States of Transition
States of Transition
Challenges and Opportunities of Nomadic Living
Hi friends 👋
I'm writing to you from a courtyard of a coffee shop in Oaxaca, Mexico, where the rain is pouring and the thunder is bellowing. It's shorts-and-t-shirt-warm, and I'm sitting here comfortably with Corina and an iced tea. Life is pretty damn good.
But it hasn’t always been good. Despite the thrill of living in southern Europe, the Caribbean and central America all in the space of three months, despite experiencing the vivid qualities of novelty, normalisation and nostalgia in each place, despite taking 3,000 photos and writing 130,000 words about our journey, the truth is, we’ve been lonely.
In this week's newsletter, we'd like to give you an update about some exciting work we're doing to help nomads like us alleviate loneliness. And not only that, get closer to local people in their host communities by building more meaningful connections. We'll share some of the challenges we've faced and the solutions we've found, along with insights from other nomads and experts in the field.
According to recent studies, one in three remote workers struggles with a lack of motivation to leave their home, while 23% report feelings of loneliness. These two challenges often go hand in hand, highlighting the difficulty of maintaining a fulfilling remote work lifestyle.
It is predicted there will be a billion nomads by 2035, so this is an issue that is likely to affect loooads of people. We've got some ideas about how to address it, drawing on what we learned studying art and building businesses. Our goal is to stay on the road for the next few years, so we feel we're in an ideal spot to be able to contribute to this important and growing challenge/opportunity.
Things are moving at a thousand miles an hour here, so we're going to break up our updates. This week's edition will focus on the problem of nomad loneliness and what we've done so far to cure ours. In subsequent editions, we'll cover our promising relationship with our insurance company, who are attempting to build a "global social safety net" and the world's first country on the internet! We'll also explore the dark side of global mobility in nomad hotspots around the world, where locals are pushing back against the gentrifying effects of what they see as “neo-colonialism.”
And of course, we'll pull back our curtain and share all of the creative ideas, projects and content we're building to try to address these issues.
Our experience of feeling isolated led us to think carefully about our travel goals. Unhappiness is usually the result of a misalignment between expectations and reality, so naturally we began to ask ourselves what it was we were trying to achieve on the road.
Being brand new to nomadism, our priority was to have a rich and varied experience, which to us meant living in as many different cultures as we could. Not in a breakneck box-ticking kind of way, as we still wanted to spend enough time in each place to get under its skin and make some friends, but we were definitely optimising for a diversity of destinations. A month at a time in each place felt right to us (for now, it still does).
In addition to diversity, we wanted a good quality of life, by which we meant living in a place where our salaries stretched further than they did back home. This is known as "geo-arbitrage" and it can be a problematic issue, as we'll see in later editions, but to be completely honest, this was an important factor for us, especially having spent a decade living in London, which is one of the most expensive cities in the world.
Between our many discussions and the nomad-related blogs, podcasts and meetups we've been gorging on, we started to develop what we’re tentatively calling the "nomad transitions.” They are essentially different stages nomads may go through on their journeys, each with their own needs, goals and characteristics. We made a deck (see image below) and this is helping us think about our audience and the types of problems we feel best-placed to build projects around.
The first stage of the nomad journey is exploration, which involves seeking new experiences and enjoying the benefits of geo-arbitrage. It's a time for adventure and discovery, but also for feeling like an outsider and dealing with loneliness.
We found ourselves in this stage for the first few months of our travels, bouncing around from one destination to the next, taking in as much as we could. It was exhilarating, but we quickly realised that we were missing something crucial: a sense of connection. Because we weren’t making a concerted effort to meet new people, it felt like lockdown with better scenery.
This led us to the second stage: integration. We wanted to build deeper connections with the places we were visiting and the people who lived there. We craved a sense of belonging and wanted to establish routines that made us feel more grounded. This is where our efforts to combat loneliness really began to take shape. We put more effort into meeting people, learning the local language (the jury’s out on whether Duolingo counts), and finding ways to give back to the communities we were living in.
For example, wanting to integrate our creative skills with our love of travel, we tried our hand at writing a city guide. As soon as we started interviewing locals about their businesses, our loneliness melted, we learned tons of local knowledge, and we were invited to stay in ritzy resorts as special guests. Our WhatsApp was buzzing with messages from new friends. It completely transformed our experience. And we were able to use the work we produced to apply for travel writing gigs. This is how we connected with our insurance company, but more on that in the next newsletter.
Obviously, we’re still very much at the beginning of our nomad journey, but already, in trying to integrate our lifestyle with our work and our talents, we both feel a renewed sense of purpose knowing we’re doing something to improve the experience of nomads and the locals who host them. We're excited about the possibilities of developing our projects and we're committed to sharing our experiences with you.
I started this newsletter two months ago, writing about self-development, occasionally peppering-in bits about our travels. Now we feel like we’re coalescing around a focused topic – nomad integration – and we wanted to set this out here so you know what type of content you can expect going forward.
In the next edition, we'll be diving deeper into our relationship with our insurance company and their wild mission to make global mobility possible for everyone on earth.
Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more.
See you next time.
– Harrison & Corina
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Read the next edition: the privilege of movement and a global social safety net →