The Reality of Digital Nomads: Chasing Adventure, Finding What?

In July 2023, I had the opportunity to start working remotely for a couple of blockchain companies. Not wanting to waste a single moment of this opportunity, I dove into a digital nomad lifestyle, traveling across three continents, 13 countries, and 20 cities over the course of a year. Even before I graduated college, I started working in an office at an IT startup, so after three and a half years of office work, there was nothing more liberating and enchanting than opening my MacBook in cafés with an uniquely exotic backdrops. The freedom to go anywhere I wanted was ecstasy. During the first three months of remote work, I probably visited almost every café in Seoul. Then, I went on a trip to Europe with my parents and also visited my sister in Philadelphia, working remotely while traveling freely.

Then, at the beginning of 2024, I decided to set off to Southeast Asia, starting with a month-long stay in Bangkok, the mecca for digital nomads in Asia after Bali. Experienced digital nomads would usually pack as lightly as possible, but as an overjoyed beginner, I left home with a fully packed 25kg suitcase and a 7kg carry-on. Of course, I regretted it several times along the way. My luggage included multiple dresses that would have been a bit too flashy to wear in Korea, along six pairs of shoes in anticipation of any special occasion that might just come up. I was so thrilled that I even published a post on my Medium blog titled How I Became a Digital Nomad in 6 Months With No Coding Skills. At the time of the post, I only had 22 subscribers, but it gained quite a bit of traction, attracting 20 new fans and receiving over 100 reactions. Seeing the enthusiastic response to my blog, which remains my most popular piece to this day, I was able to reaffirm that this lifestyle is something many people aspire to. This reaffirmation became very valuable to me because, in reality, the digital nomad life I experienced was lonely, unstable, and extremely stressful.

The idea of breaking free from the constraints of traditional work and daily life felt like such an adventure for me. I thought that my days would be filled with delightful peaks if I just stepped outside of my regular routine—so much so that I packed six pairs of shoes! But reality turned out to be quite different. Settling into new places is undoubtedly fun and exciting, but even the excitement of newness becomes routine after about two weeks - but this is all on just the surface-level of our perception.

Within our subconscious systems, circuits and gears are working tirelessly to adapt to the new environments we’ve placed ourselves in. When we’re in unfamiliar surroundings, our brain’s orientation system activates. This system helps us navigate our surroundings, recognize patterns, and adjusts our behavior accordingly. The hippocampus and amygdala play key roles in this process, helping us to perceive and remember spatial information and evaluate safety within those spaces. This cognitive load that comes from processing a vast amount of new stimuli and situations consumes significant brain energy, unlike the familiar routine tasks that used to take minimal effort. Imagine your brain only used to walk familiar paths, but now everywhere needs is new and needs to be calculated. As this cognitive load builds up until the environment feels sufficiently familiar, we start to consciously experience it as pressure or stress.

I never stayed in a single city for over a month. I had believed the best way to get the most of remote work was to explore as many places as possible. The second reason was that until I felt certain that this was the right place to settle down, I didn’t want to deal with the uninspiring hassle of administrative procedures like visa issuance. At that time, my job involved frequent business trips, so I often planned my travels by extending my stay for a few weeks at the locations I visited for work. However, my ambition in wanting to see the world, and failure to take the leap and commit resulted in a cumulative unconscious workload of constantly having to adapt to multiple places in a short period—which scientifically resulted into stress.

Moreover, I had full-time work on my plate, which psychologically felt like a heavier burden than it should have been. I was working more hours and on the weekends trying to make up for the time that I spent unfocused. I often found myself getting irritated with people around me, fearing I wouldn’t complete tasks on time, or becoming almost obsessive about getting things done in a certain way. I think I had this underlying sense of being unable to control my life in constantly changing environments, and it was quite overwhelming.

Excerpt from my journal entry on the 12th of February, 2024 which is 19 days after I arrive in Bangkok.

Oh God, this morning I felt this dense ball of air stuck in the back of my head, like an air bubble. Although air physically carries no weight, the one back there felt heavy that my head was tilting back as I was walking out from the bed. It’s like my brain was trying to stop me.

Back home, I maintained a regular routine with five workouts a week with home-cooked meals. However, when my fatigue level reached its peak, it became difficult to stick to my regular exercise routine at local gyms, and even cooking meals at home became a luxury once I started traveling. I knew that home-cooked meals are the best, so I bought the necessary soy sauce, Gochujang, Mulyeot etc. that were needed to cook Korean meals when I arrived at my first destination in Southeast Asia. However, I didn’t even get to use a quarter of them before leaving them behind as I moved on to Phuket, making eating out was much less wasteful.

Korean food abroad is more expensive than it is in Korea, and healthy meals are just as pricey. So, I mostly relied on local cuisine, and found it increasingly difficult to keep up with the oily fried dishes and unfamiliar flavors. While it's quite obvious that traveling would make it hard to maintain the diet I wanted, I intend to highlight the irony of how gaining freedom in place means but losing freedom in meals.

Now, I often joke that people living this lifestyle should be called "digital homeless" rather than digital nomads. In fact, historically, nomadic living was primarily based on collective or communal life. However, digital nomads don't travel with their community. They travel alone, or sometimes as a couple. So in my joke, the word "home" in "digital homeless" doesn’t refer to a house or an apartment, but rather to a community where one belongs— family, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Yes, there are digital nomad communities that can be accessed anywhere in the world, but those digital nomad communities can be more simply put as ‘a group of strangers that hosts co-working and after hour bar sessions’. A community isn’t a community until it starts feeling like yours over a period of time.

A segment of people from history that actually resembles a digital nomad would be the Mountain Hermits and Monastic Wanderers. For example, Christian hermits in medieval Europe or wandering Buddhist monks in East Asia often chose to live away from home, moving from place to place to find spiritual enlightenment, or solitude.

So, why do people choose the digital nomad lifestyle?

Like the wandering Buddhist monks and Christian hermits - the instability and stress from exploring so many different places does in fact provide spiritual enlightenment and growth. That’s the for story next week.

Thanks for reading.