Young people have always wanted to leave Britain. Once upon a time, they joined the merchant navy. In the 1970s, they headed to Australia. Leaving seems mysterious and risky. It’s boring to never want to escape. ‘I just got back home after being in England for two days,’ said the former Geordie Shore star Sam Gowland, who lives in Bali. ‘What a depressing, grey, cold, gloomy, miserable × 100 place. If it’s possible, and you’re at an age where you can, move abroad.’
I could sustain a pale imitation of the life of a 19th-century Mexican silver magnate from two hours of Zoom work
Today, influencers offer advice for those looking to become digital nomads. The website Nomad List recommends an array of destinations, including ‘Places with Attractive Women’. The promise is clear: anyone with a desk job can live life to the fullest abroad, so long as the internet connection is reliable. The idea of the digital nomad originated in the 1990s. David Manners and Tsugio Makimoto argued that the use of technology would return man to his nomadic instincts, while offering global businesses a new pool of mobile talent. ‘At heart we are travellers and explorers unnaturally constrained to our place of work,’ wrote one CEO, Doug Dunn.
It has morphed into a movement driven by misplaced idealism and the unfulfilled yearnings of the laptop class, who pack their existential crises with them alongside their sunglasses and language guides. I should know. I tried being a digital nomad and failed.
I had an apartment all to myself in the idyllic, silver-mining hills of central Mexico. My job was that of an English teacher, reminding fatigued Chinese infants of the alphabet. I could sustain a pale imitation of the life of a 19th-century Mexican silver magnate from two hours of Zoom work. Everything was perfect until I met my fellow nomads. They held up a horrible mirror to my existence. I met lost and mediocre men. One man in his late 60s had haunted the town for many years. He reminded me of a cross between Gary Glitter and Colonel Kurtz. Another nomad dressed up his never-ending pursuit of young Mexican women by pretending to be a screenwriter and political émigré from Trump’s America. ‘That guy has history,’ warned one bartender in broken English one evening.
In Mexico City, where I then moved, it got only marginally better. Nomads from Los Angeles and Shoreditch had transplanted themselves into the city’s historic Roma district. By day, they would tap at their laptops doing digital jobs, writing eBooks or following through on start-ups. It all felt very depressing, despite the sun and the cocktails on offer. The reality was that these people should have been buying Tesco meal deals and renting in Zone 6. But here, they felt special because they were in Mexico.
One of the benefits of being a digital nomad is not having to take responsibility for any of the country’s problems. Any embarrassment can be deferred to your host. After all, the poverty is their problem, not yours. You are merely passing through. I know digital nomads who have lived everywhere from Sri Lanka to Bangkok. There are common themes that unite them: bouts of depressive loneliness, conflict with locals, ongoing attempts to justify the whole endeavour through outlandish ‘creative’ ideas and aborted pursuits. Not to mention the strange sexual fetishes. ‘They have started arriving again,’ writes one friend who settled down in Sri Lanka. ‘They sidle up to you, clutching their laptop, in search of conversation. Many of them are left to play with the monkeys alone.’ Does being a digital nomad mean freedom or is it simply a midlife crisis deferred? I would argue it is the latter. Eventually, the saner nomads realise that they are living in a country that they don’t understand with no family, no career prospects, and no connections, aside from the internet.
I wasn’t surprised to read that in the recent Portuguese elections, the surge in right populism had been partly attributed to the hordes of digital nomads settling in the country and driving up rents. In Mexico, middle-class taxpayers have called on the authorities to regulate the number of digital nomads in the city. Of course, not every digital nomad is a sex pest, a mediocrity, or a Silicon Valley wannabe. Some marry locals and contribute meaningfully to their adopted communities. But then, that’s not really being a nomad, is it? To be a nomad is to live a temporary life, one of constant movement, more driven by the need to leave than the desire to find.
Yet the number of digital nomads only grow as more and more countries issue remote worker visas. My sister has just set off to Sri Lanka, hoping to work and travel. Two other friends are contemplating leaving the UK. They all say that their jobs here are ‘soul-destroying’ and that they have ‘not had a chance to live their youth’. They’ve fallen for the irresistible Instagram spectacle of a sun-drenched, overly sexed career abroad. I used to dream of this, too. But then I realised that while you may see yourself as a global citizen, the rest of the world just wishes you’d go home.
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