Digital Nomad vs Sabbatical
Few books have poisoned the minds of (mostly) millennials than The Four-Hour Work Week. The book, first published in 2009, argued that thanks to the internet, we can work anywhere and lean on new software and outsourcing to run tiny but profitable businesses.
Long before COVID threw millions into the remote workforce, the book was of a movement that inspired a wave of people to “escape corporate life” and live the “nomadic” lifestyle, traveling from place to place and working on their laptops for as few hours as possible.
The more books you have, the more hours you’re working.
The digital nomad lifestyle framed labor as something to be hacked. Your surroundings are something you observe but not something you participate in. To the nomad, optionality is everything. Stay free to chase the next business idea, live in the next town, and make the next set of friends. It’s thrilling, good for social media fodder, and makes for a good story.
Most nomads call it quits eventually. They stop moving and lay down roots. Or they stop viewing labor as a thing to avoid and instead, as a tool to affect change, however small.
Things worth doing are difficult. They take commitment. They require you to sacrifice optionality. (You know, the kind of things that make one sound like an old crank.)
But as I get older, I realize it’s the stuff life is made of. It’s the homecooked meal from a friend versus the Doordash order. It’s walking down the street and making small talk with one neighbor versus 100 likes on your LinkedIn posts. It’s jumping in and improving your neighborhood versus moving to the next town when things get boring or difficult.
There’s a hollowness to the digital nomad movement - because it exists largely in opposition to something. When your life design is geared toward running AWAY from something, you’ll come to the crashing realization that you eventually need to run TO something.
A sabbatical is an absence of normal to figure out what your next version of normal should be. It’s removing things that don’t work so you can add things that do. Tam Pham talked about his pivot from the nomad life to “slow living” picking three cities to rotate between. That’s running TO something.
The point of all this is to have a day-to-day life that you don’t want to run away from — whatever that means for you.