I was born and raised in New York City-- so seeing baby goats and my host’s gift of fresh duck eggs in front of my rural New Hampshire Airbnb should’ve phased me. To be shaped by a city of quirky characters and surreal oddities, though, is to embrace anything delightfully strange as reminiscent of home.
As a digital nomad who rotated through 9 homes in the past year, I’ve also learned that home isn’t a physical place, but a feeling of belonging you can cultivate wherever you go.
Living the digital nomad life for the past year has not just been a personal feat in logistics, but a re-evaluation to my approach to life. In America’s hyper-capitalistic society, we’re used to orienting our hobbies, relationships, and self fulfillment to fit our work’s demands. Seeing how little work accommodates employees during their most pressing times of need (just a few examples 1, 2, 3, 4) makes us more curious of how work should serve our lives-- the way it ought to be.
For some, like artists, activists, and entrepreneurs, reimagining the status quo is a lifelong practice. For others, it took a disruptive pandemic to realize societal structures and constraints are more malleable than presented. We could all use a little more re-imagining, a little more action. For the past few months, nomadic travel was the medium I used to do so.
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I’ve always loved to travel, not to escape life-- but to live it more intensely. Travel makes gives the banal details of the everyday an alluring sheen: a row of Philadelphia houses a local overlooks in their daily commute is a marvelous example of colonial architecture to a visitor; the six lane Texan highways with numerous turnoffs makes driving a contemplation on the future of transportation and urban design.
Travel has also expanded iterations of myself: the surfing addict in San Diego and weekday kayak-er in New Hampshire still craves a New York everything bagel with lox. There is a caveat to personal discovery via travel though: an external change of scenery doesn’t always provoke an inner transformation.
People often think they can “find themselves” somewhere else. The idea of “who you are” isn’t hiding around the corner of a foreign city, but an ideal persona you work towards. If you don’t, your bad habits and emotional baggage go wherever you bring them. For me, new situational stressors illuminated maladaptive habits I thought I outgrew. They were actually just dormant in the safe cocoon of New York. New environments can’t change you, but they can encourage trying out new selves (with some effort on your part). Going surfing on my own for the first time was terrifying--- but now I find the solitude makes for a perfect meditative practice. New environments also encourage contradictory and imperfect versions of yourself-- it’s hard to maintain this belief that you’re a capable, poised, and faultless being when you get lost two blocks away from home-- even as your self compassion reminds you, this is your fifth home you’ve successfully adapted to.
Travel can be a meditative way of interacting with the world, and yourself- a constant striving to accept all that there is, and welcoming all that there is to be.
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The nature and gifts of travel evolve when you live life on the road. Living nomadically turns locations from attraction checklists into dynamic networks of connections and repositories of memories. A roommate turns into a friend to go to dance parties with; a park turns into a safe oasis for intimate conversations.
Living nomadically allows me to add more depth to the breadth of experiences. I know which corner to turn to for the bike-friendly streets, I have inside jokes with new neighbors. Long term travel allows you to experience a place through the relationships with locals, rather than a top 10 list created by fellow outsiders.
Of course, this depth is incomparable to the depth that comes with presence: in the slow but sure layers of trust and comfort that come with the years of building your life around a person or a place. Long travel provides a different type of intimacy. This intimacy is especially pleasant when your nomadic life deposits you into generous friends' homes: there's a special pride in knowing your way around a friend's kitchen. This intimacy feels like an uncomfortable vulnerability when you depend on strangers' help, like when you have no car in a city designed around them. Either way, it is far, far better experience than a 36 hour trip on a cruise-- and you make connections to more of the world than just the corner you grew up on.
Long term travel also provides an element of exchange, rather than the all consumptive approach that short-term travel is usually marked by. In short-term travel, the constraints of time means you only want the most sensational experiences; the scarcity of money means you only want to do things that are proven reliable and satisfactory; the demands of home obligations make it so that we seek only what is easy and pleasurable in travel. Not to mention, social media compounds all those effects.
Long term travel however, demands more of you. You have to form relationships with those you live among, from neighbors to hosts. You learn to abide by the locality's rhythm and tempo rather than your jam-packed itinerary. Your decision-making is influenced by practicality, rather than convenience and indulgence. You give your friends new perspectives on their mental ruts, you host parties to introduce new hobbies and learn about your guests backgrounds, and you can even find yourself playing host to newer visitors. Long term travel re-introduces friction and languidness into your life, which in turn gives you new realities and alternative lives— rather than the smoky fantasy of tourism.
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I am extremely grateful for everything that had to go right in my life to make long term travel possible: my employment, health status, physical ability, lack of external obligations/dependents, my country's (questionable and relative) political stability, vaccination accessibility, and a high degree of agency made this very privileged lifestyle possible. A contemplation of nomadic lifestyle, however, doesn't necessarily end in a binary decision to partake or not-- rather, travel should be a starting place where we wonder why reality is the way it is. Reality is in part, what we choose to accept and feel is inevitable. Travel proves that a lot of our reality is subjective and socially constructed.
Short-term travel allows us to probe our life’s possibilities. Long travel really inspires an exploration of how we can restructure the way we work, live, and operate in a society so that we are able to explore those possibilities systemically. For example, can Mexico’s rich culinary heritage in edible insects make meatless protein alternatives appealing in the face of climate change? Can we learn from disenchanted Chinese youth the impact of hypercompetition in a society of growing inequity and the social cost of materialistic pressures? Can Trieste teach us about how caring for our communities can reduce the incarcerated and homeless population, and provide dignity to the mentally ill?
Travel is a seductive, amenable way of exploring uncertainty. It's a very literal way of doing that, but not the only, and not a guarantee of it.*
Travel can be done without motion. Xavier de Maistre wrote of how to travel without ever leaving, in his Journey around my Bedroom, and Alain de Botton wrote how to make home a destination in his Art of Travel. Botton describes people who travel often represent a majority “of those who know how to make little of much,” -- whereas those who are able to roam far and wide in the landscapes of their mind and the corner of their universe is the “minority of those who know how to make much of little.” All it takes is an acknowledgement, a study, and marvel of what is in front of us.
Travel can be done without motion because everything else evolves. Places are not static locations because existing is not a static process. As I stay abreast of local news and life updates from friends and families back home, I realize the New York I may return to is not the New York I know. I will have to reorient and navigate it all over again, as I do with any other place.
Travel gifts us a love of life and a rich imagination. When I one day settle down to a more permanent home, I know those elements can be found and provided to in other places than a literal location. A re-imagination in governance, urban design, our social responsibility to each other, of our individual potential, can take us so far-- not just in place, but also in time.
Travel can be an exploration of what makes our lives worthwhile— but so can the act of persevering, the act of loving ourselves and each other, and relishing every moment we are alive.
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*In fact, we all know from experience a worldly traveler is not synonymous with an open minded and compassionate individual. Travel more often than not, is more of a demonstration of wealth and resources i.e. those who have lists of countries they visited but don't have any formative travel memories to share or those who travel to affirm the way they already see the world. Despite people traveling more than ever, more of us exhibit growing attitudes of xenophobia, alt-right, and anti-immigration. Travel is an accessible, interdisciplinary framework of thinking about the world, but it has to be reinforced through the structures of ethics, environmental protection, and an eye on long term collective well being of all participants (and not just those who has the biggest wallets) to make it a dependable framework.