What I wish I had known before living as a digital nomad (Part 1)
01. First thing first, what is a digital nomad?
Digital nomad is a person who earns a living working online in various locations of their choosing (rather than a fixed business location).
— as defined in Oxford Languages.
COVID-19 has enabled more people to start the digital nomad lifestyle.
With the recent COVID-19 outbreak, despite the travel restrictions, the number of digital nomads in the US surged a whopping 50% in 2020 to 11 million, according to a survey by MBO partners (link). A mass exodus from the office in 2020 revealed how many jobs could be done remotely.
The COVID-19 outbreak has spurred many companies to inaugurate and/or expand policies on remote work. My employer (Facebook), for example, has introduced permanent remote opportunities and a good chunk of my colleagues have been approved to work remotely already. Facebook, in particular, has announced a plan to eventually have at least half of its workforce work remotely permanently.
For tech companies based in Silicon Valley, COVID-19 has inadvertently provided a solid ground for them to validate the hypothesis that remote work does not hurt productivity and/or cross-functional collaboration as almost 100% of the workforce has been working remotely for more than a year.
02. What you can expect from this note
You might have come across the term ‘digital nomad’ and might have had some interest in becoming one, but you are unsure if you would be a good fit living as a digital nomad.
Keep on reading this note if
- You are considering or planning to become a digital nomad.
- You want to learn firsthand lessons from someone who has been living as a digital nomad for almost 1 year.
03. Who are we?
My partner and I both work in the tech industry based in the San Francisco Bay Area which is in line with its terminology of digital nomads. According to a recent survey by MBO Partners (link), the biggest chunk of digital nomads (12%) work in the tech industry.
It didn’t seem feasible to become digital nomads in the pre-COVID-19 era where our jobs required us to commute to offices at least 4–5 times/week. We embarked on our digital nomad journey after a few months of working from home after the COVID-19 outbreak since Sept 2020.
04. How we got started on our journey as a digital nomad
My partner and I had dreamed of living as a digital nomad for a while even before the COVID-19 outbreak, but we were tethered to a specific location because our work required us to commute to physical offices. Here I will walk through our journey as a digital nomad of how we got started and where we are in the process.
1. The glimpse of a digital nomad lifestyle in Thailand kindled our dream of living as a digital nomad.
We first had a glimpse of the digital nomad lifestyle when we stayed in Bangkok and Chiang Mai, Thailand for a few weeks during the winter of 2019. We visited Thailand from the U.S., specifically to experience the digital nomad lifestyle as Thailand boasts its affordable cost of living and hi-fi Internet which make an amiable location for digital nomads. We visited a co-work space in Chiang Mai and had a pleasure of meeting a few digital nomads who were working as a freelancer from Thailand. Meeting people who were living the dream of our lives was inspiring; however, back then, we were confronted with the hurdles in realities that made it seem like becoming a digital nomad a far-fetched idea.
By working at a co-work space in Chiang Mai, we were able to learn that there were a lot of digital nomad communities with various meetups revolving around a multitude of topics and opportunities to meet new people with similar interests. You can read more about my experience as a digital nomad in Chiang Mai in this note.
2. The covid-19 outbreak inaugurated our long-term digital nomad journey.
The covid-19 outbreak has had a hard hit in the U.S. and both of us started working from home beginning in March 2020. We had just moved into a new apartment with a year-long lease a few weeks before we started working from home. We were paying expensive monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment in the San Francisco Bay Area and the ensuing months felt like an apocalypse with looming uncertainties — a surge of COVID-19 cases around the world and unknowns of when everything will get back to normal. Above it all, the historic orange sky due to the record-setting wildfires in CA culminated the sense of our earth coming to its end. Looking back now that I am fully vaccinated as of this week (~end of April 2021), the year 2020 would be marked as the crux of uncertainty in my lifetime.
After a few months of adjusting to the new normal, we were caught in an ennui of living in the same neighborhood with the mundane everyday activities and were struggling with our work bleeding into personal lives. My partner and I sat together one day and started rekindling our dreams of living as a digital nomad. We brainstormed the pros and cons of inaugurating the digital nomad lifestyles, and we mutually agreed upon terminating our one-year lease to start living, working, and exploring different places, and making the most out of this time. We were determined to seize the moment and embrace uncertainties.
3. Our digital nomad journey is still ongoing!
We’ve embarked on our digital nomad journey from September 2020. We first lived in San Francisco, CA which was around 40 minutes drive from where we used to reside (Redwood City, CA).
After two fabulous months with lots of sunlight in San Francisco, we worked from Seoul, South Korea, our homeland. We had lots of comfort Korean food, had quality time with our family and friends who we haven’t met for a while, and explored Korea as much as we could. I got to see the newborn daughters of my best friends for the first time and was astonished at how tiny they were, and am continuously in awe at how fast they grow every month!
After spending the much-needed family time in Korea, we moved to sunny San Diego, CA, and enjoyed the wonders of nature — sandy beaches, scenic trails, orange sunset, and lots of seafood tacos.
We are continuing our journey on the East Coast currently. We’ve been spending about a quarter in Manhattan, New York, and have been loving the ultimate city living! Living in NYC for one quarter has been on my bucket list and I am fortunate to be living a dream of my life — riding a bike or reading a novel on the lawn at Central Park in the springtime with blossoming flower trees, the weekend getaways to Brooklyn, New Jersey, and other neighborhoods of NYC, our evening stroll in search of the best dessert (mochi ice cream, cronut, canneles, macaron, rice pudding, chocolate bonbons… you name it!), and trying out the exquisite food from all around the world (Mediterranean, Uzbekistan, Morrocan, Thai, the best NYC pizza and bagels, et cetera, et cetera… ). NYC has so much to offer and I appreciated having the opportunity to live in such a vibrant, diverse, and extraordinary city.
I marveled at delicious lattes every morning by visiting a smorgasbord of coffee shops around SoHo and West Village in NYC and found some of my favorite go-to cafes. I also loved staring at the diverse people and dogs of New York while sitting at Washington Square Park and enjoying the youthful energy exuding from street musicians, artists, and amateur skateboarders.
Where shall we go next and how long will our digital nomad journey continue? As our journey started from a force greater than our own (i.e. COVID-19), we are still figuring out those answers as we go. It is like working on an exciting jigsaw puzzle without knowing the final picture, and we’ve been loving the process of figuring out the pieces of the puzzle together!
In the next note, I will share the lessons I’ve learned by living as a digital nomad for almost one year and what you should consider before embarking on the digital nomad journey.