想象自己生活indefinitely on the road, traveling on a bike you love, and exploring the world for as long as you like while working online to make a living. What is it really like, is that a good idea in the first place, and how does it play out in practical terms?
It’s all about how you look at things. For most people who do embrace this lifestyle, that’s all it is: a lifestyle. It’s no better or worse than the traditional highschool-university-job-mortgage-family-pension path, it’s just different. Having escaped three universities, a myriad of crappy jobs, two good newsroom jobs, and one near-engagement, I feel like I’ve dodged the bullet of becoming a Respectable Citizen; for others, I my choices may appear utterly mad.
In some ways, it’s more challenging than the traditional way of life and work; most digital nomads work for themselves, which requires a decent amount of self-discipline, time management, and creativity. Others work for companies or clients, which involves a lot of scheduled video calls, customer service, and pressing deadlines. Others still have created passive income streams – hurray -but even then, most people continue working because they love what they do.
Either way, there’s no employer to look after you or give you a job, and there’s no guarantee of a pay check if you don’t put the work in. There’s no slacking off and no paid holidays or paid sick leave – you’ve got to find work on your own, create work yourself, and stay up to date of what’s going on in your industry. You’ve got to create several different income streams for stability and put money away Just In Case: if you’re not a resident in any country, forget pension plans and government aid of any kind. You pay your own insurance and medical expenses, and if you get in trouble or lose a well-paying client, it’s up to you to figure things out.
Then, there’s the logistics of constantly being on the move, the legality of how long you can stay in any given country, regular bike repairs or upgrades, and the remaining mundanity of travel andvoluntary homelessness.
In some ways, it may seem like a highly unstable way to live. What of security? What of economics? What of safety nets?
Curiously enough, most of my digital nomad friends, myself included, are quite convinced that the traditional way of living in one geographical area and having one career path may be a much more precarious situation. Jobs are something you get, as opposed to create for yourself, which means it’s out of your control. If someone gives you a job, there’s absolutely no guarantee you’ll get to keep it for as long as you want to. Even if you do, will your salary grow as steadily and quickly as you hope, and how much influence do you have over it?
当COVID第一次冲击,恐慌席卷磨破ld, and a lot of it had to do with job loss and small businesses closing down. Online work, on the other hand, increased. Some of my vagabond friends working in the IT, communications, marketing, and creative sectors have shared their income has grown significantly since the beginning of 2020, as remote work became the new reality for so many people around the world. My workload – and pay – has also been steadily increasing, and while I would not be able to buy an apartment or a house with cash just yet, I was able to put enough away to buy and build an overland vehicle that’s going to be my next travel project. In addition, I have free rein to engage in creative activities besides work – like occasionally ruffling feathers right here on ADV Rider.
很长一段时间,数字游牧民族被视为these sketchy, long-haired backpacker dudes and dudettes gallivanting around the world and pawing away at their MacBook’s in Bali, doing some nonsense or other on the Instagrams and leeching off of the honest working classes of the world. However, those Instagrams make actual revenue in advertising and those dudes and dudettes pay their own way contributing to local economies, paying income taxes, and often, founding their own start-ups and creating jobs for others in the long run. In addition, social media is just one tiny sliver of the overall online work pie: most digital nomads aren’t influencers but rather, online entrepreneurs, writers, accountants, web designers, project managers, finance consultants, and the like. Me, I make a living as a copywriter, and I’ve created a freelance job for a junior copywriter based in Nigeria who helps me when there’s too much work and makes $40 an hour from the tasks I pass on to him. A friend of mine, a German nomad based in Costa Rica half of the year and Spain, the other, employs three different junior media managers from Serbia, the Netherlands, and Tennessee, who are on their own quest for independent-location work and world travel.
As for exploiting the countries we travel or “freeloading”, it’s not entirely clear how this notion actually works in real life. Digital nomads pay their way just like any other traveler, and these days, more and more countries recognize the value of vagabond workers offering e-residency or digital nomad visas. Some, like Estonia, even offer an e-residency visa allowing you to register a business there; in other words, you pay your income taxes just like anyone else, except it may not necessarily be in your home country. There are insurance companies offering health and travel insurance specifically to digital nomads, and if you require a procedure not covered by insurance – say, dental work or a Lasik surgery – you’re free to shop for the best and most economical options around the world. I plan to get mine done in Poland where the surgeons are excellent and the prices lower than in Western Europe.
Finally, there’s the notion that digital nomads make very little, pinching pennies, scrounging, and surviving on ramen noodles for most of the time. This may be true for those who are just starting out, but for most, two-three years into online work, they’re easily making between $45-$90 an hour, depending on the type of work that they do, their industry, and how much work they’re willing to do in the first place. The beauty here is that you can easily increase your income by 20%, 30%, or even 50% at any given month if you choose to chase after better-playing clients or take on more work. Which, of course, means more work and less travel that month, but if unexpected expenses arise, you have a way of dealing with them. Equally, you may sometimes face leaner months, but in the course of a year, it’s possible to balance it all out.
Still, digital nomad lifestyle and online work is often perceived as “less honest” or “less useful” than the work done by “real” workers like nurses, lawyers, or aircraft engineers. Certainly, a thoracic surgeon contributes more to society than an online ad copywriter. But then, an online mental health counsellor contributes to the society more than a corporate lawyer, even if the corporate lawyer has a “real” office and wears a suit to work whereas the barefoot counsellor based in some Caribbean island, alas, does not. The offense here is not the actual work, but the audacity to live in the Caribbean and refuse to wear shoes. There’s a fascinating book on the uselessness of some jobs by David Graeber, aptly named Bullshit Jobs – a fantastic read and some great insights about the way we perceive work – but at the end of the day, it’s not geography, offices, or suits that make work “real”, it’s its economic value and market demands.
By no means am I saying this way of living is in any shape or form better or more meaningful than the more traditional choices; not at all. In addition, while I feel free and capable of living a fairly comfortable nomad life now, it is entirely possible that things will change, drastically and abruptly. There may be new pandemics, a world economy crash, some unforeseen societal or environmental upheaval, or, and that’s not unlikely at all, AI may replace my job altogether in less than a decade. Yikes. However, if things change, I’m quite willing to change and adapt, too, and that’s perhaps the most valuable asset in uncertain times. It’s not the apres nous le deluge approach – it’s more of an acceptance that nothing is ever guaranteed, and most of what we perceive as safety is often an illusion.
After all, traveling the world by bike – whether you’ve saved up for the trip, took a sabbatical, or plan to work as you go along – in itself is a risky undertaking. Borders may close unpredictably, there may be civil unrest in a country you’re traveling, you may face all sorts of issues, and you may not even get to your final destination – or get there, but not via the route you envisioned.
Does that mean it’s not worth taking the journey?
