The Trouble with Digital Nomads

Where is home?

I am grateful to have stayed in many places during the past two years. Thanks to working remotely and moving often, I have experienced several new countries and new corners of my own.

Someone with this lifestyle is often referred to as a ‘digital nomad’. I don’t like to identify with the label, but I can’t deny that it fits.

During my travels, there has been a question worrying me, intermittent yet insistent.

Is this an ok thing to do?

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Seeking

My writing practice slipped in December as my freelancing deadlines loomed. So I first started writing this post during a few days of holiday before Christmas, in Gili Air: a tiny, sandy island in Indonesia. I had just spent three weeks living on Lombok, its larger neighbour.

I began a first draft while sitting in a café, trapped by a tropical downpour. Although I don’t find it easy to write in cafés, I wanted to walk round the island and couldn’t resist the allure of a barista coffee.

In that moment, I felt like I had captured the oxymoronic reality of ‘remote work from paradise’.

It starts with FOMO: you should get your work done and make the most of your freedom! But you have certain requirements for a suitable workspace: strong Wi-Fi, adequate seating, perhaps friendly staff to chat with. A good cappuccino. Throw in a back-up generator and space to camp out for a while, for when the power cuts out.

From a quick search online, the café I found myself in appeared to be Australian-owned, but the staff were Indonesian, and very friendly.

Not THE café in question, but close enough (yes, it’s a habit).

In truth, I could have reached a nearby warung for a local lunch during a short reprieve in the storm. But I felt guilty about the rather empty page on my screen, so I ordered another coffee and a slice of cake and tipped when I left.

I was disappointed with myself, secure but also somehow overwhelmed. I tried to figure out a reasonable standard of ethical behaviour to hold myself to. The search felt recursive and unsatisfying.

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Leaving

There is a basic critique of digital nomads that looks something like ‘gentrification with air miles’.

Rocketing prices for housing and amenities are straining local communities around the world. Latin America, for instance, has a few renowned cases (I have spent time in at least two). With time zones friendly to North American office hours, it is especially vulnerable: globally, around half of nomads are from the US.

Nomads are not solely responsible for housing crises; surging tourism, persistent inequality, corporate power, and government inaction all play big roles. However, in Katie Collins’ words, “the way in which nomads occupy space” – above all, doing lucrative paid work – sets them apart.

Yet even we gentrifiers each have a story and a decision-making context. A system is at work in the background.

Ximena Gonzalez

, reporting from Canada, brings this out clearly: many nomads she spoke to (in 2022) left their home base because they feel “squeezed” and are struggling to maintain their living standards.

Although economic pressure is a root cause, there is more to the story.

A crisis of meaning is emerging in societies that appear incapable of promising or delivering a safe future for younger generations. Social norms are changing in response. Squeezed millennials in particular have “reframed precarity as flexibility”.

In global terms, this reframing is an exorbitant privilege. Even in Western countries, it’s hardly available to everyone.

Personally, I left London in 2023 motivated partly by my own eco-anxiety, which spiked during the pandemic and made the prospect of exploring the world feel both urgent and fragile. After leaving, I also realised how poorly the city had been serving my physical, mental, and spiritual needs.

Instead of enjoying stability from a full-time job and home base (to the extent possible while renting), I found myself locked into patterns of instability in my inner life. I was exhausted by the permanent sense of rush, by feeling disconnected from others moving around me, and by the creeping transformation of public space for commercial use.

With all that said, I have been very fortunate overall. I benefit from a great relationship with my parents, who are stable and well and have a house with ample room for me to store belongings while I travel.

I also possess privileges in the form of my passport and my whiteness. Beverly Yuen Thompson (interviewed by Gonzalez for her article) highlights that such advantages grant short-term access to most countries around the world and make travelling generally smooth and racism-free. (For a benchmark, the online community site Nomads’ member survey suggests 59% are white.)

Thompson states the bottom line: “the rhetoric is, ‘anyone can do this,’ but that’s not true at all”.

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Taking

When we consider the digital nomad wave in the context of inequality, we should also talk about resource consumption.

UNEP estimates that high-income countries use six times more materials per capita and are responsible for 10 times more climate impacts per capita than low-income countries.

It might appear that this line of thinking is only relevant to nomads who regularly fly large distances – like I have, at times – and not, for instance, those who travel slowly around Europe by train or bus.

However, the challenges leading nomads to leave their home cities or countries in the first place are also symptoms of an unsustainable world.

Global North societies are experiencing rising anger due to stagnant or falling living standards mixed with huge disparities in wealth. Without a major internal reorganisation, how will they step down to their fair share of consumption compatible with a healthy planet?

On the other hand, the fact that gentrification can take place over thousands of miles and international borders speaks to the dematerialisation of today’s economy.

Dematerialisation manifests in the ways that many travellers extract value. Content creators, for example, need only a satellite signal and small electronic device to make money out of sharing their personal experiences. But dematerialisation has limits. After all, the production of those electronic devices relies on supplies of materials from the Global South.

Just like the reactionary, macho populism of the moment, which serves only to enrich the most powerful even further, a small subgroup of nomads embraces the selfish use of their own privilege. Taking from the world at large and refusing to give back.

James Grieg’s piece on the “Unfettered Selfishness of Digital Nomads” points to several influencers like this, who travel between countries to avoid tax, campaigning against democratic states and the obligations of citizenship.

Most nomads don’t match that profile. But all are an imprint, in one way or another, of the societies that have produced them.

More and more people feel disconnected and distrustful. They need an offer that speaks to them.

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Finding

In fact, I believe that the experience of ‘nomading’ can help people to go through an important process of recognition.

There is power in realising, in a present, embodied way, that a land is not your land. That not everyone benefits from the same rights as you.

Being a digital nomad has taught me some other valuable lessons too. It has shown me the joy and potential of human connection that can emerge beyond boundaries. It has helped me – to borrow a phrase from

Rosie Spinks

’ phrase from her writing on collapse – to become more of a “person of place”.

Finding my place still isn’t simple. However, I’m realising that every place I visit until then extends an invitation. By tending to each as if it were my own, I can give back more of what I receive.

There are concrete alternatives out there. Regenerating local areas (and the Earth) can be a core part of the travelling experience, rather than an afterthought. I try to profile some examples with this newsletter and will continue to seek them out.

I completed this piece during my current stay at Selgars, a coliving in Devon set in an old mill house. Here, I have met people in similar situations: uprooted, passing through, searching, healing. We share ideas, food, and time in the garden.

Most would say we have a home here, even though we are heading somewhere else too.

I don’t yet know where I’ll make a nest longer-term. But each time I return from a big trip, I notice a stronger desire to find the right spot for me, to tend to the soil and put down new roots. When the time comes, maybe I’ll realise that I’m already there.

Thse days, wanderings feel a lot more familiar.