What I really don't get about digital nomads
It’s just two or three little things, really.
Mandatory disclaimer: This is NOT a post against those who demand or implement new, much more flexible ways to work, less tied to traditional offices or factories, or who like to travel a lot. Not at all. Thanks and more power to all those people, I say. Seriously.
This post is only, only about the hype around two very specific narratives around full time AND long term digital nomads, that is people who not only can “travel freely while working remotely using technology and the internet” but also do it full time AND long term, that is, for simplicity “at least forty hours/week, always, as far as you can see in your future”.
More exactly, this post only summarizes why three, very specific points of the “digital nomadism” story puzzle me, namely:
- working with any laptop, smartphone or tablet full time AND long term is great and harmless, no matter how those hours are distributed
- real, LONG TERM digital nomadism makes freedom both more enjoyable and much easier to achieve
- the two points above are true for the majority of people who make or may make a living by working full time with a computer, not just the chosen few
Why I am puzzled
The pain. The pain!
If digital nomadism means sitting on whatever is available in restaurants, vans, boats, public parks… by default, not occasionally, I really fail to see how anyone can believe, or successfully sell, that it could be a physically sustainable “full time lifestyle”.
Personally, I just cannot get anything done with a screen smaller than 22/24 inches. Smaller monitors just make it much harder for me to think/analyze seriously what I’m looking at. But never mind that, maybe I am just really unlucky.
In any case, I get muscle cramps by just looking at certain pictures and imagining myself doing the same for more than, maybe, 30 minutes a day. If you don’t, just go for it, but remember to let me know it feels ten years from now.
Non-places. Non-places everywhere. And lonely ones too
The faster people with, more often than not, the same general “developed-urban” background and attitudes spread to previously different places, the faster they will all turn to ONE giant NON-PLACE, surrounding nomads with the same issues they were fleeing from, no matter how much they move (of course this is just for completeness, of course, as it’s happening anyway regardless of digital nomadism).
Loneliness is a more serious issue. There are certainly people who can be perfectly happy digital nomads who live without affective and physical roots their whole life, and that is OK. Better alone than in bad company.
I just dare observe that such people may not be the majority of those who are firmly convinced, in their 20s or 30s, that they will always feel that way. Someone I know once said “no community can really work if it doesn’t host (at least) three generations”, and it’s probably true even for communities made of one individual. So just check with yourself, every 2 / 3 years at the most but SERIOUSLY, whether you do want or not to be still nomad ten years later.
Freedom? From what, eventually?
Cyberspace does not exist and never did. Illusions that you can go digital nomad because what you really value is in cyberspace are just that, illusions. Even with NFTs, even if you call it “metaverse”, or give it the form of luxury cruises, it’s still just one thin layer of paint of the same one world we all ought to fix.
Even the mythology around digital nomadism as necessary for freedom that matters puzzles me. Less expensive, sure (for singles, at least), but more free? Free from what? A full time, long-term digital nomad is surely less free from high-tech, centralized infrastructures and products, that is “good old global capitalism”, than any off-grid farmer in Bangladesh.
And if anything, a world of nomads, that is of rootless, non-unionized individuals may make that system thrive more, not less than before. Whether that would be good or bad is another issue, I’m just saying that it doesn’t overlap with real freedom as some says.
Paraphrasing something I read on a mailing list, if digital nomadism attracts you as an individual “exodus from the system”, remember that “an exodus requires withering 40 years in the desert” by a whole nation, not one individual.