If you have children, a house in the suburbs, and excitement consists of the big minivan trip to the grandparents’ house, grab a box of tissues before reading “Globetrotting Digital Nomads: The Future Of Work Or Too Good To Be True?” (Beth Altringer, December 22, 2015; Forbes)
Who is choosing to work from laptop in Bali?
The largest group among nomads were people like Andy, frustrated professionals in their thirties (42%) leaving corporate careers that they didn’t enjoy (often in finance and consulting) and taking advantage of the fact that those careers had helped them build a cushion of financial security. When we asked what prompted the choice to go nomadic, the specific reasons differed, but the arc was strikingly similar. They had not enjoyed their work for a long time, and a crisis—of identity, or relationship, or change of circumstance—nudged them to make a major change.
#sickwithenvy as we go into the Boston winter, of course (we are going to be suffering from a high temp of 70 degrees on Christmas Eve; #beskepticalaboutglobalwarming + #butdontbuysealevelrealestate), but I wonder if this is another example of how things haven’t panned out as early Internet users envisioned. The “death of distance” we expected back in the 1980s hasn’t panned out for too many of us. Could that change with 100 Mbit service and more immersive video conferencing? Some lawyers invited me to visit Louisville, Kentucky in early January and I was able to talk them down to a Skype session on their Fortune 500 client’s awesome network and on my Verizon FiOS connection. I will be saving quite a few hours of travel time, if not enjoying the beach in Thailand.
I’m not sure that distance is really not dead. When I do deals nowadays the parties are scattered all over the place and rarely meet in person. Contracts are usually signed by PDF and email. This is a complete turnaround from when I started working in the early 80s, when documents were still sent from office to office by bicycle messenger and closings were in a conference room with all parties physically present.
Rather what is going on is this – there was an article in the NY Times yesterday that half the adults in America live within 18 miles of their mother, or something like that. There have been times when I have been traveling in China and I have been able to continue my work via email and phone just as if I were back in my office (except the 13 hour time difference made timing a little inconvenient). But, I don’t want to live permanently in China, I want to live where I have always lived, close to my family and friends and familiar haunts.
“#beskepticalaboutglobalwarming”
Phil, I’d like to know your thoughts on this. I know you like to take contrarian positions. But at this point it seems like everybody except the Republican party accepts that global warming is real. Including the Defense Department, the scientists at Exxon, and all those businesses and other entities including global warming in their future plans. Is there a reason to be skeptical?
Distance is dead for the great majority of practical reasons, but there seems to be a never-ending stream of management fads to justify keeping most office workers on-site. Deeply frustrating.
Wally: I’m not a physicist and haven’t put a lot of effort into reading the literature. So I don’t have an independent informed opinion about what will happen to the Earth’s climate. I do think that the various things that we have done on our way from a handful of primates to 7+ billion consumers must have had at least some effect on the Earth. But it isn’t obvious to me what should be done about that. Certainly the ideas that I have seen floated by politicians seem to be pretty bad, e.g., try to get people in other countries to act against their economic interest, tax poor people to subsidize the car and solar panel purchases of rich people, rush to invest in today’s low performance technology, etc.
[Note that the planetary and atmospheric physicists that I do know generally heap scorn on nearly everything that is written and said about global warming. But their priority tends to be getting funding for their labs and going on record against the current political tide is apparently not the way to get more NSF money…]
The mobile app boom is a strange closed system where startups make 11 figures selling apps to other startups to supposedly allow more mobility, but they still are required to commute to their offices to use them & all startups must still be founded in SOMA. It makes sense that no-one would create a video conferencing system that truly worked, because they wouldn’t be taken seriously unless they let their own employees use their own system to work remotely.
It is simple enough to understand “mankind-caused global warming” skepticism once you understand that
a) we don’t have accurate mathematical models to describe climate, or anything close to it (we don’t even understand all the oscillations such as El Nino, or have a way to model interactions between a body of water and the atmosphere above it)
b) the data that then is run through those mathematical models are also severely lacking.
#beskepticalaboutglobalwarming
It’s pretty clear to me that Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Al Gore, and Barack Obama are global warming skeptics.
These individuals actions show absolutely no concern at all with the impact of their extravagant lifestyles on the environment. All have multiple mansions, huge vehicle fleets, constant jet travel to meetings that could easily be conducted on Skype, and frequent vacations to exotic destinations.
Clearly these individuals don’t really think man caused global warming is real.
I once talked to a bioinformatics freelancer that owned a boat and sailed around the Mediterranean Sea and did his work when he was in port. Not a bad deal, but he was single and that made it possible for him.
The cost of living in some of these places (see Nomadlist.com) seem a little high if you ask me. Hanoi still looks cheap: $578/month , but Abidjan in Ivory Coast and Curitiba in Brazil costs as much as staying in Prague ($1560/m), really? why so? To make this attractive to me, the cost of living would need to be $800/month or lower. In Germany I am paying $920/month right now for 100sqm (rent/utilities/internet). Ideally, I would say $500/month considering the airfare costs and hassle. Maybe these are the elite accomodations for foreigners being quoted…
Education and friends are wonderful things, especially for kids. It’s easier to get if you stay put.
Climbing the corporate ladder/getting paid better for more interesting work. It’s easier if you stay put.
Gypsies and other nomads never really got smart or rich.
But if you don’t have to take care of kids, you’d probably be able to spend a bigger chunk of your life in the sunshine.
A great uncle of mine worked as a carpenter in Chicago.
Once the kids had left home and spread out all over the US, he started working part time as a carpenter in Florida during the winter. Eventually they retired in Florida.
That to me look s like an ok way to live.
When my kids leave home I’ll probably sell the house, work a bit less, travel a bit more. Maybe work a little bit from somewhere nice in rural Italy during the winters.
But you never know.