There’s no rational explanation for it.
Instinctual survival habits.
If you asked them why, they likely couldn’t give you an answer, or they’d rationalize one on the spot without realizing it.
We have millions of years of evolution telling us it’s better to be grouped up to sleep, and just a couple generations at most for recreational camping etiquette.
Instincts will always wins that battle
There’s probably different levels of this instinct that correlate to experience camping out in the boonies, as well as the size of your own party. For instance, an inexperienced individual or small family probably would want the security of being near other people. But more experienced people want the solitude, and especially so for larger groups.
Chalk it up to someone not too familiar with camping.
I wouldn’t judge someone who shows up to a campground at 430 am too harshly…
They’re probably running on pure lizard brain at that point.
Like, depending on your definitional of rational, there was/is a reason for this behavior, but it’s not like someone intentionally decides to do it. It’s just autopilot.
A lot of what we do is just autopilot and rationalizing it later. Shits crazy interesting, but we can’t really study it because it’s not ethical to just cut people’s brains in half for no reason other than to gain knowledge. And there was only a brief period it was a valid medical treatment for things like epilepsy.
https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/roger-sperrys-split-brain-experiments-1959-1968-0
Here’s something interesting, it’s cultural. There was a study done in the 80’s or 90’s and they found that Hispanics and Asians were more likely to sit next to each other in an otherwise empty room, whereas Caucasians were more likely to sit very far apart.