Idea: Becoming a digital nomad has increased in attractiveness with the pandemic. Websites such as Pieter Levels' Nomad List and RemoteJobs have helped thousands of workers and businesses to set up lives abroad, and have helped make destinations like Greece, Portugal, Indonesia and Thailand into Nomad hotspots.

But:

1) Societally, we're gaining understanding how important a sense of place, and a sense of community within that place, are to our mental health, and to building sustainable practices that will make up the paradigm shift we will need to rebuild out planet's sustainable practices.

What else can you offer the earth, which has everything? What else can you give but something of yourself? A homemade ceremony, a ceremony that makes home.
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I'm now trying to build these ceremonies, and communities, into my new home: Berlin. It takes effort, but is immensely rewarding. I was never a true digital nomad, but I have travelled and worked remotely all over the world, and found on balance this more generative experience immensely more meaningful.

This is something ex-Nomad Nat Eliason has written eloquently on. He said after a year of travelling he realised that "perhaps, the ultimate goal of long-term travel is to try to find where you feel most at home."
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2) The type of people that make up the majority of Digital Nomads are rich, white, heterosexual, single, and from the US. They primarily work in software. This isn't to make any judgement on those people. Those people are probably (mostly) awesome folks. But I worry slightly about how it affects the local economies and places between which they jump. Those nomads, who in relatively recent history we could strongly identify as colonisers, spread around the globe and demand their chosen locations increase internet speed, provide beautiful living & working spaces, and cater for any manner of bars/restaurants/entertainment that meet their needs once work is complete. This might be described as "low-key-colonialism".

The Four Hour Work Week predicted all these things, and laid out a new method of thought that was instrumental to how we think about business and our careers, but some of the practices (e.g. cheap remote assistants in The Philippines or India), and individualist desire for recurring income streams that divorce us from the meaning of our work (something I have very much identified in myself), may well do more harm than good.

Something to ponder on. I'm definitely going to expand this to a wider piece once I have more time.

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