The Disgruntled Nomad (Part One)
I never really got along with digital nomads.
Back in my dust-sucker days, I considered my experience, although less sustainable long-term, to be superior to theirs. Whereas I could spend my days hailing rides from salmon fishermen in mountain passes and kicking back in some country’s backcountry for extended stints, these poor souls were bound to their Internet-capable cafes. They spent their precious time in Brazil or Colombia looking at a computer screen while I spent it exploring lost cities and fishing for tuna out of a canoe.
Retrospectively, the criticism I held back then was surely out of jealousy more than assumed confidence in my path.
They had the money to fly anywhere in the world at the drop of a hat.
I was restricted to cheap overland buses and the occasional passing farmer.
They were free to stop and plant roots wherever they felt most comfortable.
I didn’t allow myself that luxury, for one day here meant sacrificing a future day there.
They could, in theory, keep this up long-term.
I was terrified of what would happen when the music stopped, my pockets ran dry, and I had to once again “yo-yo” back home.
My shortcomings in self-awareness aside, there was a particular type of nomad that drove me madder than others. This type harbored an apparent sense of distaste and jadedness for their nomadic lifestyle—one they chose to pursue and one that so many others envied, including me.
The idea that a digital nomad could be anything less than satisfied with a life wrapped around intense individual daily freedom, unrestricted movement around the globe, and a healthy income stream is altogether puzzling, existential, and (if we’re speaking on the nose) a rather privileged problem to run up against in our short lives.
I was baffled.
Now, a year later, I’ve joined their digital ranks. While still a fledgling in the brigade in many ways, I’m beginning to understand where the source of this discontent may stem. It is where many nomads deviate from a path ripe with growth opportunities and instead ravage on into a limbo as meaningless as the one they fought to escape at their domestic desk jobs.
This is the existential, privileged, curious case of the disgruntled digital nomad.
The nomadic lifestyle is addictive, and its draw is hardly clandestine.
Traveling solo, whether employed or not, is the first time that most experience the purest form of freedom away from social pressures, expectations from others, or even the need to compromise on leisure time.
It is a meaningful practice in becoming more confident in meeting strangers, acquiring new languages, confronting stark cultural differences, witnessing some of the earth’s most gorgeous features, uncovering nasty (albeit telling) truths about the world, and learning to be more comfortable with yourself alone.
The road is a sandbox to test yourself in places where you have no support other than your individual resolve. That in and of itself is the greatest treasure to me.
Upon my initial encounter with this specimen known as the “disgruntled nomad”, I resolved to chalk it up to an issue of time and burnout. Of all the peculiarities solo travel lends itself to, the greatest peculiarity was perhaps the traveler who, with a full-time job, would try to move from place to place at the pace of an unemployed backpacker.
The frustration at realizing you don’t have the same freedom of time as a group of English mates on a gap year is inevitable. Juggling between bargain-bin flight fares every week, finding another Airbnb with sufficient Internet speed, and staying aware of how long until your visa runs out on top of a 40-hour workweek is a surefire path to becoming fed up with life as a nomad. These folks burned bright but burned out fast.
Taking notes as I tend to, I silently logged these observations into my journals, filed them away for a later date, and vowed to do better when it was my time. If too much movement was the source of burnout, then the solution should be staying put for longer.
Staying put, as it turns out, is quite a challenge.
Employment normally dictates where we live, meaning we stay where we are. Remove the need to be physically present, and that leash gets infinitely longer, if not cut entirely.
In the absence of that leash, the freedom to move is as simple as booking the next Airbnb. At the first sign of boredom, we can pack our bags and move on before we confront the reality of what to do without the next tourist attraction. It becomes a self-induced loop to seek constant saturation with the new and exciting.
Questions arise like, “I wonder what Peru is like at this time of year…” and “What am I doing in the dreary winter of London when I could just hop a flight to a sunnier spot tomorrow?”
It is easier to change the pin on a map than to change within ourselves.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his 1833 work Conduct of Life, offers an even deeper and damning explanation of the phenomenon:
“I observe that men run away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For the most part, only the light characters travel…. He that does not fill a place at home, cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger crowd…. What is true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can only find so much beauty or worth as he carries.”
Are we traveling indefinitely to flee from a fear of insignificance when we stop?
For what reason each of us travels I cannot say. As for my reason, I suppose I’d have to stop traveling to confront it.
Regardless of agreement with Mister Emerson, the disgruntled nomads of the digital world require an evident solution.
Eventually, even novel experiences lose their shine when inundated with too many in a compressed time. Adrenaline spikes become less pronounced, and no matter how far “off the map” you go, provincial endeavors will cease to impress a nomad after long enough in the saddle.
With numbness to surprise at an all-time low after 10 months of skiing volcanoes, dancing in the streets to samba, and floating for days up jungle rivers, it was clear what I was missing wasn’t another absurd story—it was people to share it with.
Eureka! All we ever needed was community and relationships. Perhaps this value, one as old as time (and the first to be discarded as we hit the road), was the key to remedying the disgruntled nomad’s woes.
If only that was as straightforward as staying put.
Forging relationships in a new community from ground zero takes genuine effort and investment in others. Surely difficult enough in our home cultures, doing so in a foreign one comes with additional hurdles. The most frustrated nomads are those who arrive bright-eyed and eager to meet other locals only to surrender when the gap in cultural, lingual, and economic differences appears too insurmountable.
Patience is key. My experience has shown it takes 2-3 months to begin to feel a part of anywhere.
We are not patient creatures though, and the natural tendency for a gringo grappling with a lack of community is to seek it with those who are closer in cultural, lingual, and economic differences. You need to see only one roving clan of French travelers to confirm that.
This natural drift to alike demographics is precisely what perpetuates the expansion of hostel chains like Selina, a sterile, hospital-reminiscent lodging where travelers can huddle together in the haven of a co-working space among their own countrymen. Capitalizing further on the community-creation market are digital nomad “retreats” like Nomad X—entire villages built abroad for nomads, encouraging alienation from the very culture they just traveled so far to visit.
No wanderer, including me, ever knows how long this whole lifestyle will last. That is the root of the disgruntled nomad: a lack of deep community induced by the vanity of pursuing it in the face of an impending departure.
Most of us can justify this indulgence in comfort and neglect the labor involved in building long-term relationships and community because it’s all temporary anyway. Isn’t it?
Perhaps.
But how would you approach it differently if it were permanent?
