5 Pros and Cons Of Being A Digital Nomad

Like everything in life, there are good and bad things about living out of your suitcase. Here’s my personal experience.

I’ve been a digital nomad on and off for about 5 years now and I’ve learned a LOT during this time with countless different experiences. Is it amazing to be able to wake up in a different city every month? Yes. Is it amazing to feel like you spend most of your life on a never-ending vacation? Sure. But this lifestyle comes with a lot of hard consequences as well and I think it’s about time we truly address them. I’m very thankful for even having the opportunity to have such a lifestyle. Most people would like to be able to have the chance to have such freedom but can’t find the way to do it or have no real willpower to do it. But like any other job or lifestyle, your choices have consequences and benefits.

When you’re constantly living out of your suitcase or backpack for a long period there might come a time when you start to feel like you need a place to go back to that you call yours. Does this defeat the point of being a digital nomad in the first place? Not really. I’ve worked in the aviation industry for 3 years and I know countless people from pilots, to cabin crew, to office admins that are constantly on the go and living in hotel rooms but the older ones all have that one place to call home to. What I found for myself is that after 2 to 3 years into living nomadically I felt like I couldn’t relax anywhere I was going to, everything and everywhere was a workplace for me, and at the end of the day I felt like I wanted to put down some roots and have my place to go back to when I no longer wanted to be traveling. Obviously, this comes as well with its set of added expenses as you’ll need to pay both for your accommodation when you’re traveling and pay your rent or mortgage back home but for me, it was a game-changer.

Yes, I can pack my bags and decide I want to be in the Maldives next week but the anxiety around booking plane tickets, Airbnb or hotel rooms, finding transportation to take you from the airport to your new place, just to get there and find out that it’s nothing like it was on the listing when you chose it in the first place (yep that still happens), making sure your Wi-Fi connection is good so that you can work, making sure that you can organize your schedule around your work or clients and making sure you have time to explore where you’re staying at, adjusting to different time zones are all of the many things we encounter as nomads. Also, it has happened to me that after I exhaust myself just to get the basics set up I get to wherever place and it’s nothing like I expected it to be. Having no expectations when traveling is the best advice I’ve received and given.

One may think “you get to meet so many people from so many different places in the world and have friends everywhere, that’s so cool!” and that is true however what I’ve noticed is that even if this is the case friendships are very vague and the connection with others sometimes is not as deep as you’d think it’ll be. Yes, it’s amazing to meet people with the same interests as you, some that may even be doing the same remote job as you so you can bounce ideas around with each other, we can meet up for dinner and bar-hopping but that’s about it. I felt this first hand during the pandemic where the people that I knew from multiple parts of the world somehow completely disconnected from me and me from them to be honest. Why? I’m never enough time in one place to make long-term deep-rooted connections with people and in times like we are living now, we closed ourselves from both the world and others and only your close nit group of people will actually stick around. The same applies to your friends back home where in order to stay connected with. It requires effort from both parties to keep the relationship alive. This in no way shape or form is me saying that you need to talk to your friends every day, far from it, but that you need to reach out to them and find ways to be with each other face to face from time to time. Sometimes the people back home have a more difficult time relating to you because they don’t have your lifestyle and may not even understand what you do but they are probably the most important relationships you’ll ever have.

It’s so easy to get distracted by the turquoise waters and white sandy beaches but it’s critical that you can control those urges and focus on your work tasks. Especially if you have your own business or are a freelancer, literally you need to put in the work to see money in your bank account. When you have the freedom to choose where you want to be working from you can at times even feel FOMO because it’s like the clock is ticking and you don’t have time to enjoy everything you wanted in each spot. Beating work procrastination will be your number one thing to manage. In my opinion, this gets easier as time goes on and you no longer get super dazzled by the new coffee shops or that exposition going on around you but still, control plays a major role here.

Even if you go work in shared workspaces or coffee shops you will at times feel very much alone. It’s not even that you don’t have people around you or that you don’t go out at all with the people you do meet but more so that you feel like you’re missing your people and you want more connection with others. This happens to me quite often that’s why for me it’s important to come back to my home base and be around my family and friends. Thankfully we live in a day and age that everyone is a phone call or video chat away but still, real connection, real contact, and conversation are needed.

Counterintuitive to what I said before? Hear me out. No joke, when you live like this you meet so many people, some with the craziest life stories and cool jobs and it’s super interesting and fun to see how we truly are so different but so alike at the same time no matter where you’re from. Sometimes it might just be a super quick drop-in where you connect super fast and it’s just that a quick connection with someone but you’ve gained either a new perspective or knowledge through this person that you just randomly started talking to.

Leaving your hometown and setting yourself up for new adventures all over the world is for sure going to make you expand your mind, your experiences, and overall you’ll grow as a person. When you are exposed to different cultures, different life paths, different personalities it really makes you question yourself, your old thoughts or patterns, and 9 out of 10 it’s a win-win situation for you. You’ll find yourself a lot more tolerant, more in touch with your own intuition, your ego shifts its perception and you become the 2.0 version of you.

If you have the travel bug you know what I mean. The main characteristic of people who travel is their unlimited curiosity. Curiosity is the juice that fuels our creativity, our expansion, and our knowledge, and being a digital nomad or a world traveler you’ll depend on it to keep going and even when you want to return to home base you’ll see that sooner or later you’ll want to be packing your things and setting off to your next place. Never let curiosity die, not for traveling, not for questioning yourself and your surroundings, not for wanting to break the status-quo, whatever it is, fuel it.

I’ve experienced short and long stays in many different places and by far I’ve felt a lot more immersed and connected to the place and its people the longer I’ve been there. Yes it’s fun and especially when we’re starting out, we want to go everywhere and see as many places as possible but there’s a beauty behind the cultural immersion and routines that one creates in each place. Your stories are a lot deeper, your relationships will be a lot more valuable, and traveling goes from being a hobby to a new way of life.

Five years ago when I started blogging and freelancing online I never thought I could have scaled it to a point of making it my job. Even though I do have a day job that as well allows me to work, having my own side hustle and making it possible to develop remotely and digitally has been one of the best things I could have done. I hope my personal take on being a digital nomad has enlightened you or helped you in some way.

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Nicu Sebe is a professor in Computer Science at the University of Trento, Italy. Back in 2005, he solved the mystery behind the world’s most famous smile, portrayed in Leonardo Davinci’s Mona Lisa…