Life as a Digital Nomad in Two Pictures

Sometimes I work remotely at a table by the beach in the Caribbean. Sometimes, I sleep on a concrete floor in a cold airport during an 8-hour layover.

My office, Friday afternoon.

My office, Monday morning.

Wherever I go, I always have my backpack with me. As someone who works in digital marketing and web development, my office is always on my back, and my laptop is almost always within reach.

Even though I have a physical office in downtown Tucson, Arizona, I’m not there all the time. Sometimes I’ll go for a few days, a week, or more without actually “going in to the office.”

While I do HIGHLY recommend that solopreneurs get their own office (I’ll write more on this in the future), I find myself splitting my time between the office and being a digital nomad.

The first time I heard the term “digital nomad” was in 2008, when I was on a trip to New Orleans with a friend. During our week-long adventure, we spent a couple of nights in Mobile, Alabama, at the home of my friend’s friend, who was out of town.

It was just the two of us hanging out in a big, empty house we used as a home base while taking day trips to Pensacola and New Orleans.

As I sat at the kitchen table, sweaty and bare-chested, in a stranger’s home without air conditioning, pounding away on my laptop keyboard, I had a major realization.

I had now become a “digital nomad.”

I had achieved a new state of being. It was like finding a magical key to unlock a hidden level in a video game or getting “god mode” status: the normal rules didn’t apply to me anymore.

Everything I needed to get my work done from this random house in Mobile was right there with me, and nobody even needed to know that I wasn’t in my hometown or at my office.

I was working thousands of miles away from where I lived, and it made absolutely no difference. I was just as equipped as I needed, and yet I was having fun exploring the Deep South with my friend.

I could send emails and text messages to people as if it were a normal day at the office, and as long as I remembered the time zone difference, nothing would be out of the ordinary. I had all my gear with me, so my location didn’t matter.

I could go anywhere I wanted. That’s what being a digital nomad is.

Since then, I’ve gone all over the place, inside and outside the USA, working remotely. When I leave town, I almost never tell anybody, so most of the time, my clients don’t even know I’m gone… because it just doesn’t matter.

This is a MAJOR benefit of being self-employed in a career field that doesn’t require a central location to work from.

My father-in-law, a plumber, could never do this. Neither can many of my clients, who have a local service area where they get in their work vehicles and drive to their customers’ homes or offices to remodel their houses, fix their electrical wiring, or landscape their front yards.

The freedom I have to work from anywhere is truly the best part of my job. It’s very special, and something I don’t take lightly.

Being able to work remotely from anywhere in the world is life’s biggest cheat code.

Having said that, though, sometimes people get confused about this. They’ll find out what I do from time to time and say, “Wow, it must be nice to work from the beach.”

Most people who idolize a remote worker’s ability to “work from anywhere” have no idea how hard it really is. (I’ve written about this in the past.) In reality, though, working remotely is a combination of blessings and curses.

People have this wild idea that it’s all about sipping Mai Tais while relaxing in a beach chair, listening to seagulls, and watching the surf. I have to admit, that is my experience on occasion.

Sometimes, my office is literally a table by an unbelievably sexy beach in the Caribbean.

Sometimes, though, when I’m getting to and from “exotic” locations, it also requires me to creatively find a way to make a phone call when it’s hard to find cell phone reception and there’s excessive road noise, or roosters crowing in the background.

Sometimes, I’ll have to attend a Zoom meeting at 4:00 am or 11:00 pm because of the time difference. I’ll be giving a sales presentation while I’m super groggy from literally sleeping on the hard concrete floor of a freezing cold airport in North Carolina during an 8-hour layover.

There are awful days when it’s almost impossible to find a place to work remotely effectively. Where you miss the bus, or you make it to the bus but you’re motion sick, choking down diesel exhaust, and trying to write that proposal that was due a week ago while also trying not to vomit.

There are incredible days when everything’s perfect, and it’s a purely magical experience: the weather is fair, the sun is shining, your surroundings are quiet, and miraculously, you have a stable and fast wifi connection.

But at the end of the day, work is work. Period.

Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it sucks. No matter where you work. That’s life, and that’s the way it goes for everybody.

My advice: stop looking at those wild social media posts where it appears people as young as 18 years old can make six figures without any experience by simply typing on a laptop with their toes in the sand. This isn’t real: in all my travels, I have never met a person who actually does this.

For every fun, sexy moment you see captured in a photo on Instagram, there are fifteen others you didn’t see, with sunburn, extreme sweat, bug bites, homeless beggars, roads with potholes, language barriers, unreliable transportation, unexpected costs, and a lot of other bits of real life mixed in.

Friday afternoons are great, but Monday mornings are hard, no matter where you’re working from. It’s all hard work.

Keep working hard, no matter where you are.