It strikes you in places you did not expect. Not with force. Not all at the same time. It comes slowly, like a steam that wraps around you while you are too busy responding to Slack messages or optimizing your concept dashboard to notice it. He is there in beach cafes with fast Wi-Fi and $ 3 flat whites. This is when you exchange telegram sleeves with someone who has also just landed in Chiang Mai or Cancku or Medellín. He is there in the vocal note that you record for a friend at home who starts with “I live the dream” and ends with a silence that you do not bother to modify.
This is the part that nobody tells you. The part that guides and gurus do not mention in their course funnels. The part that rarely arrives on Instagram, because there is no aesthetic filter that can soften the edges of the void. It is the loneliness hidden behind the lifestyle of the laptop – a solitude that does not seem tragic, just quietly unshakable. And if you are still long enough, you can feel it settled in your chest somewhere.
I spent years in this life. Living in cities that take place as cards to exchange in expatriate forums. The rental of apartments with monthly prices that seem impressive when converted to USD. Attend co-work mixers where people present themselves with their monetization strategy. I woke up with the sun on my face in the villas surrounded by rice fields and I always felt like sleepwalking. I had times when I felt completely free, followed almost immediately by a deeper feeling that something essential was missing.
At first, I thought it was just me. That I was perhaps not grateful, or quite productive, or quite spiritual. That I may not have yet found the right “hub” – this magical city where any click and loneliness rises and the lifestyle finally becomes what he promised to be. But as time passed and the conversations improved, I started to hear it in the voices of others too. Fatigue behind the bustle. Sparkles them with doubt behind organized foods. Silence wonders: what do I really do here?
There is a particular type of emotional transitional which has just been a digital nomad. You meet incredible people and you cannot keep them. Or you meet a version of someone – a vacation version, an organized version, a self -moving self -improvement project – and you realize later that none of you was completely there. Conversations are unaware of the small conversation and go directly to commercial tactics or trauma disclosure, but rarely land in the more disorderly average space where real relationships live. Everyone is going. Everyone optimizes. Everyone has a flight to catch, or a brain, or a shamanic retirement from next week.
So we adapt. We learn to say goodbye quickly. We learn to smile through impermanence. We learn to pack the light, emotionally and otherwise. We keep our friendships in the cloud and our desires pending. We continue to move – not always towards something, but certainly far from something. And we tell ourselves that it is freedom.
But what if not?
What if it’s just another type of trap – the one who disguises himself like a release but is, in truth, another avoidance algorithm?
Because this is the uncomfortable thing about this lifestyle: it allows you to believe that you are free while keeping yourself in a state of constant movement. You are not bound by a job, a lease or even an identity. But you are also not anchored in something deeper than your last travel insurance policy and a Google Doc route. You can go anywhere – but when you arrive, you are already halfway.
There is a seduction. Be the one who escaped 9 to 5. Be the guy who responds to the emails of a hammock. To build a personal mark around the movement. And I did it all. I romated it, monetized, I defended it. I always think that there is something beautiful on this subject – the courage that it takes to live in an unconventional way, the great creativity that comes from the overhaul of your life from zero. But I also think that it has become a myth that eats its own tail.
The myth says: This is what freedom looks like. But what I learned is that freedom without connection becomes another form of imprisonment.
Because here is the secret: people don’t only want time and freedom of money. They want to be known. They want to be seen. They want to belong somewhere that does not disappear every 30 days. But in this life, when you start to feel a feeling of a house, the calendar reminds you that it is time to leave. The visas expire. Communities dissolve. Friendships drifts. And because many of us have chosen this life in order to avoid being stuck, we hesitate to admit that we could also be stuck in a different way.
I remember a particular conversation – in a bar on the Bangkok roof, around midnight. Another nomad that I had just met said: “I think I mastered each time zone, but I lost track of each version of myself.” He stayed with me. Not just because of poetry in the line, but because of the pain behind. We are told to continue to evolve, to continue to hack us, to continue to improve our systems – but nobody tells us how to cry the people we leave behind, or the myself that we abandon at the service of the next iteration.
We have created a culture where authenticity means vulnerability, but only in the form of content. You can cry on a YouTube vlog. You can talk about professional exhaustion in your newsletter. But when you sit in silence with another human being and you feel these things in real time, you realize how difficult it is to be real when there is no algorithm to reward you.
And yet, for all its faults, the nomadic nomadic lifestyle reveals something important. It shows us the cracks. He exhibits how little we are taught about real emotional sustainability. This forces us to face the uncomfortable question: if I delete all external structures – employment titles, social expectations, geography – who am I? What matters? And what’s left?
I think that is why some of us stay there longer than we should. Not because it’s so perfect, but because it just brings us closer close enough to us to touch almost something deeper. But not quite. And so we are trying again. New country. New co-work space. New life design strategy. All looking for something that we cannot quite name.
Finally, I started to see it more clearly. It was not just a lifestyle. It was a performance – and I had been played in a role that I wrote for me. The productive vagabond. The entrepreneur with spiritual evolution. Whoever understood. And abandoning this role would mean admitting that I had not understood this at all.
I started to notice the void in my schedule, even when it was full. I started sucking up at depth, familiarity, for the feeling of being woven in the fabric of a place rather than parachuting with a laptop. I started to want silence – not as a retirement, but as a commitment.
Because immobility requires something that this lifestyle does not often encourage: intimacy. Not only with people, but with the place. With discomfort. With the version of yourself that appears when there is nowhere to be.
I came to believe that the real measure of freedom is not how far you can go. It is how deep you can stay. How honestly you can root. How you can courageously commit yourself – not only to a project or a passport stamp, but also to the waste of human beings, near the others who testify to this.
And it is the paradox at the heart of the nomadic digital movement: we pretend to build a life of intentionality, but often we simply organize the distance. Distance from the systems we have left. Distance from the emotional work of belonging. Distance from the possibility of real and complicated love. We build worlds in motion, so we never have to answer the question: what happens if I stopped moving?
To be clear, I don’t think this lifestyle is intrinsically false. I think it’s a mirror. A magnifying glass. A sandbox. It gives you the tools to reinvent yourself, to explore new ways of living, escape the numbness which often comes with conformity. But that also gives you unlimited opportunities to avoid you, to stay not told, to never really let anyone enter.
And I think we owe it – and to each other – to name it.
To say: I lived this life, and it taught me a lot. But it also showed me the cost of constant reinvention. This made me realize that the presence is not the same thing as proximity, and that being available on each time zone does not mean that you are available significantly.
I do not regret my time in Thailand or the years that I spent in a suitcase. I do not regret the people I met or the landscapes where I was inside. But I regret how long it took me to admit that freedom, without connection, is only a prettier cage.
Now, when I meet digital nomads – with brilliant, enthusiastic eyes, ready to tell me about their new podcast or their productivity stack – I listen to. I smile. And I wonder if they still felt it. This pain calms behind the contents. This moment when the dream begins to feel thin. This whisper in the back of the mind: “Is it?”
Sometimes they did it. Sometimes they didn’t do it. But anyway, I don’t judge. I went there. I always wear pieces of this identity with me. The difference is that I stopped claiming that it is the whole story.
And maybe this is the beginning of something more true – not a rejection of nomadic life, but a deeper calculation with what we really are looking for.
Not just Wi-Fi and Wanderlust.
But at home. In its most radical form.