For the people at home

You have one of these in your life. A son, a daughter, a partner, a friend. At some point they said the words "digital nomad," and you nodded, because the alternative was admitting you did not fully know what they meant. This is for you.

First, the thing that will save us both some time: the person you are worried about is probably not me. I am the far end of this. Most people who use the phrase are doing a version of it, for a while, and then they go home, and that is a completely normal thing to do. I am one of a handful I have met in years who never stopped. So read this for the parts that fit. Some of it will. Some of it won't.

What does the word even mean

Nothing precise. That is not me being evasive, it is just true. There is no agreed definition and no exam. It covers the person on a beach with a laptop who went back to their old job after four months, and it covers me, and it covers a thousand people in between. Most of them prefer it vague, because a vague word lets you belong to something without having to qualify for it. I am not going to mock anyone for that. But it does mean that when your person says "I'm a digital nomad," they have told you almost nothing, and you were right to be unsure.

What they actually do all day

Work. That is the part nobody films. There is a version of this life sold in short videos where the laptop is a prop and the day is a montage of scooters and sunsets. The real day is a person in a rented room answering a client in another time zone, often at an unsociable hour because the client is in New York and they are not.

They left an office to escape the commute and the Sunday-night dread and the meeting that could have been an email. They got rid of those. In exchange they had to build the whole structure themselves, from nothing, with no one making them. Some days that goes well. Some days they stare at the screen for three hours and produce nothing and feel bad about it. That is not laziness. It is the cost of a life with no external walls, and it takes years to get good at.

What it costs

More than the spreadsheet they showed you.

There is the visa run. Every couple of months a government reminds them that they are only allowed to be where they live thirty days at a time, so they get up at four in the morning and sit in a minivan to a border town that exists for no other reason, queue, get a stamp from someone who looks personally wronged by tourism, and come home having lost a working day and some dignity. Nobody puts that in the brochure because you cannot film it and make it look like freedom.

There is the air, in some cities, in some seasons, that they do not mention on the phone. There is the health insurance question, the one that gets deferred in the first month and then sits there, unanswered, until the 2am when something feels wrong and suddenly the question of who they would call and where they would go is the only thing that matters. There is the good hospital that is genuinely good and still starts from zero, because it is not the doctor who knows their history. That doctor is where you are.

And there is the time. This is the one that matters and the one that is hardest to see from a distance. The good part of this life arrives late. The first year or two is mostly the bill. The thing they paid it for, the place that finally feels like theirs, the handful of people who are real and not on an app, does not show up on schedule. So if you are speaking to them somewhere in the first couple of years, you may be speaking to them at the lowest point on the whole curve, maximum cost, minimum return, and it will be tempting for everyone, them included, to call the whole thing a mistake. It usually isn't. It's just early.

The part they won't tell you

They are lonelier than they let on, and they have gone quiet about it, and the quiet is the tell.

Not lonely all day. Alone all day is fine, they got used to that fast. It is the being lonely at specific times. It is Sunday afternoon, when the work is done and the city does not know their name yet and there is nowhere they have to be. It is a birthday spent deciding whether to mention to anyone that it is their birthday. It is a whole year, in my case, of not being able to sit down and eat a meal in a restaurant alone, because a waiter takes the second chair away and leaves an empty space across the table, and I would rather stand at a street cart in the rain than sit in front of that.

Here is why they go vague with you specifically. It is not that they are hiding something bad. It is that explaining it properly is exhausting, and they have quietly decided you won't understand, and the decision that you won't understand is easier to make than the effort of finding out whether you would. That decision is usually wrong. But it is why the answers you get are short, and cheerful, and a little flat. The flatness is not distance. It is a door they closed because opening it felt like too much to carry in a phone call.

What to ask them instead

Not "when are you coming home." That question tells them you think the life is a phase they are failing to end, and it closes the door another inch.

Ask them what they eat, and where, and whether they go alone. Ask them who they saw this week, a real person, a name. Ask what the visa situation is right now, because it is a genuine ongoing hassle and being asked about the boring true part tells them you are actually listening. Ask what the hardest part is, and then do not try to fix it. You will not fix it from there, and they are not asking you to. They are asking, without saying so, to be understood for the length of one conversation. That you can do.

That is more than most people back home ever offer them. It is worth more than you would think.

Andrew - No Refunds •••