Can’t remember where I read it, but some founder or famous techie once said they never bring their laptop on trips. Home is for focusing on work, travel is for focusing on the location, being present, fully experiencing the probably only time in your life you’ll be in some new exotic location.
Ostensibly I agree, how nice it is to experience a European city for the first time as an American and marvel at all the little details you don’t get at home, the crowded and small streets, too small for cars so it’s just full of people walking around, and you join them and maybe for the first time get to experience what it means to actually live in a real city, not just drive through it like a million other shades that never really leave their home or car or workplace.
Then again, this morning I was thinking, why isn’t every day like that? Even when I lived in boring old Houston, surely there was a way I could make every day meaningful, put aside the laptop, forget work, and go and live, right? In theory, wonderful, but obviously impossibly utopian. The working class gotta work to pay the bills. And by working class, I mean, anyone who, if they stopped working today, would before a natural death in their 80s, at some point be homeless and/or starve. That includes the relatively privileged, such as me and many of my otherwise quite well off tech bro digital nomad buddies. If that describes you, stop trying to have class solidarity with billionaires who live on a different planet from you.
Anyway, we gotta work, so I find this reality clashes with the ideal, and not just on vacation. Ideally, no work for anyone, but that’s not today, so instead, I think there’s a better balance to be found than “working really hard for 50 weeks a year, and then super chilling and being present for 2 weeks somewhere exotic.” If you have the means, I think digital nomadism bridges this gap well.
Living in Taiwan, which already is one of the most beautiful places on Earth, I can at any given moment, stand up from my desk, leave my laptop behind, and within 20 minutes be starting a hike into a mountain, and if I keep at it for an hour, I can be deeply remote, alone, and as mindful as I’m in the mood to be. I can go find a teahouse and quietly enjoy a cup with my phone on “do not disturb,” I can spend a couple hours biking on a riverside, I can have an embarrassing foreign language encounter at a market, all the things that in my old life in the States, could only happen in that little 2 week slice of time (4 weeks if you’re a particularly privileged American - yes, even if you have “unlimited PTO,” which in reality means 4 weeks).
Even here, I still feel the argument, almost every morning (it’s absolutely beautiful out today, which kicked this article off): shouldn’t I leave the laptop at home and go live life? I can’t, if I did that every day, even in low cost of living Taiwan, I’d be destitute in less than 5 years, and at that point so rusty nobody would pay me to do their engineering for them - not to mention have no retirement savings anymore! Still, at least today I can take the laptop to somewhere beautiful, and do what I love in a place that was fun or challenging to get to, and when I look up I can see something nice, rather than just my office. When I go grab a bite to eat, it’s not at the three reasonable places to eat at in walking distance of my Mission and 16th apartment in SF, delicious though they may have been. I can have my immigrant foreign language moment, and then get right back to tucking away cash for my future.
TLDR, I believe it’s better to have a year (or 3 months, or whatever) of having the laptop with you, rather than 2 weeks of no laptop, and 50 weeks of work and little else.
If you’re interested in digital nomading, I highly recommend looking into Taiwan and the Gold Card Visa. If your trade skill isn’t one that lends itself well to digital nomading and you’re looking to change that, programming is always there. I took the bootcamp route, but there’s members of my software engineering co-op that are purely self-taught.