A lot of ink has been spilled the last couple years on the experience of remote work as the pandemic ushered in millions of people previously tethered to their job sites into the WFH lifestyle: its pros and cons, its challenges and benefits, and how to adapt to a new way of working and living.
Some of us grizzled veterans have been doing it for years, so that when the world (or at least the white collar/digital-friendly world) was forced to adapt overnight, we had to make relatively few adjustments to our routine.
My own experience with remote work has taken the “remote” part of it to a less common extreme, having lived most of the last decade abroad. While I am based near Washington D.C., I still spend a good part of the year abroad.
Like many lifestyle changes that start as temporary curiosities and eventually become permanent, working internationally/remotely was mostly a happy accident. I left the US to experience life on the other side for a while, and when I decided to indefinitely extend my initially planned two-year jaunt, I’d have to develop a steady freelance income. Fortunately, my occupation as a writer and editor lent itself nicely to digital nomadism.
The location-independent lifestyle made possible by remote work offers a lot of perks. It’s an exhilarating degree of freedom to know the world is opened up to you, and that you can country-hop and culture-hop for months or even years at a time while enjoying the means of supporting yourself. These days, I’m not particularly nomadic, but sometimes just having the opportunity is as good as indulging in it.
Obviously, employment is not the only factor to consider with the digital nomad lifestyle. There are other legal and logistical demands, particularly involving visas and, if you’re staying very long, immigration. American citizens enjoy the beneficence of foreign states’ affinity for US passport holders, who can travel to 185 countries visa-free and in many cases stay for several months—long enough to “live like a local.” Airbnb has made midterm apartment rentals a breeze by creating an efficient, trust-based market where one did not exist. (I am skeptical of Airbnb generally and its deleterious effect on the local housing markets, but it does take the stress out of landing in a new place and trying to find a midterm furnished apartment.) I am generally favorable toward the efforts of municipalities efforts to reverse the tide of “Airbnbization,” but I hope the short-term/midterm/monthly housing market doesn’t disappear altogether. Hopefully the competing interests of flat owners, tourists, digital nomads seeking temporary housing, city governments, tenants, residents, and Airbnb itself can hammer out a reasonable compromise in cities such as Barcelona, London, New York, Berlin, and other tourist hotspots where the demand for housing is white-hot.
I also consider myself fortunate in that the work I do as a writer and editor tends to be remote and solitary anyway, and is not as meeting-intensive as other professions. Before COVID made Zoom the go-to means of communicating and collaborating, I very infrequently video- conferenced (do people even use that term anymore?) with clients. Email and the occasional phone call sufficed. I think I would enjoy remote work less if I was in virtual meetings all day. I have somewhat warmed to Zoom but I still find it a pitifully poor imitation of face to face human contact; even less so when you’re conferring with multiple people at once. The failures and foibles of Zoom calls have given rise to a bevy of running jokes that are cliché now, because they’re so ubiquitous: the awkward voice delay; the guy who forgets to turn off his mic; the girl who can’t see anyone’s video; the guy who conducts the meeting with a cat filter supplanting his face because he can’t figure out how to turn it off…
I have also thrived on the schedule flexibility that remote work (and, specifically, self-employment) allow. An incorrigible night owl, the 9-to-5 routine never suited me (though I did enjoy the office camaraderie, the definitive endpoint of the workday, and the physical act of moving from home (“this is where I live”) to the workplace (“this is where I labor”), which creates a healthy physical (and by extension psychological and emotional distinction) between different realms of your life.
My night owl nature also has the unintended benefit of allowing me to very seamlessly operate in another time zone. When I lived in Europe, keeping late hours basically put me on East Coast US time, which made it convenient to schedule chats with clients.
I maintain a full-time schedule more or less in accord with the average white collar worker, but working from home has conditioned my daily schedule in a way that I’m kind of always working, never working, often late into the evening (which I enjoy as that’s when I’m most dialed in), but home and work life easily bleed into each other. I’ve operated this way for so long that I’ve kind of forgotten it is not the norm. It suits me, but I think it would drive others crazy, particularly the non-self-employed. As a self-employed individual, yes, my boss can be a jerk, but I’ve gotta live with him.
I’m happy that a large swath of the workforce can now enjoy the privilege of working from home, something us long-timers have long relished when few others could. The geographic untethering of the employee from the job site has, as has been widely reported, induced a migration of white collar workers in search of lower cost of living, more space, and, quite literally, greener pastures. I wonder if the next big trend will be an outflow of digital nomads who, like I did many years ago, venture far and wide to live temporarily, or even settle (for years if not permanently) in other countries.
Self-employment, residing abroad (while maintaining a business in America), and doing it all remotely work together seamlessly and provide a life of prosperity, freedom, and adventure that is certainly not for everyone, but has worked remarkably well for me.
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