Digital nomad

Digital nomads are people who conduct their life in a nomadic manner while engaging in remote work using digital telecommunications technology.[1] Such people generally have minimal material possessions and work remotely in temporary housing, hotels, cafes, public libraries, co-working spaces, or recreational vehicles, using Wi-Fi, smartphones or mobile hotspots to access the Internet.[2][3][4][5][6] Some digital nomads are perpetual travelers, while others are only nomadic for a short period of time. While some nomads travel through various countries, others focus on one area. Some may engage in vandwelling.[7] In 2020, a research study found that 10.9 million American workers described themselves as digital nomads, an increase of 49% from 2019.[7]

Digital nomad working from Thailand.

Digital nomads are often younger remote workers, backpackers, retired or semi-retired persons, snowbirds, and/or entrepreneurs.

Etymology

One of the first digital nomads was Steve Roberts, who in 1983 rode on a computerized recumbent bicycle and was featured in Popular Computing magazine.[4]

One of the earliest known uses of the term digital nomad was in the 1997 book Digital Nomad by Tsugio Makimoto and David Manners, which describes how technology allows for a return of societies to a nomadic lifestyle.[8] It is unknown if the phrase was coined in this book or if they took a term that had already existed.[4]

Benefits

People typically become digital nomads due to a desire to travel and location independence. Compared to living in expensive cities, a digital nomad lifestyle also has cost advantages.[9]

Challenges

Although digital nomads enjoy advantages in freedom and flexibility, they report loneliness as their biggest struggle, followed by burnout.[10]

Other challenges include maintaining international health insurance with coverage globally, abiding by different local laws including payment of required taxes and obtaining work visas, and maintaining long-distance relationships with friends and family back home.[11] In some cases, the digital nomad lifestyle leads to misunderstanding and miscommunication between digital nomads and their clients or employers.[12] Other challenges may also include time zone differences, the difficulty of finding a reliable connection to the internet, and the absence of delineation between work and leisure time.[13][5]

Feelings of loneliness are often present in the practice of nomadic lifestyle, since nomadism often requires freedom from personal attachments such as marriage.[14] The importance of developing face-to-face quality relationships has been stressed to maintain mental health in remote workers.[11] The need for intimacy and family life may be a motive to undertake digital nomadism as an intermittent or temporary activity as in the case of entrepreneur and business developer Sol Orwell.

Resources
  • Conferences and festivals centering on the digital nomad lifestyle include "The Nomad Cruise",[15] DNX Festival, Nomad City, Freedom x Fest, Freedom Business Summit, and Nomad Summit.[16][17][18][19]
  • A documentary film about the digital nomad lifestyle by Christine and Drew Gilbert, titled The Wireless Generation, earned $37,000 in funding through Kickstarter.[4]

WorkMotion publishes a list of the The Cities Best Facilitating Remote Work; the top ten cities are Melbourne, Montreal, Sydney, Wellington, Prague, Toronto, Tallinn, Zagreb, Singapore, and Dublin.[22]

Legality

Many digital nomads tend to come from more developed nations with passports allowing a greater degree of freedom of travel. As a result, many tend to travel on a travel visa, which can be technically illegal and controversial.[23]

Several visa programs are targeted at digital nomads such as the e-Residency in Estonia and a SMART visa program in Thailand. Estonia has also announced plans of a digital nomad visa.[24] Other countries such as Bermuda, Barbados, Georgia, and Croatia offer similar digital nomad visa programs.[25] Some digital nomads have used Germany's residence permit for the purpose of freelance or self-employment[26] to legalize their stay, but successful applicants must have a tangible connection and reason to stay in Germany.

References
  1. Mohn, Tanya (March 19, 2014). "How To Succeed At Becoming A Digital Nomad". Forbes.
  2. Colella, Kristin (July 13, 2016). "5 'digital nomads' share their stories from around the world". TheStreet.com.
  3. Lamarque, Hannah (June 3, 2015). "The Rise of the Digital Nomad". HuffPost.
  4. Schlagwein, Daniel (December 6, 2018). "The History of Digital Nomadism". International Workshop on the Changing Nature of Work (CNOW).
  5. Nash, Caleece (February 2018). "Digital nomads beyond the buzzword: Defining digital nomadic work and use of digital technologies". Lecture Notes in Computer Science. iConference 2018: 207–217. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-78105-1_25. ISBN 978-3-319-78104-4 – via Springer.
  6. Adams, R. Dallon (January 29, 2021). "The future of business travel: Digital nomads and "bleisure" define the new high-tech take on work trips". TechRepublic.
  7. "COVID-19 and the Rise of the Digital Nomad" (PDF). MBO Partners. 2020.
  8. Makimoto, Tsugio; Manners, David (1997). Digital Nomad. John Wiley & Sons.
  9. Kadet, Anne (February 16, 2021). "Manhattan Couple Ditch Apartment, Buy RV. Was It Worth It?". The Wall Street Journal. ISSN 0099-9660.
  10. Moss, Jennifer (November 30, 2018). "Helping Remote Workers Avoid Loneliness and Burnout". Harvard Business Review. ISSN 0017-8012.
  11. Snedden, Meggan (30 August 2013). "When work is a nonstop vacation". BBC News.
  12. Kong, David; Schlagwein, Daniel; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka (2019). Issues in Digital Nomad-Corporate Work: An Institutional Theory Perspective. European Conference on Information Systems. Sweden.
  13. Wasserman, Todd (November 10, 2014). "Digital nomads travel the world while you rot in your office". Mashable.
  14. Wang, Blair; Schlagwein, Daniel; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka; Cahalane, Michael C. (2018). "Digital Work and High-Tech Wanderers: Three Theoretical Framings and a Research Agenda for Digital Nomadism". acis2018.org.
  15. "The Nomad Cruise".
  16. Hynes, Casey. "Why Digital Nomads & Entrepreneurs Keep Choosing Chiang Mai". Forbes. Retrieved 2017-09-20.
  17. Steven Melendez (23 March 2015), Work From Anywhere But Home: Startups Emerge to Turn You Into a Globetrotting Digital Nomad, Fast Company
  18. Rosie Spinks (16 June 2015), Meet the 'digital nomads' who travel the world in search of fast Wi-Fi, The Guardian
  19. Kavi Guppta (25 February 2015), Digital Nomads Are Redefining What It Means To Be Productive, Forbes
  20. Wang, Blair; Schlagwein, Daniel; Cecez-Kecmanovic, Dubravka; Cahalane, Michael (2018). Digital Work and High-Tech Wanderers: Three Theoretical Framings and a Research Agenda for Digital Nomadism (PDF). Australasian Conference in Information Systems. Sydney, Australia.
  21. Schlagwein, Daniel (2018). "Escaping the Rat Race": Justifications in Digital Nomadism. European Conference on Information Systems. Portsmouth, UK.
  22. "The Cities Best Facilitating Remote Work: A Global Index". WorkMotion.
  23. Hall, Grant; Sigala, Marianna; Rentschler, Ruth; Boyle, Stephen (2019). "Motivations, Mobility and Work Practices; The Conceptual Realities of Digital Nomads". Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism: 437–449. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-05940-8_34. ISBN 978-3-030-05939-2. S2CID 59616398.
  24. Morrison, Geoffrey (August 12, 2020). "Estonia's Digital Nomad Visa Now Available". Forbes.
  25. "The Complete List of Digital Nomad Visas". The Anywhere Company. 28 August 2020.
  26. "Residence permit for the purpose of freelance or self-employment - Issuance". service.berlin.de.
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