Re:Between Workaholism and Procrastination (2015)
by tristor on Thursday July 09, 2020 @10:06AM
(#23780360)
As someone who was a digital nomad and now works more or less permanently from home in the US, I can say that this is absolutely not true. There are definitely "digital nomads" that could be described that way because they are operating affiliates businesses off of a travel blog and monetizing social media, and I guess more power to them. But most of the digital nomads I met, including myself, worked actual full-time jobs for actual companies while abroad.
Becoming a digital nomad isn't about making money... in fact if you do it properly it's at best break-even or slightly cheaper than just renting a place to live in the US and staying put, but could be vastly more expensive. It's about exploring the world, expanding your viewpoint, and inspiring you to think differently. Going abroad helped my engineering work immensely, and also gave me a chance use time zones to my advantage to improve my health by adapting my sleep cycle to my body's needs rather than the whims of an employer. It also got me moving much more despite working on a computer all day, which greatly improved my health as well. Being able to leave work and actually go do something new, interesting, and exciting each day had a positive effect on work/life balance and was the perfect way to combat the burnout I was experiencing as a senior engineer before I stepped on the plane.
I don't advocate being a digital nomad, because I think it's something that's not for everybody and it had its own set of challenges and stressors. But I don't think it's some sort of MLM get-rich quick scheme by people either. You are only seeing the aspect of it shown by social media which is dominated by "influencers" using their skill at marketing and manipulation to enrich themselves. But if you talk to most people who lived the lifestyle, they were normal joes doing normal jobs, just in a location-independent fashion. Not everyone who is a digital nomad is a white 20-something from New York or LA that decided to take their affiliate blog on the road and write a book to be self-published by Amazon, probably less than 10% of the digital nomads I met along the way were like that. I met a lot of people during my time due to using coworking facilities in so many places.
Becoming a digital nomad isn't about making money... in fact if you do it properly it's at best break-even or slightly cheaper than just renting a place to live in the US and staying put, but could be vastly more expensive. It's about exploring the world, expanding your viewpoint, and inspiring you to think differently. Going abroad helped my engineering work immensely, and also gave me a chance use time zones to my advantage to improve my health by adapting my sleep cycle to my body's needs rather than the whims of an employer. It also got me moving much more despite working on a computer all day, which greatly improved my health as well. Being able to leave work and actually go do something new, interesting, and exciting each day had a positive effect on work/life balance and was the perfect way to combat the burnout I was experiencing as a senior engineer before I stepped on the plane.
I don't advocate being a digital nomad, because I think it's something that's not for everybody and it had its own set of challenges and stressors. But I don't think it's some sort of MLM get-rich quick scheme by people either. You are only seeing the aspect of it shown by social media which is dominated by "influencers" using their skill at marketing and manipulation to enrich themselves. But if you talk to most people who lived the lifestyle, they were normal joes doing normal jobs, just in a location-independent fashion. Not everyone who is a digital nomad is a white 20-something from New York or LA that decided to take their affiliate blog on the road and write a book to be self-published by Amazon, probably less than 10% of the digital nomads I met along the way were like that. I met a lot of people during my time due to using coworking facilities in so many places.